The Grade Of Equivalence In Linguistic Process
Translation is the act that renders information, whether literary or scientific, a mobile nature of culture. Such mobility, in turn, is what gives human understanding a deep and lasting influence beyond the borders of its primary setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have preferred to focus on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, therefore a crucial part in its intellectual history, and continues to be so today.
Despite such importance, science and medical translation has been a topic of only sporadic scholarly study. The so-called “invisibility” of the literary translator, whose efforts and worth tend to be ignored in favor of the original writer, doubly applies to the scientific translator, who has been neglected even by the sphere of linguistic studies, with a few notable exclusions. Such exceptions for example, regarding the transmission of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic science reveal an interesting truth: no less than with literary works, translators of science and medicine have often imposed new elements upon the texts they have rendered, enriching and expanding them by adaptation to new cultural contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical knowledge in to variety of lingvas, so has this knowledge been advanced by translation in turn.
As translation theory evolved, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even general factors as well. With the advent of the functionalist vision in translation theory, the function or purpose of translated texts as communicative tools moved into the center of attention, where it remains today.
Although this article lacks space to even outline the impressive variety of factors that have been investigated up to date, it is fair to stress that translation studies as a field has moved radically in the direction of embracing an integrative approach to translation that sees itself as a cross-subject with virtually no aspect of the communicative process being outside its scope of reference. Maybe one of the most overriding shifts in lingvo theory has been from the static to the dynamic: from seeing the translation process as one of establishing equivalence between original and translated texts to seeing it instead as one of cognitive, social, and communicative action. Results of think-aloud studies on the mental processes involved in translation, stopping first on the interplay between intuitions and strategies, suggest that mental process research can be a fruitful source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
This study may seriously make valuable commitment to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying an idea for strategy and creativity exercises.
Partly as a result of the equivalence-to-action shift in translation theory, there is an growing awareness that translation experts must be actively engaged in the development of personally adapted skills for dealing with the endless number unforeseeable combinations of factors that they will definitely face in their professional work. Language like an ocean cannot be ever measured!