The Level Of Similarity In Linguistic Process
Translation is the process that renders info, 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 original setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have preferred to pay attention on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, that’s why sensitive part in its intellectual history, and goes on to be so presently.
Despite such importance, science and medical translation has been a theme of only sporadic scholarly study. The so-named “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 language studies, with a few important exceptions. These exceptions for example, concerning the transmission of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic knowledge 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 spreading them by adaptation to new national contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical knowledge into many lingvas, so has this knowledge been improved by translation in turn.
As translation science evolved, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even general causes as well. With the introducing of the functionalist vision in translation theory, the function or purpose of translated texts as communicative tools moved into the spot of attention, where it remains these days.
Although this piece of text lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been checked up to date, it is fair to stress that translation studies as a spot has moved radically in the direction of embracing an integrative approach to translation that sees itself as a multidiscipline with virtually no aspect of the communicative process being outside its scope of reference. Maybe one of the most overriding changes in languages 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, focusing primarily on the interplay between intuitions and strategies, suggest that mental process research can be a good source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
Such investigation can really make valuable contributions 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 ever-increasing awareness that translation experts must be widely engaged in the development of personally adapted skills for dealing with the endless number unpredictable arrangements of factors that they will definitely meet in their professional work. Language like an ocean cannot be ever measured!