The Level Of Equivalence In Language 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 boundaries of its natural setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have tended to pay attention on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, therefore sensitive element in its intellectual history, and goes on to be so today.
Despite such importance, science and medical translation has been a theme of only sporadic scholarly study. The so-called “invisibility” of the literary translator, whose labor 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 field of language study, with a few important exclusions. These 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 spreading them by adaptation to new traditional contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical techniques into variety of languages, so has this knowledge been advanced by translation in turn.
As translation science evolved, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even technical factors 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 center of attention, where it remains these days.
Although this opinion lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been checked until now, it is fair to underline that translation studies as a spot 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. Possibly one of the most overriding shifts 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, stopping first on the interplay between intuitions and strategies, suggest that mental process research can be a positive source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
This study can seriously make necessary contributions to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying a role for strategy and creativity training.
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 strengthening of personally built skills for dealing with the thousands unforeseeable sets of factors that they will definitely face in their professional work. Language like a see cannot be ever measured!