The Level Of Similarity In Translation Process
Translation is the activity that renders info, whether literary or scientific, a mobile form 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 tended to focus on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, thus critical share in its intellectual history, and continues to be so at present.
Despite such importance, science and business 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 field of language study, with a few serious exceptions. Such exceptions for example, regarding the transmission of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic knowledge discover 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 broadening them by adaptation to new traditional contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical techniques into many languages, so has this knowledge been advanced by translation in turn.
As translation theory developed, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even general factors as well. With the introducing of the functionalist approach in translation theory, the function or purpose of translated texts as communicative tools moved into the spot of attention, where it remains at present.
Although this piece of text lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been investigated to date, it is fair to say 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 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 fruitful source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
Such research may really make necessary commitment to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying a plan 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 actively engaged in the development of personally found skills for dealing with the thousands unforeseeable sets of factors that they will definitely meet in their professional work. Language like an ocean cannot be ever measured!