The Issue Of Equivalence In Language Works
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 primary 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, thus a crucial part in its intellectual history, and goes on to be so today.
Despite such importance, science and business translation has been a theme of only sporadic scholarly study. The so-named “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 linguistic study, with a few important exceptions. Such exceptions for example, concerning 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 techniques into many languages, 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 technical 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 center of attention, where it remains at present.
Although this article lacks space to even outline the impressive variety of factors that have been checked to date, it is fair to stress that translation studies as a focus 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. Possibly 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 study can seriously 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 growing awareness that translation experts must be actively engaged in the growth of personally adapted skills for dealing with the thousands unforeseeable arrangements of factors that they will obviously pass in their professional work. Language like a see cannot be ever measured!