The Issue Of Similarity In Translation Works
Translation is the act 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 pay attention on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, therefore ultimate part in its intellectual history, and continues to be so today.
Despite such importance, science and general translation has been a topic 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 author, doubly applies to the scientific translator, who has been neglected even by the field of translation 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 broadening them by adaptation to new traditional contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical knowledge into lots of languages, 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 technical causes 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 these days.
Although this opinion lacks space to even outline the impressive variety of factors that have been investigated to date, it is fair to say 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. 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 primarily 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 may well 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 rising awareness that translation experts must be widely engaged in the development of personally found skills for dealing with the myriad unforeseeable sets of factors that they will definitely meet in their professional work. Language like an ocean cannot be ever measured!