The Grade 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 boundaries of its original setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have tried to focus on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, that’s why critical part in its intellectual history, and continues to be so these days.
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 writer, doubly applies to the scientific translator, who has been neglected even by the sphere of language studies, with a few serious exclusions. These exceptions for example, regarding 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 broadening 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 improved by translation in turn.
As translation science developed, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even technical causes 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 today.
Although this opinion lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been investigated up to date, it is fair to underline 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. Possibly 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 first 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 may seriously make necessary contributions to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying a plan 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 growth of individually found skills for dealing with the myriad unpredictable combinations of factors that they will definitely pass in their professional work. Language like the space cannot be ever measured!