The Issue Of Similarity In Language Process
Translation is the act that renders information, 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 boundaries 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 sensitive share in its intellectual history, and continues to be so at present.
Despite such importance, science and general translation has been a theme 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 author, doubly applies to the scientific translator, who has been neglected even by the field of translation study, with a few notable exceptions. Such exceptions for example, concerning 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 expanding them by adaptation to new national 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 advanced by translation in turn.
As translation theory evolved, 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 center of attention, where it remains at present.
Although this piece of text lacks space to even outline the impressive number of factors that have been investigated up to date, it is fair to point out 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 translation 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 fruitful source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
Such research may well make valuable commitment 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 rising awareness that translation experts must be widely engaged in the development of individually built skills for dealing with the myriad unforeseeable combinations of factors that they will obviously came across in their professional work. Language like a see cannot be ever measured!