The Level Of Equivalence In Linguistic Works
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 borders of its natural setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have tried 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 sensitive share in its intellectual history, and continues to be so presently.
Despite such importance, science and medical 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 field of linguistic studies, with a few important exceptions. These exceptions for example, concerning 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 cultural contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical techniques in to lots of lingvas, so has this knowledge been advanced by translation in turn.
As translation science developed, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even general 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 spot 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 to date, it is fair to point out 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 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, 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.
This research can seriously make valuable contributions to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying an idea for strategy and creativity training.
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 development of individually adapted skills for dealing with the thousands unpredictable sets of factors that they will definitely pass in their professional work. Language like the space cannot be ever measured!