The Grade Of Similarity In Language 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 borders of its natural 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 sensitive element in its intellectual history, and continues to be so at present.
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 efforts 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 serious 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 broadening them by adaptation to new cultural contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical knowledge in to many lingvas, so has this knowledge been improved by translation in turn.
As translation theory developed, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even technical factors as well. With the advent 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 these days.
Although this opinion lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been investigated until now, 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 multidiscipline with virtually no aspect of the communicative process being outside its scope of reference. Possibly one of the most overriding changes 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 positive source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
This investigation may really make necessary 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 widely engaged in the development of personally built skills for dealing with the myriad unforeseeable combinations of factors that they will definitely pass in their professional work. Language like an ocean cannot be ever measured!