The Issue Of Equivalence In Language Works
Translation is the activity that renders knowledge, 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 preferred to pay attention on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, thus a crucial part in its intellectual history, and goes on to be so at present.
Despite such importance, science and medical 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 writer, doubly applies to the scientific translator, who has been neglected even by the sphere of linguistic studies, with a few serious exceptions. Such exceptions for example, concerning the transmission of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic science 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 spreading them by adaptation to new cultural contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical knowledge in to variety of lingvas, so has this knowledge been improved by translation in turn.
As translation theory evolved, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even technical 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 spot of attention, where it remains today.
Although this piece of text lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been checked until now, 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. Possibly 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, focusing 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 investigation may well make necessary 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 ever-increasing awareness that translation experts must be actively engaged in the growth of individually 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!