The Problem Of Similarity In Language Process
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 primary 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, that’s why critical 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 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 translation studies, with a few notable exceptions. Such 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 into variety 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 technical causes 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 spot of attention, where it remains today.
Although this opinion lacks space to even outline the impressive number of factors that have been investigated until now, 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. Maybe 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, focusing primarily 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 investigation may really make valuable commitment to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying a role 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 actively engaged in the development of individually found skills for dealing with the endless number unforeseeable combinations of factors that they will obviously pass in their professional work. Language like the space cannot be ever measured!