TRANSLATION: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Tóm tắt

Translation has become an important means of interlingual communication in this increasingly globalized world. It is also an academic field that has captured the interest of many people. When we embark upon a journey to explore the world of translation, we come upon some of these issues: 'Is there a criterion by which we can determine whether or not a translation is a good one? What can we learn from a poor translation? Are there standards that are upheld at the level of translating texts dealing with certain subject matters? Does good translation entail good writing?' These questions cannot really be addressed in this chapter because they are the subject matter of this book. Instead, the present chapter presents an overview of what translation is, points out some of the difficulties involved in translating, and emphasizes the need for translation theory to accompany translation practice. A discussion of the definition and characteristics of good translation is provided as well. What Is Translation? If we limit the translation process to the realm of expressing in another language what the first language expresses, we find some basic characteristics of the source language material transferred to an equivalent text in the target language. Transfer is a key concept in this characteristic-based approach to translation because linguists tend to believe that languages are not encoding systems that encode the same message in different ways; a message uttered in one language does not exist in another language with a different form of expression. A different approach to translation has underlined the fact that languages do indeed encode messages in different ways. Thus, the process of translating appears under a new trait: translation is not so much a way of maintaining an object by producing an equivalent copy of it as an operation geared towards making this object function as if it were created by persons who belong to a certain cultural setting. The transfer object of translation would no longer suggest that translating is like reproducing a document, but would instead imply that the primary function of a translation is to have a semantic effect on the target audience, indigenous to a specific cultural, chronological, and situational setting. (Komlosy, 2024)