TRANSLATION THEORY

Translation theory is an interdiscipline containing elements of social science and the humanities, dealing with the systematic study of the theory, the description and the application of translation, interpreting or both these activities.
Translation studies can be normative (prescribing rules for the application of these activities) or descriptive; a translation scholar that insisted upon this latter approach was Antoine Berman
As an interdisciplinary discipline, translation studies borrows much from the different fields of study that support translation. These include comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, terminology, and so forth. Note that occasionally in English, writers will use the term translatology to refer to translation studies. However, the term translation studies has become implanted in English, whereas in French, it is la traductologie that is used.

Discussions about theories of translation are too often concerned with distinctions between literary and nonliterary texts, between prose and poetry, or between technical articles on physics and run-of-the-mill

commercial correspondence. But in order to understand the nature of translation, the focus should not be on different types of discourse but on the processes and procedures involved in any and all kinds of

interlingual communication (Bell, 1987). Furthermore, a theory of interlingual communication should not be restricted to discussions between translating and interpreting (whether consecutive or simultaneous),

since interpreting differs from translating primarily because of the pressures of time and exigencies of the setting. Some professional translators take considerable pride in denying that they have any theory of translation — they just translate. In reality, however, all persons engaged in the complex task of

translating possess some type of underlying or covert theory, even though it may be still very embryonic and described only as just being "faithful to what the author was trying to say."

Instead of no theories of translation, there are a multiplicity of such theories, even though they are seldomly stated in terms of a full-blown theory of why, when, and how to translate. One of the reasons for so many different views about translating is that interlingual communication has been going on since the dawn of human

history. As early as the third millenium BC, bilingual lists of words — evidently for the use of translators — were being made in Mesopotamia, and today translating and interpreting are going on in

Sherwood, 1978). Interpreting is often done by children with amazingly fine results, especially before they have gone to school and have learned something about nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

One reason for the great variety of translation theories and subtheories is the fact that the processes of translating can be viewed from so many different perspectives: stylistics, author's intent, diversity of languages, differences of corresponding cultures, problems of interpersonal communication, changes in literary fashion, distinct kinds of content (e.g. mathematical theory and lyric poetry), and the

circumstances in which translations are to be used, e.g. read in the tranquil setting of one's own living room, acted on the theatre stage, or blared from a loudspeaker to a restless mob.

The wide range of theories and the great diversity of problems in translation have been treated by a number of persons interested in translation theory and practice, e.g. Güttinger (1963), Vazquez Ayora (1977), and Wilss (1988).

A theory should be a coherent and integrated set of propositions used as principles for explaining a class of phenomena. But a fully satisfactory theory of translating should be more than a list of rules-of-thumb by which translators have generally succeeded in reproducing reasonably adequate renderings of source texts. A

satisfactory theory should help in the recognition of elements which have not been recognized before, as in the case of black holes in astrophysics. A theory should also provide a measure of predictability

about the degree of success to be expected from the use of certain principles, given the particular expectations of an audience, the nature of the content, the amount of information carried by the form of the

discourse, and the circumstances of use.

Despite a number of important treatments of the basic principles and procedures of translation, no full-scale theory of translation now exists. In fact, it is anomalous to speak of "theories of translation," since all that has been accomplished thus far are important series of insightful perspectives on this complex undertaking.

19 more than a thousand languages — in fact, wherever there are bilinguals. One of the paradoxes of interlingual communication is that it is both amazingly complex (regarded by LA. Richards (1953) as "probably the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos") and also completely natural (Harris and

The basic reason for this lack of adequate theoretical treatments is that translating is essentially a technology which is dependent upon a number of disciplines: linguistics, cultural anthropology, psychology,

communication theory, and neurophysiology. We really know so little about what makes translators tick. But tick they must — and increasingly so in a shrinking multilingual world.

Instead of speaking of theories of translation, we should perhaps speak more about various approaches to the task of translating, different orientations which provide helpful insight, and diverse ways of talking about how a message can be transferred from one language to another. The different ways in which people go about the task of interlingual communication can perhaps be best described in terms of different perspectives: (1) the source text, including its production, transmission, and history of interpretation, (2) the

languages involved in restructuring the source-language message into the receptor (or target) language, (3) the communication events which constitute the setting of the source message and the translated text,

and (4) the variety of codes involved in the respective communication events. These four different perspectives could be regarded as essentially philological, linguistic, communicative, and sociosemiotic.

These four major perspectives on the problems of interlingual communication should not, however, be regarded as competitive or antagonistic, but as complementary and supplementary. They do not invalidate one another but result in a broader understanding of the nature of translating. They do, nevertheless, reflect an interesting historical development as the focus of attention has shifted from emphasis on the starting point, namely, the source text, to the manner in which a text is understood by those who receive and interpret it.

Such a development is quite natural in view of the fact that all communication is goal oriented and moves from the source's intention to the receptor's interpretation.