IV. Translation Varieties

Translation has a long history. It took the beginning in the ancient times when the parent language began to disintegrate on the separate languages and the necessity in people who knew several languages and were able to come forward in the role of intermediaries during the intercourse of the representatives of the different linguistic communities has appeared.

The translating activity in the modern world acquires the larger scales and social meaningfulness. The profession of a translator became mass and popular one. The representatives of many other professions in one or the other form are engaged in translation as well. The wide circles of the public are also interested in translation.

The purpose of translation is to make readers who do not master the source language acquainted with the given text or the content of the verbal speech.

Translation is the exact reproduction of the source language text by the devices of the target language with saving the unity of content and style. The unity of content and style is recreated in the translation into the other linguistic basis and therefore there will be a new unity peculiar to the language of translation. Undoubtedly, translation is a complex process. It is necessary not only to find the most suitable words in the language of translation, but also to clothe them in the proper grammatical form for the exact and faithful passing the thought of original text. To translate means to express faithfully and completely by the devices of one language that is already expressed by the means of the source language text.

Scientific and technical revolution involves all the new areas of life and related to its international cooperation of sciences and the other essential phenomena of civilization lead people to unprecedented development of every sort of contacts between the states and the other polyglot societies. In these conditions the role of translation as a mean that serves economic, social and political, scientific, cultural and others relations between nations extraordinarily increases.

Translation is the transformation of the meaning in the source language text into the target language one. The word-for-word translation is not possible as the languages differ by their grammatical structure, the quantity of words, their cultural traditions that can influence the methods and results of translation. Accomplishing translation a translator, first and foremost, defines the method of translation or the measure of informative order for the text translated. The first step in the choosing the method of order consists of determination of the way the source language text should be represented fully or partly in the culture of translation. Depending on the communicative task at this step the complete or brief translation is chosen.

All types of the texts can be subjected to the brief translation practically, beginning from a simple business letter to the novel. Such texts as abstracts, annotations, summaries etc. are the result of application of the brief translation. Properly, a brief translation is accomplished by one of two fundamental methods of translation such as selective and functional translation.

The selective translation as a method of brief translation consists of the choice of key units of the source language text and their complete translation. All the other components of the source language text at using this method are cast away as a second rate components from the point of view of the result and are not subjected to translation at all. Authenticity of such translation is based on the exactness of choice of key units in order not to lose some important part of the initial information in translation.

The functional translation as a method of brief transmission of the source language text into the other language consists of composing the target language text from the functionally regenerated units of the original text. The functional transformation is based on the lexical and semantic, grammatical and stylistic transformations of source language text, applied for its common abbreviation or simplification.

Unlike the brief translation the complete translation is directed on careful reproduction of all the components of the informative order of the source language text in the units of the target language. The complete translation can be carried out by the different ways, but most widespread is the following: literal or word-for-word, semantic and communicative methods.

The word-for-word translation consists of word-for-word reproduction of the source language text in the units of the target one with saving the order of the elements following. Essentially, the word-for-word translation is comparatively rare used for the communicative purposes and has usually the exceptionally scientific area of distribution.

The semantic translation supposes complete passing of the contextual meaning of the elements of the source language text in the units of the target language. The process of the semantic translation is natural co-operation of two strategies that are the strategy of orientation on the method of expression, accepted in the target language, and strategy of orientation on saving the features of the initial form of expression. The semantic translation, as a rule, is used to the texts that have high social and cultural status such as important historical documents, works of literature, unique patterns of epic literature etc. It is requested at passing the texts that belong to the type of technical instructions, most scientific publications and legal documents.

The communicative translation supposes the choice of such way of initial information transference, which results in translating the text with faithful influence on a recipient. The main object at such method of translation is not only linguistic composition of the source language text but its substantial, emotional and aesthetic meaning. Thus, unlike functional translation, the communicative translation does permit neither abbreviations nor simplifications of the initial material.

Choosing one or another method of translation, a translator besides all the other circumstances follows the understanding that any method of translation does rare operates in the real process of translation. As a rule, the most of the difficult texts are translated with the use of different methods, however, one of them is the leading method and it determines the character of relations between a source and target language text on the whole, dictating the terms of source language division and determination of the units of translation as well as the choice of translating devices by which a source language text is directly transformed into the target language one in translation.

Translation can be carried out both in written and oral form.

Written translation is the type of translation, at which an original text and its translation come forward as the fixed texts to which a translator can repeatedly apply deepening understanding of the source language text and correcting the select variants of translation. A similar situation allows reaching the greater exactness of the source language text reproduction, giving a possibility to a translator to use different dictionaries and reference books, to appeal for the help to the specialists.

There are substantial distinctions between translation which consists of the written transference of meaning from one language into another, and interpretation which consists of transference of meaning in verbal form or in the form of gestures (in the case of sign language) from one language into another one.

During the verbal translation a source language text and the target language one come forward in the unfixed (verbal) form that predetermines the singleness of perception of segments of the original text by a translator and impossibility of subsequent comparison or correction of the translation after it was uttered.

Coming from how translating practice considers passing the process of translation, it is possible to come to conclusion, that interpretation is a subspecies of translation. However, it comes obvious in practice that the separate approach corresponds to each of these two types of translation.

In the process of translation independently of its form (verbal or written), it is possible to mark out the following basic stages:

1) Decoding or understanding (reading, listening) of a text in the source language.

2) Directly translation.

3) Encoding (recording, pronouncing) of a text in the target language.

To decode the meaning of a text a translator must first define the unit of translation that is a segment of a text which can be a word, a phrase, one or several suggestions that will be considered as the unit of a meaning. Quite often translation is required even at the level of phonemes (below than level of word), and at a level higher than indention.

Thus, the process of translation is the complex cogitative operation.

To decode the complete meaning of the source language text, a translator must consciously and methodically interpret and analyse all its features and peculiarities. This process requires deep thorough knowledge of grammar, semantics, syntax, idioms and other subtleties of the source language and its culture. A translator must have the same deep knowledge in the target language in order to be able to encode the meaning of the text faithfully. It is where the practical distinctions between translation and interpretaion are clearly seen. Translators know that a written text of sufficient complication must be translated by the native language spaker. The point is that not only specialist but also any well-prepared reader can easily recognize target language translation on the mother language executed by a foreigner.

An opposite picture is observed in interpretation of a text of sufficient complication or in simultaneous or consecutive translation. The task of an interpreter is to completely pass the ideas expressed by a talker in the target language. This phenomenon is usually explained by that fact that while interpreting into non-native language an interpreter automatically uses the constructions learned by heart. When interpreting into native language an interpreter is often lost in the variety of possible variants and forced to stop on the decision distant from optimal one. Thus, it is extraordinarily important to know the object, which is considered and spoken about in the text.

Establishment of relations of equivalence between a source and target language text is the purpose of translation. To say in other words, both texts carry the same communicative information. In spite of the most different obstacles that a translator has to overcome, translation is considered to be faithfull and successful if it corresponds to two criteria:

1) Exactness or authenticity. It is characterized how precisely translation passes the meaning of the source language text, for example with adding or subtracting anything from the meaning, strengthening or loosening some elements of it.

2) Transparency. The question is in what measure tha native language speaker perceives translation as not such, but as an authentical text in the target language, that is corresponding to the grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic norms of language.

Translation which corresponds to the first criterion can be named «the faithful translation»; translation that answers the second criterion is characterized as «the idiomatic translation».

The used criteria of estimation of authenticity of translation differentiate depending on the subject of a text, exactnesses of content of an original, type, function and use of a text, its literary qualities, social and history context.

The criteria of transparency estimation of translation seems to be more simple: non-idiomatic translation «cuts» an ear, and in the process of word-for-word translation that is carried out by the many machine translation systems often turns out to be a nonsense.

Nevertheless, in definite situations a translator can consciously carry out the word-for-word translation. For example, the translators of the fiction literature and religious texts often maximally adhere to the source language text. For this purpose they intentionally «stretch» the scopes of a translating language, producing the non-idiomatic text.

Translation in itself is difficult as a type of activity. Moreover, in practice a translator must overcome the obstacles which complicate the process of translation.