4. History of Translation theory

CTIS research in this area focuses on particular periods of translation activity and the scope, nature, causes and effects of those activities. One major strand concentrates on the history and theory of translation from Chinese into European languages in the 18th to early 20th centuries. Basic questions such as what was being translated, by whom and for what purposes have led to the investigation the relationship between translation, the rise of sinology as an academic discipline in France and England, developments in translation theory of the time, rivalry between European nations in the 19th century, and the rise of racist discourses which asserted European supremacy. A second strand is the study of fascist Italy, especially fascist cultural policy and the development of the Italian publishing industry, from the point of view of translation. A third strand concerns the role of translation in the dissemination of scientific ideas in Europe in the early 19th century, with a current focus on German-English translation of scientific papers and the context and impact of this translation activity.

5. Equivalence in translating.

As “equivalence” is a term which is also broadly used outside of the field of enquiry at hand, it may be useful to start with a more general definition of the concept before mentioning more specific ones. As far as languages are concerned, there are no two absolute synonyms within one language. Quite naturally, no two words in any two languages are completely identical in meaning. As translation involves at least two languages and since each language has its own peculiarities in phonology, grammar, vocabulary, ways of denoting experiences and reflects different cultures, any translation involves a certain degree of loss or distortion of meaning of the source text. That is to say, it is impossible to establish absolute identity between the source text and the target text. Therefore, we can say that equivalence in translation should not be approached as a search for sameness, but only as a kind of similarity or approximation, and this naturally indicates that it is possible to establish equivalence between the source text and the target text on different linguistic levels and on different degrees. In other words, different types of translation equivalence can be achieved between the source text and the target text such as phonetic equivalence, phonological equivalence, morphological equivalence, lexical equivalence, syntactical equivalence and semantic equivalence. (Le Meiyun 1989)

6. Translating Process and its Aspects.

The translating process includes two mental processes – understanding and verbalization. First, the translator understands the contents of ST, that is, reduces the information it contains to his own mental program, and then he develops this program into TT. The translating process has to be described

in some translation models. A model is a conventional representation of the translating process

describing mental operations by which the source text or some part of it may be translated, irrespective of whether these operations are actually performed by the translator. Translation models can be oriented either toward the situation reflected in the ST contents or toward the meaningful components of the

ST contents.

The existing models of the translating process are based on the situational (or referential) model, which is based on the identity of the situations described in the original text and in the translation, and the semantic-transformational model postulates the similarity of basic notions and nuclear structures in different languages. These postulates are supposed to explain the dynamic aspects of translation. In other words, it is presumed that he translator actually makes a mental travel from the original to some interlingual level of equivalence and then further on to the text of translation.

7. Concept of translating Unit.

In the field of translation, a translation unit is a segment of a text which the translator treats as a single cognitive unit for the purposes of establishing an equivalence. The translation unit may be a single word, a phrase, one or more sentences, or even a larger unit.

When a translator segments a text into translation units, the larger these units are, the better chance there is of obtaining an idiomatic translation. This is true not only of human translation, but also in cases where human translators use computer-assisted translation, such as translation memories, and also when translations are performed by machine translation systems.

According to R. Bell, a unit of translation is the smallest segment of a sourcelanguage text which can be translated, as a whole, in isolation from other segments(as small as possible and as large as is necessary).

Should we consider a word asa translation unit? Though there exists the notion of a

word-for-word translation,the word can hardly be taken for a translation unit. First of all, this is because word borders are not always clear, especially in English. Sometimes a compound word iswritten in one element, sometimes it is hyphenated, or the two stems are writtenseparately as a phrase:e.g.,moonlight, fire-light, candle light.

On the other hand,in oral speech it is difficult to single out separate words because they tend to fusewith each other into inseparable complexes: [‘wud3э'ko:lim?] – according to thestress, there should be two words, while in written speech we can see four words:Would you call him?