The emergence of the science of translation

 

From the very beginning, the translation performed the most important social function, making interlanguage communication possible. The spread of written translations has opened wide access to the cultural achievements of other nations for people, made possible the interaction and mutual enrichment of literature and cultures. Knowledge of foreign languages makes it possible to read books in these languages in the original, but not everyone can learn even one foreign language.

The first theorists of translation were the translators themselves, who sought to summarize their own experience, and sometimes the experience of their fellow professors. It is clear that the most outstanding translators of all times presented their “translation credo” and, although the considerations expressed by them did not meet the modern requirements of science and evidence and did not add up to consistent theoretical concepts, yet a number of such considerations are of undoubted interest today.

The French humanist, poet and translator Etienne Dole (1509-1546) believed that the translator should follow the following translating language of the basic principles of translation:

- to understand perfectly the content of the translated text and the intention of the author whom he translates;

- to be fluent in the language from which it translates, and it is equally excellent to know the language into which it translates;

avoid the tendency to translate word for word, for it would distort the content of the original and destroy the beauty of its form;

- use common forms of speech in translation;

- correctly choosing and arranging words, reproduce the overall impression made by the original in the appropriate "key".

In 1790, in the book of the Englishman A.Taytler "Principles of Translation" the main requirements for translation were formulated as follows:

- the translation should fully convey the ideas of the original;

- The style and manner of presentation of the translation should be the same as in the original;

- The translation should be read as easily as the original works.

 

Translation Matches

 

The desire to maximize the semantic and structural proximity of the translation to the original leads to the fact that not only texts combined in the translation process, but also individual statements in these texts, and not only related expressions, but their units of the original language and translating language, are equivalent. . The use of a specific unit of translating language to translate a given unit of the original language is not accidental. Both units have a relatively stable value, and the fact that one of them can replace the other in the translation process indicates a significant commonality of their meanings. Such a community creates the prerequisites for establishing relations of translational equivalence between them, i.e. for regular use of one of them as a translation of the other. A unit that translates a language that is regularly used to translate a given unit to the source language is called a translation match.

Private translation theories study systems of translation correspondences in different languages with respect to units of a given language or a system of translation correspondences in a given language with respect to other languages. Since we are talking about the relationship between units of languages, for each pair of languages there is a set of correspondences and, therefore, its own particular translation theory. Units of one language that have some units of another language as translation correspondences will not always be, in turn, correspondences of these latter, if the given language is used as a translation language, i.e. the transfer will be made in the opposite direction. In other words, translational correspondences are not completely reversible, and within each particular translation theory, the relations of linguistic units are separately studied when translated into each of the two languages.

Translational correspondence acts as communicatively equivalent to the units of the source language, therefore the proximity of the values of the units of the source language and the translating language is only a prerequisite for the emergence of translational correspondence, but an insufficient condition for this. Equivalence relations are established when translating not between isolated linguistic units, but between units of the original language and translating the language, appearing as part of speech statements. Their ability to be communicatively equivalent is determined not only by the meaning that they have in the system of their language, but also by the peculiarities of their use in speech. Therefore, translational correspondences cannot be detected by trying to match the units occupying a similar place in the systems of two languages involved in the translation process, but it is necessary to extract from the communicatively equivalent utterances that are combined in the translation. This is achieved through a comparative analysis of translations, during which a large number of originals and their translations reveal units of the original language and translating language, which are equated to each other in the process of translation.

For practical purposes, the issues of translating such units of vocabulary and grammatical structure of the source language are particularly detailed in the framework of the private translation theory, the choice of correspondences for which is associated with special difficulties. Thus, when comparing texts of English-Russian translations with their originals, considerable parallelism is found in the use of such parts of speech as numerals and adjectives, and therefore the methods of their transmission are not described in detail in translation. On the contrary, Russian correspondences to various categories of the English verb and verb phrases (syntactic complexes) are considered in great detail. Of the impersonal forms of the English verb, the main focus is on the infinitive (especially the perfect one), and when describing the ways of translating an infinitive, its use in the definition function, associated with significant translation difficulties, is analyzed in detail. In other words, there is a selection of translationally relevant phenomena in the system of the original language. This selection is made on the basis of the nature of the correspondences in the translating language used in the translation of the distinguished units. It follows that the set of translationally relevant phenomena in any source language will each time be different when changing the translation language for which these phenomena are distinguished. Each pair of languages has its own set of translation difficulties.

As a starting point of the analysis, units of the source language are taken, as a rule, for which matches are found in the target language. In principle, such correspondences can be found for units of the source language at any level of the language system: from phoneme to sentence.

 

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