TRANSLATION

TRANSLATION The restatement of the forms of one LANGUAGE in another: the chief means of exchanging information between different language communities. Translation is a fundamental yet often overlooked element in life and has played a decisive part in the development of languages like English, especially by promoting the flow of ideas and the spread of the literary forms in which they have been expressed: for example, Homeric poetry from ancient Greece and the Bible translated from Hebrew and Greek. As the Canadian historian of translation Louis Kelly has observed, ‘Western Europe owes its civilization to translators’ (1979). Five distinctions are commonly made when discussing translation, none of which represent absolute positions, but rather end-points in an appropriate continuum:

1. Translating and interpreting.

Written translation can be distinguished from oral translation or interpreting, which came first, as for example in military and diplomatic exchanges. However, because of its relative permanence and lasting influence on the transmission of culture and technology, written translation has traditionally been considered more important. Professional interpreting takes two forms: simultaneous interpreting (at international conferences, etc.) and consecutive interpreting (in court, at diplomatic gatherings, in business transactions, etc.).

2. Word-for-word and free translation.

Languages do not match neatly in the way they form messages. Depending on the level at which translation equivalence can be established (word with word, phrase with phrase, word with phrase, etc.) translations can be more literal (that is, one-to-one at the level of words), or free (restatement of the message regardless of formal correspondence).

3. Literary and technical translation.

Depending on the type of discourse translated, a distinction is often made between literary translation (of aesthetic, imaginative, fictional texts) and technical translation (of workaday, pragmatic, nonfictional texts). However, boundary lines between them are sometimes difficult to draw, as in the translation of the Bible (which is currently available in over 2,000 languages): for example, the drama of the Book of Job and the listing of laws in Leviticus.

4. Professional and pedagogical translation.

A distinction can be made between translation as a vocation or trade (working for a client) and translation as an exercise in the process of language learning (working for a teacher). It has been argued that traditional grammar—translation tasks in school do not constitute a suitable training for translating as such.

5. Human and machine translation.

The high cost of professional translating and interpreting has encouraged institutional investment in experiments with largescale electronic translation and dictionary systems. However, fully automatic translation of high quality still seems still to be a long way off.

Translation and publishing

Much of the world's publishing depends on translation, although the centrality of the translator's role is often only minimally indicated in the credits of particular works. Thousands of translators and interpreters around the world continue to perform essential tasks in often less-than-ideal conditions. By the early 1970s, close to half of the world's book production was made up of translations, the chief source languages being English, French, Russian, German, Spanish, and Italian, the chief target languages German, Russian, Spanish, English, Japanese, and French. Because of worldwide demand for translation of all kinds, the 20c has been referred to as ‘the age of translation’.