Translation and Translation Studies:

Translation turns a text of source language (SL) into a correct and understandable version of target language (TL) without losing the suggestion of the original. Being bilingual is an important prerequisite, no doubt, but translation skills are built and developed on the basis of one's own long drawn-out communicative and writing experiences in both the languages. As a matter of fact, translation is a process based on the theory of extracting the meaning of a text from its present form and reproducing that with different forms of a second language. Conventionally, it is suggested that translators should meet three requirements, namely: 1) Familiarity with the source language, 2) Familiarity with the target language, and 3) Familiarity with the subject matter to perform the job successfully. Based on this concept, the translator discovers the meaning behind the forms in the source language (SL) and does his best to reproduce the same meaning in the target language (TL) using the TL forms and structures to the best of his knowledge. Naturally and supposedly what changes is the form and the code and what should remain unchanged is the meaning and the message (Larson, 1984).Therefore, one may discern the most common definition of translation, i.e., the selection of the nearest equivalent for a language unit in the SL in a target language. It deals with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting or both. It tends to explore the commonalities and disparities among the languages and cultures of the world. It also

attempts to offer solutions for bringing global understanding and inter-human communication among diverse nations and races. Translation Studies is the new academic discipline related to the study of the theory and phenomena of translation. At its nature, Translation Studies is multilingual and also interdisciplinary, encompassing languages, linguistics, communication studies, philosophy and a range of types of cultural studies.

Types of translation:
Units of translation depend on: - levels of linguistic description (word, collocation, phrase, clause, text, body of texts) - kind of message / text R. Jacobson On Linguistic Aspects of Translation (1959) TYPES OF TRANSLATION: 1. intralingual - rewording - interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs in the same language 2. interlingual - TR proper - interpretation of (SL) verbal signs by means of the signs of another language (TL) 3. intersemiotic - transmutation - interpretation of verbal signs by means of non-verbal sign systems. Besides these, translation may be literary or sense for sense from another angle.

Scope of Translation:
Translation studies as an interdiscipline: Contains elements of social science and the humanities. Deals with the systematic study of the theory, the description and the application of translation, interpreting, or both. borrows much from the different fields of study that support translation including comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, terminology, and so forth. Cultural translation is a concept used in cultural studies to denote the process of transformation, linguistic or otherwise, in a given culture. The concept uses linguistic translation as a tool or metaphor in analyzing the nature of transformation and interchange in cultures. In his essay, Holmes sketched the scope and structure for this discipline, as follows (Toury, 1995, p. 10). Despite its usefulness and impact, this map is marred by conceptual inconsistencies.

Figure1. Holmes' Map of Translation Studies The following is a list of research objects of translation studies, which interact and have overlaps:

 Translation:

definition, history, functions, types, influences, evaluation, criticism Translator: roles, personal development, idiosyncrasies, social relationships Translating: materials to be translated, cognitive processes, strategies, procedures & workflows, aids, external influences (e.g., skopos), ethics Translation Studies: purpose, research objects, research methods, disciplinary orientation, history, research trends.

Significance of Translation Studies:

Solves interlingual and intercultural communication problem. Paves way for global interaction. Offers an excellent opportunity to undergo sociocultural survey of various languages and their literatures. Gives an opportunity to establish some kind of relevance it has in the study and area of Literary Criticism. Through translation we know about all the developments in communication and technology and keep us abreast of the latest discoveries in the various fields of knowledge. Gives us access to the literature of several languages and to the different events happening in the world. Helps us widening the circumference of knowledge through sharing.

History of Translation:

The first important translation in the West was that of the Septuagint, a collection of Jewish Scriptures translated into early Koine Greek in Alexandria between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. Throughout the Middle Ages, Latin was the lingua franca of the western learned world. The 9th-century Alfred the Great, king of Wessex in England, was far ahead of his time in commissioning vernacular Anglo-Saxon translations of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Meanwhile the Christian Church frowned on even partial adaptations of St. Jerome's Vulgate of ca. 384 CE, the standard Latin Bible. In Asia, the spread of Buddhism led to large-scale ongoing translation efforts spanning well over a thousand years. The Tangut Empire was especially efficient in such efforts; exploiting the then newly invented block printing, and with the full support of the government, the Tanguts took mere decades to translate volumes that had taken the Chinese centuries to render. The Arabs undertook large-scale efforts at translation. Having conquered the Greek world, they made Arabic versions of its philosophical and scientific works. During the Middle Ages, translations of some of these Arabic versions were made into Latin, chiefly at Crdoba in Spain. The first fine translations into English were made in the 14th century by Geoffrey Chaucer, who adapted from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio in his own Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde; began a translation of the French-language Roman de la Rose; and completed a translation of Boethius from the Latin. Chaucer founded an English poetic tradition on adaptations and translations from those earlier-established literary languages. The first great English translation was the Wycliffe Bible (ca. 1382), which showed the weaknesses of an underdeveloped English prose. Only at the end of the 15th century did the great age of English prose translation begin

with Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthuran adaptation of Arthurian romances so free that it can, in fact, hardly be called a true translation. The first great Tudor translations are, accordingly, the Tyndale New Testament (1525), which influenced the Authorized Version (1611), and Lord Berners' version of Jean Froissart's Chronicles (152325). Meanwhile, in Renaissance Italy, a new period in the history of translation had opened in Florence with the arrival, at the court of Cosimo de' Medici, of the Byzantine scholar Georgius Gemistus Pletho shortly before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453). The Elizabethan period of translation saw considerable progress beyond mere paraphrase toward an ideal of stylistic equivalence, but even to the end of this period, which actually reached to the middle of the 17th century, there was no concern for verbal accuracy. In the second half of the 17th century, the poet John Dryden sought to make Virgil speak "in words such as he would probably have written if he were living and an Englishman". Throughout the 18th century, the watchword of translators was ease of reading. Whatever they did not understand in a text, or thought might bore readers, they omitted. The 19th century brought new standards of accuracy and style. In advance of the 20th century, a new pattern was set in 1871 by Benjamin Jowett, who translated Plato into simple, straightforward language. Jowett's example was not followed, however, until well into the new century, when accuracy rather than style became the principal criterion.

Language and culture in translation

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: (relativism) - No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

Language is a modelling system:

- No language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture. And, no culture can exist which does not have at its center, the structure of natural language (Lotman) - a text cannot be treated in isolation from the culture where it works.

Vermeer (1987):
- a theory of culture is needed to explain the specificity of communicative situations, and - the relationship between verbalized and non-verbalized situational elements.

Definition of culture: (Goodenough 1964)

A society's culture consists of whatever one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and do so in any role that they accept for one of themselves, Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behaviour, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, the models of perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them.

Culture is:

the entire setting of norms and conventions an individual as a member of his society must know in order to be 'like (Vermeer 1987) Therefore: translating means comparing cultures : - culturemes: units/features of culture : universal (similarity) and language-specific (differences) - a culture-specific phenomenon: one that is found to exist in a particular form or function in only one of the two cultures being compared e.g. translating religious, political, administrative, behavioral phenomena, etc. from a SL culture into a TL culture: taxonomies of settlements (city, town, village; state, region, county, municipality, borough, district; food terms) - UK/US/F/I/H.