Translation is the interpreting of the meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an equivalent text, likewise called a "translation," that communicates the same message in another language. The text to be translated is called the source text, and the language that it is to be translated into is called the target language; the final product is sometimes called the target text.
Translation, when practiced by relatively bilingual individuals but especially when by persons with limited proficiency in one or both languages, involves a risk of spilling-over of idioms and usages from the source language into the target language. On the other hand, inter-linguistic spillages have also served the useful purpose of importing calques and loanwords from a source language into a target language that had previously lacked a concept or a convenient expression for the concept. Translators and interpreters, professional as well as amateur, have thus played an important role in the evolution of languages and cultures.
The art of translation is as old as written literature. Parts of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh , among the oldest known literary works, have been found in translations into several Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh may have been read, in their own languages, by early authors of the Bible and of the Iliad .
Since the Industrial Revolution, developments in technology, communications and business have changed translation greatly. Once the activity of a relatively small group of clerics, scholars and wealthy amateurs working with religious or literary texts, it is now a profession with accredited schools, professional associations, and accepted standards and payscales. In particular, the advent of the Internet has greatly expanded the market for translation and introduced a vast array of new tools and types of work, including product localization, content management, and multilingual documentation. An estimated 75% of professional translators currently make their living from technical texts of various kinds.
Since the 1940s, attempts have been made to computerize or otherwise automate the translation of natural-language texts (machine translation) or to use computers as an aid to translation (computer-assisted translation).
The term
Etymologically, translation is a "carrying across" or "bringing across". The Latin translatio derives from the perfect passive participle, translatum , of transferre ("to transfer" — from trans , "across" + ferre , "to carry" or "to bring"). The modern Romance, Germanic and Slavic European languages have generally formed their own equivalent terms for this concept after the Latin model — after transferre or after the kindred traducere ("to bring across" or "to lead across").
Additionally, the Ancient Greek term for "translation", μετάφρασις ( metaphrasis , "a speaking across"), has supplied English with metaphrase (a "literal translation", or "word-for-word" translation)—as contrasted with paraphrase ("a saying in other words", from the Greek παράφρασις , paraphrasis "). Metaphrase corresponds, in one of the more recent terminologies, to "formal equivalence", and paraphrase to "dynamic equivalence."
A widely recognized icon for the practice and historic role of translation is the Rosetta Stone, which in the United States is incorporated into the coat of arms of the Defense Language Institute.
Attributes
A competent translator shows several attributes:
- familiarity with the subject matter of the text being translated;
- a very good knowledge of the language, written and spoken, from which he is translating (the source language);
- an excellent command of the language into which he is translating (the target language);
- a profound understanding of the etymological and idiomatic correlates between the two languages; and
- a finely tuned sense of when to metaphrase ("translate literally") and when to paraphrase , so as to assure true rather than spurious equivalents between the source- and target-language texts.
Misconceptions
A common misconception is that anyone who can speak a second language will make a good translator. In the translation community, it is generally accepted that the best translations are produced by persons who are translating into their own native languages, as it is rare for someone who has learned a second language to have total fluency in that language. A good translator understands the source language well, has specific experience in the subject matter of the text, and is a good writer in the target language. Moreover, he is not only bilingual but bicultural.
As with other human activities, the distinction between art and craft may be largely a matter of degree. Even a document which appears simple, e.g. a product brochure, requires a certain level of linguistic skill that goes beyond mere technical terminology. Any material used for marketing purposes reflects on the company that produces the product and the brochure. The best translations are obtained through the combined application of good technical-terminology skills and good writing skills.
Translation has served as a writing school for many prominent writers. Translators, including monks who spread Buddhist texts in East Asia and the early modern European translators of the Bible, in the course of their work have shaped the very languages into which they have translated. They have acted as bridges for conveying knowledge and ideas between cultures and civilizations. Along with ideas, they have imported, into their own languages, loanwords and calques of grammatical structures, idioms and vocabulary from the source languages.
Interpreting
Main article: InterpretingInterpreting, or interpretation , is the intellectual activity that consists of facilitating oral or sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two or among three or more speakers who are not speaking, or signing, the same language.
The words interpreting and interpretation both can be used to refer to this activity; the word interpreting is commonly used in the profession and in the translation-studies field to avoid confusion with other meanings of the word interpretation .
Not all languages employ, as English does, two separate words to denote the activities of written and live-communication ( oral or sign-language ) translators. Even English does not always make the distinction, frequently using translation as a synonym of interpreting , especially in nontechnical usage.
Fidelity vs. transparency
Fidelity (or faithfulness ) and transparency are two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to be striven for in translation, particularly literary translation. These two ideals are often at odds. Thus a 17th-century French critic coined the phrase les belles infidèles to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time.
Fidelity pertains to the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to or subtracting from it, without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning, and otherwise without distorting it.
Transparency pertains to the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.
A translation that meets the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation that meets the second criterion, an "idiomatic translation". The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth.
The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds wrong", and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machine-translation systems, often results in patent nonsense with only a humorous value (see Round-trip translation).
Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously strive to produce a literal translation. Literary translators and translators of religious or historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source text. In doing so, they often deliberately stretch the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Similarly, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language in order to provide "local color" in the translation.
In recent decades, prominent advocates of such "non-transparent" translation have included the French scholar Antoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations, and the Am
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