TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

fluent translation; 5) With the most proficient students, there was very little
difference between instant and elaborated translations.
9. Conclusions. Any translation remains “an impossible venture”
(Correia, 2003:38), since there is no one-to-one relationship between
languages, and the cultures to which they belong. The mental and emotional
associations are almost completely different. “However hard we marshal our
resources and draw on our experience, the end result will never be the same
as the text with which we started” (Correia, 2003:38). Therefore, it is a
utopia to consider the translating process as the pursuit of textual identity,
since changing the language of the text entails changing other elements.
This principle will break the cultural convention, which, “in spite of all
evidence, expects the ST and the TT to coincide” (Correia, 2003:38).
To conclude, besides the shifts from the ST in terms of structure and
meaning, the shift is also obvious in Translation Studies from the
translator’s subjectivity to the more objective constraints of the text.
Stress is laid on the new role of the translator as communicator, on
his/ her task of discriminating between the pragmatic dimensions of the
context, of being aware of its semiotic function, and of the focus type of the
text, as well as of designing the new text structure in translation having a
good command of the discourse texture in the TL.
Many questions concerning the translator as mediator, and the
difficulties of translating between remote cultures are still open, possibly
because cultures are difficult to define even in an age of ‘international’
culture, as their interpenetration is continual and dynamic, and, in other
words, because different cultures come together under the global
communication umbrella.
References
Baker, M. 1995. ‘Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and Some Suggestions for
Future Research’ in Target 7 (2).
Baker, M. 2000. ‘Towards a Methodology for Investigating the Style of a Literary
Translator’ in Target 12 (2).
Biber, D., Conrad, S., Reppen, R. 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language
Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bulgăr, Gh. 2003. Dicţionar de sinonime. Bucureşti: Editura Lucman.
Carter, R. 1987. Vocabulary. Applied Linguistic Perspectives. London: Allen and Unwin.
Chesterman, A. 1997. Memes of Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chuquet, H., Paillard, M. 1987. Approche linguistique des problèmes de traduction. Gap :
Ophrys.
Correia, R. 2003. ‘Translation of EU Legal Texts’ in Crossing Barriers and Bridging
Cultures. A. Tosi (ed). Clevendon-Buffalo-Torronto-Sydney: Multilingual Matters
Ltd.