constructing pathways to translation - Higher Education Commission

it. So, while there must be theoretically a science of Translation, there is no science of
Translating.
Secondly, the view that Translation is not a matter of intuition, but concerned with pure
reason can be easily refuted by considering the communication pattern, leaving
Translation aside. It is undoubtedly accepted that the power to communicate is not a
human prerogative, but a purely divine phenomenon. When human beings all over the
world communicate among themselves through different languages, they create a pattern
of communication to serve the need for communication through transference or
substitution of meaning from one language to another. Hence, the birth of Translation.
Peter Newmark(1988:4) very aptly remarks:
‘catastrophe’
in a seventeenth century text.
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There is nothing mystical about this sixth sense, but it is compounded of
intelligence, sensitivity and intuition as well as of knowledge. This sixth sense
will often come into play(joue) during a final revision, tells you when to translate
literally, and also instinctively, perhaps in a hundred and three hundred words,
when to break all the rules of translation, when to translate malheur by
Just like any other individual, that translator ‘understands’ new experiences in terms of
ones which had gone before, and
deals with them as though they were recurrence of the
same event. Memory contains more than ‘records of’ past experiences; it also has plans
for action on the basis of what one knows and what one has done. It is also clear that
much of one’s experience of the external world of the senses and of the world of the
mind, is mediated by language. The concepts stored in memories refer to entities via
conventions of language and do so variably, depending on the language used.
It then applies to human beings in a general sense. But it applies to translation in a very
particular sense; for a translator
there are at least, two languages or two cultures
involved, rather than one, and translators are more consciously aware of language and
the resources it contains, than monolingual communicators are. Both possess procedural
knowledge about language (know how to operate the system) and possess factual
knowledge (knowing that the system has such and such characteristics).The task of the
translator is to turn the procedural knowledge which he possesses, into factual
knowledge which can be probed, shared and discussed.