Ministry of Science and Education of Republic of Kazakhstan

Colledge of the Foreign Languages

Establishing and development of the theory of translation as a science in the XX century

Karaganda 2008

Introduction

Many years ago, according to the Bible, all people living on the Earth spoke the same language. As they had had a great desire to reach the God, they began building a very high tower to be closer to him. The God decided to punish them and one morning when they woke up they were speaking the different languages and could not understand each other. Since that very time people have been needing interpreters. Functionally, an interpreter is a person who converts a source language to a target language. The interpreter’s function is conveying every semantic element (tone and register) and every intention and feeling of the message that the source-language speaker is directing to the target-language listeners. Language interpreting or interpretation is the intellectual activity of facilitating oral and sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two or more users of different languages. Functionally, interpreting and interpretation are the descriptive words for the activity. In professional practice interpreting denotes the act of facilitating communication from one language form into its equivalent, or approximate equivalent, in another language form. Interpretation denotes the actual product of this work, that is, the message as thus rendered into speech, sign language, writing, non-manual signals, or other language form. This important distinction is observed to avoid confusion. Peter Trent, a senator from Westmont, Canada was sure that: “To think that you can be an interpreter only because you know two languages is the same to think that you can play the piano only because you have two hands”.           Each interpreter must know foreign languages very well and of course he must know theory of translation, because it is impossible to translate perfectly without knowing the main basic aspects of the theory of translations. The theme of this work has been chosen because the theory of translation is of great importance in my future life. It has a very interesting history, and was widely developed in the XX century. This century is often called a century of great discoveries, development and progress. Business relations among people, different kinds of communications lead to intensive development of the theory of translation in the XX century. This course paper’s aims are to show the history of interpreting, establishing of the theory of translation and its development in the last century. The course paper consists of introduction, two chapters, conclusion and bibliography. In the first chapter devoted to the history of interpreting and establishing of the theory of translation the attention is paid to the definition of the terms “translation” and “interpreting”. It is shown that the history of translation has a very long way, beginning from the ancient times. A special attention is paid to the history of theory. In the second chapter which is dedicated to the development of the theory of translation in the twentieth century attention is paid to Modern western Schools of translation and difference among them is shown. In this chapter the difference between simultaneous and consecutive translation is shown and types of interpreting are stated.

History of interpreting and establishing of the theory of translation

Translation and interpreting 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 “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 must take into account constraints that include context, the rules of grammar of the two languages, their writing conventions, and their idioms. A common misconception is that there exists a simple word-for-word correspondence between any two languages, and that translation is a straightforward mechanical process; such a word-for-word translation, however, cannot take into account context, grammar, conventions, and idioms. Translation is fraught with the potential for “spilling over” of idioms and usages from one language into the other, since both languages coexist within the translator's mind. Such spilling over easily produce linguistic hybrids such as “Franglais” (French-English), “Spanglish” (Spanish-English), “Poglish” (Polish-English). 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 have thus played an important role in the evolution of 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 Asiatic 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. With the advent of computers, 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 latin “translatio” derives from the perfect passive participle, “translatum”, of “transferre” 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”). ............