Translation is one of the oldest human practices ever known since early history. It is a cornerstone in humanities; being the main bridge of communication and knowledge transfer between different nations and civilizations. Throughout history, rising civilizations effectively used translation as a gate towards glory. Greeks learning from Ancient Egyptians, Europeans learning from Muslims, and from Cicero to Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, translation always proved to be the locomotive of human civilization. Not only has it been helping in connecting people with different tongues, but it also plays a great role of exploring the ancient civilizations. We all know who Champollion unveiled the secrets of Ancient Egypt by decoding the Ancient Egyptian language using the scripts of the Rosetta Stone.
This important role of translation in our life caused modern scholars to start late attempts in the past century to systemize translation practices, trying to set fixed definitions and theories for it. It has been always proving to be a controversial topic. This controversy came from the fact that it is a humanity field, what makes it much more objective than being subjective. On one hand As-Safi believed that translation as a practice is expected to lead to make generalizations that should be turned into norms or rules to govern the process. On the other hand, Bassnett focused on studying the mental processes occurring during the practice of translation instead of trying to conclude tight rules for translators to abide by. Maybe this is why the pursuits of systemizing the process of translation were criticized for tying to tame “an animal of its own”; translation. That’s why Newmark described translation theory as an “operational instrument”, meaning that I “may” use it, yet I “should not” follow it.
Researchers were split between the process and the product, or let’s say the road versus the destination. Many researchers tried to formulate definitions for translation. They viewed it from very different angles, what left us with multiple definitions; none of them being wrong nor being the ultimate.
‘Translation is an incredibly broad notion which can be understood in many different ways’ (Shuttleworth and Cowie (1997: 181)
Jakobson, Nida and Catford on one hand focused on the concept of equivalence on different levels, like the equivalent message or linguistic equivalency. While on the other hand, we have Bell, who focused on the meaning on style and semantics of the target language, Nord who adopted a functional approach, and Hatim & Munday who focused on other factors in the process, like the socio-cultural context, linguistics and ideology.
Finally, let’s say that translation theories should be more like the Six Thinking Hats. We should use them to view the activity of translation from different perspectives. Different translation theories could be very useful to adopt best practices in the activity, while maintaining the freedom of creativity. In other words, it’d be useful to consider the sincere endeavors to formulate a notion for translation, while maintaining your own paradigm.
What do you think? Share your thoughts with us in a comment.