Basic translation theories

1. BASIC TRANSLATION THEORIES

Plan
1. Transformational Approach
2. Denotative Approach
3. Communicational Approach

2. 1. Transformational Approach

The transformational theories consist of many varieties which may have
different names but they all have one common feature: the process of
translation is regarded as transformation. According to the transformational
approach translation is viewed as the transformation of objects and
structures of the Source Language into those of the Target Language.
Within he group of theories in the transformational approach there is a
division into transformations and equivalences. The scholars who follow
his approach are: Barkhudarov,L.,Gak,L.,Bell,R. and many others. This is
the most wide-spread approach.
A transformation starts at the syntactic level when there is a change, i.e.
When we alter, say, the word order during translation.
Substitutions at other levels are regarded as equivalences, for instance
when we substitute words of the TL for those of the SL.
In the transformational approach we shall distinguish three levels of
substitutions: -morphological equivalents;- lexical equivalents ; -syntactical
equivalents.

3.

In the process of translation:
- at the morphological level all morphemes (both word-building and wordchanging) of the TL are substituted for those of the SL.E.g. smallest (has
two morphemes – small is a word building morpheme and –est is a word
changing morpheme. In the process of translation we substitute these
morphemes by their equivalents in the TL;
• - at the lexical level words and word combinations of the SL are substituted
by the words of the TL;
• At the syntactic level syntactic structures of the SL are substituted by those
of the TL.
• The syntactic transformations in translation comprise a broad range of
structural changes in the TL starting from the reversal of the word order in
a sentence and finishing with division of the source sentence into two or
more in the TL or vice versa.

4. 2. Denotative Approach

According o the denotative approach the process of translation is not just a
mere substitution but consists of the following mental operations:
-translator reads( hears) the text in the SL;
-translator finds a denotatum and concept that correspond to this message;
- translator formulates a message in the TL relevant to the above denotatum
and concept.
It should be noted that according to this approach during translation we del
with similar word forms of the matching languages and concepts deduced
from these forms, however, as opposed to the transformational approach
the relationship between the source word and the target word is
occasional rather than regular.
E.g. The sea is warm today
The staff only
Service Room

5. Communicational Approach

The communicational theory of translation was suggested by O.Kade and
is based on the notions of communication and thesaurus.
Communication may be defined as an act of sending and receiving some
information which is called a message.
Information sent or received may be of any kind: gestures, words,
pictures…, but we shall limit ourselves to verbal communication only, i.e.
when we send and receive information in the form of written or spoken
text.
When communicating we inform others about something we know. That is
in order to formulate a message we use our system of interrelated data
which we cal a thesaurus.
We shall distinguish between two kinds of thesauruses in verbal
communication : language thesaurus and subject thesaurus.
Language thesaurus is a system of our knowledge about the language
which we use to formulate a message, whereas a subject thesaurus is a
system of our knowledge about the content of the message.

6.

Thus, in order to communicate, the message sender formulates the mental
content of his message,
using subject thesaurus, encodes it using the verbal forms of language
thesaurus, and conveys it to the message recipient, who decodes it using
his language thesaurus and interprets the message using subject thesaurus
as well. This is a simple description of a monolingual communication.
But it is very important to note that sometimes people do not understand
each other in spite of the fact that they speak the same language. It depends
on the level of knowledge of the communicators.
In bilingual communication (translation) we have three actors: Sender,
Translator and Recipient.
The Sender and the Recipient have two thesauruses: a language thesaurus
and a message thesaurus they should understand the topic of the
communication).
The translator should have two language thesauruses ( the TL and the SL)
because he should decode the source message and encode the target one.
Moreover he should know the message thesaurus.

7.

O.Kade’s communicational theory of translation describes he process of
translation as an act of special bilingual communication in which a
translator acts as a special communication intermediary, making it possible
to understand a message sent in different languages.
To understand it better let se an example of message formulation
(encoding), message translation (encoding/decoding) and message receipt
(decoding).
Several new schools appeared in the area.
Let us assume then that the message sender being a fisherman and using
relevant subject thesaurus by' schools’ means large number of fish
swimming together rather than the institutions for children education.
But the ordinary person as well as the translator who doesn’t know the
meaning of this word in this context translates the word ‘schools’ by its
denotative meaning as ‘fish’.