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The concept "translation" has been changing during the last century; TRANSLATION PROCESS [2]
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This is my writing:
The Translation process
The concept "translation" has been changing during the last century due to the development of Linguistics' theories and the division between Linguistics and Translation Studies producing two points of view of Translation:
Translation as a product which focus in the resultant text without taking account the mental process executed while the translator is carrying out the translation activity and translation as a process that is centered on how to explain the mental process (with the Psycholinguistics support) of transference from the original text into the target text, so it is focused in the middle phase.
Nowadays It is necessary to consider the translation as a process to understand the whole meaning of "translation". Although the translation is also a product, if the translator only considers it in that way he does not take account many influential factors that could provoke the understanding or misunderstanding of the target text. For example the cultural factor that influences in the author and translator's mind and, as a consequence, in the texts too.
Knowing that, the translation process can be divided in three phases:
The first phase is the comprehension of the original text. Normally, translation's students are used to ignore or not pay attention enough at this phase but, contrary to these thoughts, the comprehension phase is very relevant to translation process because the translator must understand completely the content of the text for producing a good target text, a text that respects the content (as much as possible) and the sense the author wanted to give it.
After the total comprehension of the text, the second phase consists on the transferring of original text's contents into another text. Sometimes, the total transferring is impossible because the translator must adapt the original's information to another text with different features knowing the final reader, the communicative intention (of both texts; the original and the future text the translator would produce), the function of the text, and, the most important factor, the different cultures. Depending of these factors, the translator will summarize or omit some information so that the target text fits in the target culture and, also, communicate. Usually the communicative intention and the author's intention are equivalent, nevertheless, this equivalence can be changed because of many different reasons: political reasons, religious reasons, functional reasons or just the translator decided to change it. An example of this non-correspondence is the translation of philosophical texts which, at first, they were used to show the philosopher's ideas and, nowadays, the translators change its function to criticize author's own ideas.
Lastly, the third phase in which the translator express the content extracted and synthesized in the second phase to a new text. In this phase, the author of the text changes becoming the translator the author of the new text and then, the responsible to decide the expression and text's form (taking account the features explained before). Moreover, the culture and the sense role an important influence during the rewriting phase to avoid writing the text in a non natural way, that is to say, to express the content using non typical syntactic forms.
For example: to translate an English journal into Spanish but using English syntactic forms. For this reason, the knowledge of both languages and cultures are essential to translate in a natural way using typical forms and expressions from the target culture and respecting the content from the original culture.
In sum up, the translation process is, in fact, a transferring of cultures ( they might be similar or different each other) and the translator is only a link or "bridge" between two texts involved in two cultures, a person who lives between two worlds.