Abstract
The article was about the history of translation in many aspects such as how it should be done, how it should be defined and if it should or not be seen as a process and those who outlined their own definitions.
Introduction
Through the history translation has been a human activity. It takes us back to Cicero to analyze the earliest definitions or advises of what translation was and how it should be done. In subsequent centuries many definitions of translation were made by famous translators, authors, poets, writers, linguists and several people related to languages. But it was until some decades ago that the theory of translation was formulated to translation to be seen as a process. This report is made for you fully understand the translation as a process.
Main Body
Ever since translation has always been a human activity the need to define has always existed. Cicero felt the need to argument how translation should be done, contradicting literalism, which was in fashion during that time, his criterion that translation should be, not only words but ideas, taking into account the norms of the target language (TL), and keeping expressive strength (style) of the source language (SL).
Through the centuries when emerges the linguistic theory of translation the most difficult issue was to define it or conceptualize it. That’s why Catford, Taber, Nida, Fiódorov, Barjudátov, Garcia Yebra and Garcia Landa, among many others, tried to define what translation is.
Among the definitions which take into account the semantic aspects in translation, the one stated by Barjudátov in 1975 presented: “translation is a process of transformation of a linguistic production in a language (SL) to a linguistic production in another language (TL), in which the content level is unchangeably conserved.” Henceforth and taking into account many others criteria Barreiro Sánchez define his conception about translation as follows: “translation is a process in which at least three aspects interact: the stylistic, the semantic and contextual (pragmatic). If we (as translator) participate in the sense what for translating firstly we have to understand and that it is not possible to translate what was totally understood, we must also agree in that such comprehension, such immersion is the sense intended, is impossible without fully understanding in which context it was produced in the SL, which the conditions presented in the production of the original text were.
Conclusion
We can finally say that translation is interlinguistic communicative process in which a message originally expressed in SL is re-expressed in its equivalent, more or less close in the TL, at the level of the text. This definition must be taken into account to set the basis for the teaching of translation strategy and develop a methodology.
References
Barrientos Sánchez, Manuel A. (n.d.). Let's talk about translation: The translation as a process.
