Despite the fact that it has been carried out by generation after generation of people, translation has been deemed by quite a number of scholars and writers as a mission impossible. The German philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, described it as an attempt as solving an impossible task, and the American poet, Robert frost, poetry is what gets lost in translation. To what extent do you think translation is possible?
Generally speaking, there are universal things, like physical and psychological needs, mental process, feeling and moral standands, among all human beings in spite of their different races, skin colors, nationalities or ethic groups. This universality has provided the basis and driving forces for communication and mutual understanding among different people. Besides, there are similarities among different languages. For example, the smallest unit to express one’s idea is a sentence, which usually consists of subject, predicate, object, attribute and adverbial modifier, etc…the universality among languages and the universality among human beings mentioned above together constitute the basis for translatability. However, despite the universality there are great differences in terms of both languages and human beings. Language difference die primarily in phonology, spelling, grammar and, most importantly, ways of expressing, habits of using language, including different word choice, different metaphors and different geographical regions have their unique experience, unique histories and unique life style, therefore, frequently, there Is no word or expression in the TL that corresponds exactly to a given word and expression in the SL. In other words, sometimes both the content to be expressed and ways of expressing may be different may be different from one speech community to another. Consequently, there must be some loss in the process of translating and translation can be regarded as an attempt to introduce culturally unique things from one未完 |