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What about interpretation? What is the difference between translation and interpretation?

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Is Translation Is An Exact Science?

Those unfamiliar with translation often mistakenly believe it to be an exact science, assuming that a one-to-one correlation exists between the words and phrases in different languages. This assumption leads them to believe that a translation dictionary or online service is the only thing needed to translate a given passage. However, such a fixed relationship does not exist between languages, and different words often carry very different meanings or shades of meaning depending on the context of use.

Translation process

The translation process for translation involves:

1. Decoding the meaning of the source text, and

2. Re-encoding this meaning in the target language.

To decode the meaning of a text the translator must first identify the segments of the text to be treated as a unit. A translation unit may be a word, a phrase or even one or more sentences. Behind this seemingly simple procedure lies a complex cognitive operation. To decode the complete meaning of the source text, the translator must methodically interpret and analyze all its features. This process requires thorough knowledge of the grammar, semantics, syntax, idioms and the like of the source language, as well as the culture of its speakers.

The translator needs the same in-depth knowledge to re-encode the meaning in the target language. In fact, often translators' knowledge of the target language is more important, and needs to be deeper, than their knowledge of the source language. For this reason, most translators translate into a language of which they are native speakers.

In addition, knowledge of the subject matter being discussed is essential.

Measuring success in translation

Given that the goal of translation is to ensure that the source and the target texts communicate the same message, a successful translation can be judged by:

1. Faithfulness, or fidelity: the extent to which the translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to it or subtracting from it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning; and

2. Transparency: the extent to which the translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.

The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth.

The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds" wrong, and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machine translation systems, often result in patent nonsense with only a humorous value (see round-trip translation).

Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may knowingly strive to produce a literal translation. For example, literary translators and translators of religious works often adhere to the source text as much as possible. To do this they deliberately "stretch" the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Likewise, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language to provide "local color" in the translation.