Stage 2

Translation as intercultural communication.

The process of translation is often described for practical reasons as a three-stage pattern (see Швейцер 1988: 49; Miram 1998: 57):

S2 R2

S1 R1

STAGE 1 STAGE 3

Where Stage 1 is communication between the original Sender of information (source language sender or S1) and translator (receiver of information1 or R1), Stage 2 is “code shifting” (transformations, performed by a translator) and Stage 3 - communication between the translator (S2) and the final addressee (target language receiver 2 or R2).

According to this scheme there are two interrelated communicative acts in the process of translation: communication between the initial sender of information and a translator and communication between a translator and the final addressee (receiver of information). In this process a translator is changing his (her) role all the time, acting as a receiver (at Stage 1) and as a sender (Stage 3) of the respective messages. Focusing upon the code shifting process, this scheme, however, does not consider social, cultural, political and other extralinguistic factors of communication.

A. Shveitser (1988: 51), following Nida and Taber (1969), suggests another scheme of translation which includes both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. This scheme seems to be much more comprehensive and will be used as the basic model in our approach to analysis of the process relevant for translation and interpretation:

		TEXT 2

TEXT1

R3

S1

	R2 S2

communicative

situation 1

communicative

situation 2

where:

S1 - sender 1 (source language speaker);

R1 - receiver 1 (source language addressee);

R2 - receiver 2 (translator/interpreter in the mode of receiving in-coming messages);

S2 - sender 2 (translator/interpreter in the mode of performing translation);

R3 - receiver 3 (target language addressee);

L1 - language 1(source language);

L2 - language 2 (target language);

C1 - culture 1 (source culture);

C2 - culture 2 (target culture).

According to this scheme translation may be defined as a two-stage process of inter-lingual and inter-cultural communication, during which a translator, on the basis of an analyzed and transformed text in L1, creates another text in L2 which substitutes the source text in the target language and culture. It should be also added to this definition that translation is a process aimed at rendering communicative effect of the source text modified by the difference between two languages, two cultures and two communicative situations.

So an act of translation appears to be an intercultural communicative event, so far as cultures include the corresponding languages, languages include texts and texts pertain to specific subject fields (предметні галузі): politics, economics, business, law, teaching, chemistry, mathematics, physics, agriculture, environmental protection, medicine, etc.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11