2025/1 Translation

translation n. 1 the act or an instance of translating. 2 a written or spoken expression of the meaning of a word, speech, book, etc. in another language. (The Concise Oxford English Dictionary) 

The first sense relates to translation as a process, while the second to the product. The first focuses on the role of the translator in taking the original or source text (ST) and turning it into a text in another language (the target text, TT). The second sense centres on the concrete translation product produced by the translator. 

Dubois (in Bell, 1991:5) defines translation as “the expression in another language (or target language) of what has been expressed in another source language, preserving semantic and stylistic equivalences.” The focus is on preserving the meaning and style of the source text. 

Translation, as the process of conveying messages across linguistic and cultural barriers, is an eminently communicative activity, one whose use could well be considered in a wider range of teaching situations than may currently be the case (Ian Tudor, quoted in Duff, 1959:5). Translation is “an incredibly broad notion which can be understood in many different ways. For example, one may talk of translation as a process or a product, and identify such sub-types as literary translation, technical translation, subtitling and machine translation; moreover, while more typically it just refers to the transfer of written texts, the term sometimes also includes interpreting.” (Dictionary of Translation Studies, Shuttleworth and Cowie 1997:181).

Munday (2008:5) states that “translation has several meanings: it can refer to the general subject field, the product (the text that has been translated) or the process (the act of producing the translation, otherwise known as translating). The process of translation between source text (or ST) in the original verbal language (the source language or SL) into a written text (the target text or TT) in a different verbal language (the target language or TL).