An Experienced French Interpreter Struggles to Preserve Meaning in the Target File
To translate a text does not mean one restitutes its meaning only. First and foremost, the new text will not necessarily be more refined or elegant than the original. In other words, the grammar and syntax must not be neglected for the sake of meaning. Without any doubt, to translate a text means to restitute its meaning. Nevertheless, the translator must do his or her best in order to keep as faithful as possible to rendering a particular notion. It is true to say that the original text must not differ much from the target text, or at least from the idea it conveys. When receiving the foreign the translator must be very careful and work extremely hard in order not to naturalize, denature or assimilate it. Thus, as English to French Translation employee Berman claims the translator can also overpoweringly distort the translating language. Berman, who is a famous theorist of translation and historian, stresses on the importance of transforming the language in order to suit it to the translator’s own imaginary world. Logically, this will be a world which will refer to a situation, person, place or setting whose objective atmosphere consists of premeditated disavowal of skepticism of imaginary worlds and the interminable realities coming as a result.Bearing in mind that translation is a form of interpretation, the first challenge that every translator faces lies in reading and perceiving the text. The reader translates the written text into mental matter during the first stage of this process. This is often the case when the reader has to deal with a text in his own native tongue. Russian Translation Services employee and psychologist Wygotsky has demonstrated in his study of infants that thought undergoes a process of transformation into an internal code that yields to an internal dialogue inside the mind. According to another scholar, Peirce, reading a text creates a series of interpretants. Every sign stands for an object – be it internal or external. As the interpretant is a psychical sign, it is subjected and linked to the experience of the person through the words and, respectively, through the concepts connected to those words. Moreover, Bruno Osimo, an Italian Translation ideologist argues that the language in which we think is not a natural code, but a very particular language that can be defined as a multi-code language. The result can be that the image that forms in the mind of the reader during the process of reading may not correspond to the one formed inside the writer’s mind. As the translator faces the difficult task to find the graphic sign of the other language, the process of translating from one language into another becomes even more complex. A good instance of this will be a work by an Australian author, who has made a description of a tea tree along the gravel bed of a river. An Australian reader will perceive it as a Melaleuca of a paperbark tree, whereas the British reader will form the conception of a shrub or low tree whose dried leaves form the tea of commerce, which are two contrasting views. When the translator goes on with the execution of the translation process, i.e. the encoding of his or her mental language into the code of the translated text, he or she must be familiar with this difference. Thus he or she risks to distort the meaning of the original text and the translation will most likely be wrong.
