Keeping the Main Thought in French Translation
The art of translation is not only concerned with restituting meaning. In the first place, it does not aim at creating a text that is more fluid or elegant than the original. To be honest, the meaning must not be governing as the text itself should not be destroyed. It is true that restituting the meaning is central to the translation of a text. Nevertheless, the translator must do his or her best in order to keep as faithful as possible to rendering a particular notion. It would not be wrong to argue that the most instant meaning of a text must be preserved in the target text translation. When receiving the foreign the translator must be very careful and work extremely hard in order not to naturalize, denature or assimilate it. The target language can become strongly perverted due to bad work by the translator according to French Translation Services ideologist Berman. The translator can distort the language in such a way that it becomes suited to his or her individual world, argues Berman, who is a prolific theorist and translator himself. This world can be an event, place, setting, or merely a situation whose objective reality comprises to a large extent the deliberate denunciation of disbelief of illusory universes and the resulting discontinuous realities.Having in mind that translating is a kind of interpreting, and every translator is challenged to firstly read, perceive and make sense of the text. The reader translates the written text into mental matter during the first stage of this process. Often when the reader has to deal with a text in his own native tongue he/she applies this technique. Thus thought becomes an internal code that produces an internal dialogue which is assimilated inside the mind, argues Russian Translator researcher and scholar Wygotsky in his study of young children. Reading a text involves a series of interpretants – a view shared by another distinguished scholar – Pierce. Every sign stands for an object – be it internal or external. An interpretant is a psychical sign, which is governed by and connected to the experience of the person via his/her words, and logically, via the concepts these words stand for. More to the point, as argued by Bruno Osimo – founder of the Italian Translation Services company, it is wrong to assume that the language we think in is a natural code. Quite the opposite, it is a particular language that can be termed as a multi-code language. As a result, the images created inside the mind of the reader following the entire reading process may differ drastically from those shaping up inside the mind of the writer. Translating from the target into the source language is an even more complex process since the translator has to determine which the graphic sign of the other language is. For example, if a book by an Australian author describes a tea tree along the bed of a river, the image in the mind of an Australian reader (Melaleuca/ paperbark tree) will be totally different from the image created in the mind of a British reader (the shrub or low tree whose dried leaves form the tea of trade). 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.
