Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Psychologically viewed, the translating process need include two mental processes
- understanding and verbalization. First, the translator understands the contents of
ST, that is, reduces the information it contains to his own mental program, and
then he develops this program into TT. The problem is that these mental processes
are not directly observable and we do not know much of what that program is and
how the reduction and development operations are performed. That is why the
translating process has to be described in some indirect way. The translation theory
achieves this aim by postulating a number of translation models.
A different approach was used by E. Nida who suggested that the translating
process may be described as a series of transformations. The transformational
model postulates that in any two languages there are a number of nuclear structures
which are fully equivalent to each other. Each language has an area of equivalence
in respect to the other language. It is presumed that the translator does the
translating in three transformational strokes. First — the stage of analysis — he
transforms the original structures into the nuclear structures, i.e. he performs
transformation within SL. Second —the stage of translation proper —he replaces
the SL nuclear structures with the equivalent nuclear structures in TL. And third —
the stage of synthesis — he develops the latter into the terminal structures in the
text of translation.
In describing the process of translating we can explain the obtained variants as the
result of the translator applying one or all of these models of action. This does not
mean that a translation is actually made through the stages suggested by these
models. They are not, however, just abstract schemes. Training translators we may
teach them to use these models as practical tools. Coming across a specific
problem in ST the translator should classify it as situational, structural or semantic
and try to solve it by resorting to the appropriate procedure. If, for instance, in the
sentence "He is a poor sleeper" the translator sees that the attributive group cannot
be directly transferred into Russian, he can find that the transformational model
will do the trick for him here and transform the attributive group into a verb-adverb
phrase: «Он плохо спит».
In other cases the translator may resort to various types of grammatical substitutes.