Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

LESSON – III 
ROLES OF THE TRANSLATOR IN
POETIC TRANSLATION 
Translation as Synthesis
 
Linguistically speaking, translation has been defined as "replacement of textual 
material in one language (SL) by equivalent material in another language". But as Wolfram 
Wilss says. "There is hardly any other concept in translation theory which has produced as 
many contradictory statements and has set off as many attempts at an adequate 
(comprehensive) definition as the concept of TE between source language text (SLT) and 
target language text (TLT)".
While accepting the possibility of a translator or computer-based definition of 
translation, he prefers the text-based definition of translation in a transfer process which aims 
at the transformation of a written SL text (SLT) into an optimally equivalent TL text (TLT), 
and which requires the syntactic, the semantic and the pragmatic understanding and analytical 
processing of the SL text", for the discussion of translation equivalence.
Semantics in Translation
In the words of Wolfram Wilss, "Translation is primarily not a linguistic, but a 
psycholinguistic operation, which presupposes a semantic interpretation of the source 
language text". In another paper, he has referred to the fact that because some translators 
think "since meaning is some inherent possession of a form (words), the only way to achieve 
fidelity in translation from the SL to the TL is to always use the same lexical unit as 
expressed in the SL and to also reflect as closely as possible the syntactic structure of the SL 
Text", and then the rejects this approach: "But meaning is not some inherent possession of a 
form, but a set of oppositions for which the verbal symbol is a conventional sign. Meaning 
must therefore be described basically in terms of distinctive features. These features are 
called 'semantic components", (Nida 1975:15) and then he concludes, "The translator, then, 
should not be overly occupied with trying to reproduce the formal, surface structures of the 
SL text. Instead his main concern should be with the deep (semantic) structure underlying 
these forms. This deep structure constitutes 'a set of relations for which a verbal symbol is a 
sign', and the translator must realize that the verbal symbol has as its referent 'a concept or set 
of concepts which people may have about objects.