Perspective Of Translation

1 Perspectives on translation
This book is concerned with translation and, in particular, with proposing a new orientation to the study of translation. In this first chapter, we intend to set the scene for what is to follow by asking three questions which, we believe, lie at the root of any attempt to understand the phenomenon of translation and, if such is our goal, improve our own work as translators or as trainers of others in the task. The three questions, which constitute the three sections of this chapter and recur in different guises throughout the book, are:
(1) What is translation?
(2) What is a translator?
(3) What is translation theory?
We shall soon discover that these questions are fraught with ambiguity and the answers to them, not surprisingly, are far from satisfactory.
Since documentary evidence of translation can be traced back for at least two millennia and present-day international communication depends heavily on it, it is surely paradoxical that a phenomenon as widespread in time and in space as translation is should be so ill-understood. Attempts at explaining it appear stuck at the pre-scientific stage of anecdote that the life sciences had reached in the late eighteenth century; the study of natural history'.1
The development of the study of translation, from that point, stands in the strongest contrast with that of the life sciences. In their case, careful - not to say, meticulous - description of what was observed led rapidly to the development of botany, biology, zoology; sciences dedicated to the creation (or discovery) of theories which made sense of the flora and fauna. The theory of evolution is, of course, the classic nineteenth-century example.
Translation theory, on the other hand, appears still not to have taken this second step and remains, as it were, in the hands of the 'naturalists'. We therefore wish now (a) to