Page 6 - Міністерство освіти і науки України

Lecture 1
Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Translation and Interpretation

I Introduction

Translation is one of those phenomena in our lives that seems very simple and
easily understood at first glance. Everybody seems to known what translation is and
most educated people have translated something more or less successfully.
At the same time the significance of translating is vivid and has long been
recognized in modern society.
Translation is the process of rendering the meaning of a source language word,
word-combination, sentence or text in the target language.
Interpretation is synonymous to translation and denotes the way of presenting the
idea of the work under translation by the translator in his particular way, which is
somewhat different from that of the author`s. Moreover, the term “interpretation” often
denotes the act or the result of translating by speaking (oral translation), which must
have been the earliest form of translation.
According to some linguists translation consists of studying the lexicon,
grammatical structure, communication situation and cultural context of the source
language text, analysing it in order to determine its meaning, and then restructing this
same meaning using the lexicon and grammatical structure which are appropriate in the
target language and its cultural context.

II Theoretical Approaches to Translation

The most common theoretical approaches to human translation include the
following three:
1. Transformational Approach.
According to this approach, the process of translation is regarded as
transformation or, in other words, any replacement of a source language unit by its
equivalent in the target language.
Transformation can be observed at morphological, lexical and syntactic level. For
example, at the morphological level English word-building suffix “-tion” may be
transformed in the process of translation into Ukrainian suffixes “-ція”, “-ка”.
e.g. revolution – революція
preparation – підготовка.
At the lexical level words and word combinations of the source language are
transformed into those of the target one. For example, in the process of translation, the
English word “room” is transformed at the lexical level into Ukrainian words “кімната”
or “простір”.
The syntactic transformations comprise a broad range of structural changes.
e.g. He has never been answered.
Його ще ніхто і ніколи не спростував.

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