The Philosophers Stone Of The Alchemist Translator
This article aims at analyzing the way technical translators construct the textual meaning
. The methodological framework based on genre theory and its application is used to reveal the complex relationships between the semiotic, pragmatic, rhetorical, semantic and linguistic approaches. The understanding of meaning will depend on the interaction between textual and contextual factors. There is no autonomous and objective meaning in a text, but a convergence of parameters that constitute a crossroads of human communication for extracting a negotiated meaning. There are as many definitions of translation as views on the reality of the translation process and product; most of them are meaning-oriented, because they follow the translation tradition; translation is, then, taken as an isolated process wherein the translator has to deal with a text containing all the information required to make sense of the whole. The valuable contribution of genre studies and textual analysis stems from the importance of contextualizing texts; in this sense, meaning is not content anymore, but is relativized, negotiated, and remodeled according to external factors, that play a decisive role in the understanding of the communicative act involving actors or participants, institutions, places or ceremonies, communicative purposes and private intentions, as well as formal and social conventions. In this sense, genre perspectives lead to conclude that revisiting the definition of
translation may be necessary to understand better what is meaning.
Meaning is no longer a convenient notion for equivalence because translating is not part of a communicative equation, where meaning would be the philosopher's stone.
Now, what happens with meaning? In order to systematize the translating process, translators have adopted a semantic perspective to refer to what I have called X in previous lines. Their task is then to convey a meaning, i.e. the textual content. Unfortunately, there are as many understandings of meanings as visions of translation. Translators shift from referential meaning to contextual and pragmatic meaning and do not make a clear distinction between co-text (the surrounding text and all the linguistic and textual information) and context (the recurrent communicative situations, Miller 1984, Nord 1997), nor between referential meaning, communicative meaning, rhetorical tricks used to convince the reader, communicative purpose of a specific communicative situation and/or private intentions of the author.
The question puts forward a reality: meaning is neither an objective nor a universal value, but is constructed by readers according to the situational context; subjectivity is then the starting point of the translating process, whatever the text type and the text genre.
Translation Studies have tried to provide valid concepts to operate the communicative equation. However, communicative events are far from being as clear and determined as mathematics; communication is first of all negotiation between people in order to achieve a collective purpose and convince others that the message is worth reading and may contribute to the progress of the state of the art.
equivalence is what the translator seeks; and meaning is what is inherent to the text.
The importance of meaning is related to the need for
translators to count on a measuring unity used to systemize the process. Rendering the equivalence of meaning is still nowadays the method employed by a great deal of translators to do their job. The problem is that there is not a meaning, but a plurality of interpretations. Meaning is not static; it changes in time and space. A same text at the same time, but out of the ceremony, will lose part of the raison d'tre and the reader will have new interpretations of the communicative purposes and private intentions.
From the genre perspective, extra textual parameters have to be considered before reading a text and will help the reader, especially when he or she is an outsider, to make a textual interpretation suitable for a specific translation job and for the future readers.
Translatorsprofessionals and scholarsneed to work on redefining translation, abandoning tricky and misleading concepts like meaning, which tend to objectify the translation process instead of admitting that any communicative act is subjective by nature.
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by: carmen
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