Mediators in the process of translation By Juan Carlos Barragan
T
he phenomenon of migrations is transforming the countries all over the world into a multicultural ones, where persons of different languages, religious backgrounds and cultures live together side by side. To know the other person's historical, cultural and religious background is certainly one of the fundamental aspects towards knowing the history of towns. How is it possible to know one culture learning from itself?; it might be possible throughout being bilingual or interpreter. Paul A. Kolers (1973) discusses the relation between bilingualism and translation in his article "Translation and Bilingualism" mainly considering the lexical level of translation and the role of bilingualism. He uses bilingualism to examine some general questions in the use of language and to learn more about how the human mind handles different kinds of information, he also emphasizes the human factor in translation by humans comparing it with machine translation, pointing out that there is no satisfactory translation machine. Throughout history of translation, there have always been found the fact that machines cannot replace what linguistic meadiators do in the process of translation and interpretation; the reason for this is the complex structure of languages and the fact that the meanings of words have more than one interpretation depending on the context in which they are used, and a machine cannot make this distinction. In addition to, (Catford 1965:20) focuses on is the fact that the way bilingual people interpret words is different from the dictionary translations of the same words.
Kolers explains this situation through a psychological approach: "Our words are commonly used in contexts, in situations that are defined both by their physical characteristics and by our habits, attitudes, dispositions, and intentions toward them. These cognitive and emotional conditions affect the way we interpret a word when we hear it or see it; they affect the meaning we give to the world" (Kolers 1973: 283). In conclusi贸n: Many Experts point out that bilingualism is a necessary condition for translation activity, the role of the linguistic mediator helps lots of but proficiency of the language is an essential issue to be mastered. Interpreters do not translate words, they do translate ideas.
Source: Cambell S (1998) Translation into the second language, Longman England
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