Translation Theory Term Paper

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Translation -- Art or Science?

One of the most interesting examples generated by the debate over the philosophy of the North American Translation Workshop is an anecdote that chronicles the practice of an experiment of Harvard students, all of whom had to translate a passage to contextually render its meaning to individuals of their own historical place in time. It is noted that this practice, of "actual translation" or enacted translation "opened up fixed ways of seeing" these received documents of their particular culture. (15) In other words even translation of the familiar is not a literal process, where a set of words takes upon the meaning of another set of words, in a language other than the original document and other than the language of the writer. Translation is a holistic interaction of language, culture, and the individual translator's artistic sensibility.

Thus, the philosophy of the North American Translation Workshop, first and foremost explores why there was a boom or a noted increase in desire to translate the works of other cultures, customs and languages during the 1960's, yet there was no corresponding increase in including translation as a component of creative writing programs during the period.

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Inherent to this assumption is that translation is a less creative process than original writing process itself. However, a translator must grapple with the fact that the act of translation is itself a creative act, a negotiation between alternative creative modalities of expression in two different cultures -- the translator's and the writer's -- rather than a simple, linear mechanical work of making one word stand for another word.

This idea seems to fly in the face of the philosophy of the "Science" of Translation, which hopes to render a document as perfectly as possible into another language. The North American Translation Workshop would state that such an ideal is impossible. For instance, to read Homer as a Greek individual of so many centuries ago as a contemporary is an entirely different cultural as well as linguistic experience no human being today can attain. To render the Greek literally causes the Greek to sound stiff and archaic in a way that would never be experienced by a contemporary of the poet, for instance….....

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