A Study Of Translation Process From Functional Perspectives

The objective of translation studies is no doubt to offer as good and as full as possible an account of what real-life translation processes involve (Toury, 1995: 181). However, scholars in translation studies have long overlooked the importance of translation process studies (TPS), with far less of them engaging in TPS than those in translation comparison. Two reasons can be found to account for this situation: scholars have been deterred from the daunting task of TPS because its subject, according to James S. Holmes, involves the interlingual translation mechanism inside the little black box (the human brain); and scholars fail to find suitable theoretical tools to make a breakthrough in this area.Since scholars are convinced that TPS should focus on the mechanism of interlingual translation, efforts have been made in decoding the operation of the little black box. In his book Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice, Roger T. Bell builds through an introspective appraoch a model of translation process on the basis of linguistic knowledge. This introspective approach offers a new way towards TPS, but has been blamed for "being remote from the translator's problem" (Newmark, 1988: 21).If we take a translation as a kind of product, there must be something in common between the production of such a product and of any industrial product. Accepting a purchase order always sits at the top of a process flowchart because engineers and workers alike should follow the purchase order in their design, material preparation, production and quality control. Translating also involves these steps, with the interlingual translation as a critical step, and all the steps are unavoidably under the influence of many elements, such as the purpose of translation, the audience, and the time and place of text delivery. To study the real-life translation process, one has to examine the steps in producing a translation from accepting a translation task to finalizing the target-text, along with all the elements involved in these steps, and to set up a model of translation process to illustrate how a translation is produced.German functionalist theories of translation represented by Nord's Function plus Loyalty are focused on addressing problems with the real-life translation process which centers on the development of intended text in a target language for the expected audience. According to functionalist theories of translation, the intended text function plays a key role in the translator's decision-making from choosing the overall translation strategy to appropriate wording in the target language. In an attempt to closely examine the real-life translation process, this thesis employs functionalist approaches to illustrate the whole process of producing a translation, for the purpose of setting up a functional model of translation process with the intended text function at its core to reflect its importance. It also classifies the elements involved in the process and explains at which step and in what way an element may influence the translation production.