Translation is an art that not only restitutes meaning. In the first place, it does not aim at creating a text that is more fluid or elegant than the original. To be honest, the meaning must not be governing as the text itself should not be destroyed. Undoubtedly, in order to translate a certain text one must restitute its meaning. Altogether, the process of rendering a certain idea involves the translator preserving the original meaning to the best of his/her abilities. It will not be wrong to claim that the translator must be faithful to the source text or in other words to its central idea. The translator is forced to labor hard on every individual letter in order to render the target text without it being naturalized, denatured or assimilated. The translator may alter the idea of the original text so that it become unrecognizable claims Antoin Berman, English to French Translation employee. According to Berman, who is a distinguished translator himself, language must be transformed in a way that the translator can adapt it to his or her made up world. This world can be an event, place, setting, or merely a situation whose objective reality comprises to a large extent the deliberate denunciation of disbelief of illusory universes and the resulting discontinuous realities.
Having in mind that translating is a kind of interpreting, and every translator is challenged to firstly read, perceive and make sense of the text. During this process, the written text is translated into the reader’s mental language. In cases when the reader works on a text in his own native language he/she goes through this process. As psychologist and Russian Translation Services worker Wygotsky demonstrated in his study of young children, thought is transformed into an internal code that generates an internal dialogue assimilated inside the mind. According to another scholar, Peirce, reading a text creates a series of interpretants. Each sign refers to an object, which may be external or internal. Being a psychical sign, the interpretant is dependent on and linked to what every person experiences via the discourse and in this respect the concepts this discourse determines.
Furthermore, the language that we think in, according to Bruno Osimo – an Italian Translation Services theorist, is not a natural code. On the contrary, it is a specific language that can be labeled as multi-code language. The result can be that the image that forms in the mind of the reader during the process of reading may not correspond to the one formed inside the writer’s mind. As the translator faces the difficult task to find the graphic sign of the other language, the process of translating from one language into another becomes even more complex. A good instance of this will be a work by an Australian author, who has made a description of a tea tree along the gravel bed of a river. An Australian reader will perceive it as a Melaleuca of a paperbark tree, whereas the British reader will form the conception of a shrub or low tree whose dried leaves form the tea of commerce, which are two contrasting views. Were the translator not familiar with this difference when he or she moves on to the second stage of the translation process, which involves the translator’s encoding his or her mental language into the code of the translated text, then most probably the translation would turn out to be incorrect because something will be lost.
