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How do you know a translation was
successful?
As the goal of translation is to ensure that
the source and the target texts communicate the same message while
taking into account the various constraints placed on the translator,
a successful translation can be judged by two criteria:
1. Faithfulness, also called fidelity, that
is the extent to which the translation accurately renders the meaning
of the source text, without adding to it or subtracting from it,
and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning; and
2. Transparency, that is the extent to which the translation appears
to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been
written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical,
syntactic and idiomatic conventions.
A translation meeting the first criterion
is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation
meeting the second criterion is said to be an "idiomatic translation".
The criteria used to judge the faithfulness
of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of
the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its
literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth.
The criteria for judging the transparency
of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic
translation "sounds" wrong, and in the extreme case of
word-for-word translations generated by many machine translation
systems, often result in nonsense.
Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator
may knowingly strive to produce a literal translation. For example,
literary translators and translators of religious works often adhere
to the source text as much as possible. To do this they deliberately
"stretch" the boundaries of the target language to produce
an unidiomatic text. Likewise, a literary translator may wish to
adopt words or expressions from the source language to provide "local
color" in the translation.
The concepts of fidelity and transparency
are looked at differently in recent translation theories. The idea
that acceptable translations can be as creative and original as
their source text is gaining momentum in some quarters.
The concepts of fidelity and transparency
remain strong in Western traditions, however. They are not necessarily
as prevalent in non-Western traditions. For example, the Indian
epic Ramayana has numerous versions in many Indian languages and
the stories in each are different from one another. If one looks
into the words used for translation in Indian (either Aryan or Dravidian)
languages, the freedom given to the translators is evident.
Resources::
Wikipedia
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