Generally translation theory has been an attempt to explain how one has translated what s/he has translated and why s/he translated it. It is about discussing the different choices and suggesting new ideas on translation.
A chronological review to the translation theories gives one the advantage to see the evolution of the translation studies and appreciate/understand today's perspective more easily and throughly.
Beginning with Etienne Dolet and his How to Translate Well from One Language to Another is a good start to see the binary oppositions, which still are dominant in some terms in the translation theory, since he gives a clear distinction between the good and the bad translations and suggests methods to create good translation. The main idea behind the good translation is being faithful to the source text. Ironically enough, he himself was executed for mistranslating. This is an important proof of the strength and effect of words.
The idea of faithfulness, supported by the same binary opposition, is also apparent in the other texts from John Dryden, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Friedrich Schleirmacher, and Andre Lefevere. Either the opposition is about the quality of translation, good vs. bad, or about the text type, literature vs. commercial texts. But the general approach to evaluate a translation, to appreciate a translation and/or to disapprove of it is to think with a split mind and the texts in the framework of faithfulness.
Only Dryden proposes a third way, what he calls an "imitation", although he does not name it as a translation. Even the inclusion of such a possibility into an essay on translation is a little clue for us to consider the variety existed in the translations.
Lefevere's binarism, however, stems from a bigger opposition, West vs. East. He try to see the process of translation both as a product and as a proces through this opposition.
His article on comparision of Chinese and Western ideas on translation suggests a different systematic method to look at translation. He suggests that translation is not a static action and has to be changeable according to the culture, accoring to the time and according to the people. If we are to quote from him:
"Different cutures have tended to take translation by granted, or rather, different cultures have taken the technique of translating that was current at a given time in their evolution for granted and equated it with the phenomenon of translation as such."
However, the problem in his article is his superficial look at both of the cultures. He generalizes a West and a China in his head and tries to prove the reader what he meant by "different". Although his ideas are an ideal start to consider translation and language; translation and culture at the same time, the way he looks at culture is problematic on its own. Because his definition has its own contradictions in it. Although he consider cultures as not fixed and as bound to change, he considers "the culture" of a time is static in itself. He mentions both Chinese and Western cultures as a big united homogeneos culture without any margins or without any oppositions in them.And he misses the point that there cannot be a pure homogenity in a culture.
Another problematic perspective Lefevere is the way he compares these two cultures. He overlooks the dynamics of these culture. He misses the human part in them and approaches them as if independent from their creators.
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