Among the many complex problems studied by modern linguistics, an important place is occupied by the study of linguistic aspects interlingual speech activity, which is called “translation” or “Translation studies”.
Translation is a very ancient human activity. Translation activity has its roots in distant, archaic times. Once upon a time, the proto-language of our ancestors began to split into various language groups. There was an urgent need for people able to take on an important mediating mission in communication between representatives of different communities. The first translators appeared.
The brave and enlightened Romans were the pioneers of educational translation functions. Many renowned citizens were involved in the transcriptions here, because proficiency in Greek (and in ancient Rome, basically all texts were translated from ancient Greek) was an indicator of high status and good education.
The very first theorist in translation activity was Mark Tullius Cicero. According to Cicero, when translating a text, one should focus on the final recipient, while the very meaning of the given work should be conveyed, not necessarily literally. “A word-by-word translation entails a depletion of the original”, said Mark Tullius.
The emergence of book printing stimulated translation activities. It was then that modern terms appeared. The appearance of the verb “traduire” is attributed to 1539, and in 1540 the French humanist and translator Etienne Dole includes “traduction” and “traducteur” in one of his treatises. In Spain, the neologisms “traducir” and “traduccion” appear, and in Italy – “tradurre” and “traduzione”. In school practice, the term “version” continues to be used, meaning translation into the native language from Greek and Latin.
By the end of the XIX century translators began to formulate some semblance of a “normative translation theory” outlining a number of requirements that a “good” translation or translator must meet.
Translation studies first took shape as an independent discipline as a branch of linguistics in the 1930s. One of the first attempts to create a full-fledged theory of translation was made in the works of Russian scientists A.V. Fedorov and Ya.I. Rezker. They developed a linguistic translation theory called “the theory of regular correspondence”. There was still no full understanding of translation as an interdisciplinary phenomenon, and the attention of researchers was quite rightly focused on its linguistic aspect. The significance of this theory can hardly be overestimated.
The modern theory of translation as a starting point is based on the fact that translation, like language, is a means of communication. Hence the name of this theory – “the communicative model of translation”. There are many descriptions translation, reflecting one or another of its features as an act of interlingual communication. Among them – one of the most developed is proposed in the works of German scientists O. Kade and A. Neubert. Communication theory owes much of its subsequent development to the research of Russian scientists V.N. Komissarov and A.D. Schweitzer.
Today, the greatest need for translators is in technical fields, more than 70 % of the world’s translators work in them. The largest volume of translated texts is business correspondence, followed by consumer informational texts of various kinds (instructions, brochures, etc.), then scientific and technical texts, contractual texts, technical descriptions.