The particular (specific) theories of translation study the linguistic aspects of translation from one given language to another given language.

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V. Basic approaches to translation/ Basic translation theories (methods).

The human translation theories may be divided into three main groups which quite conventionally may be called transformational, denotative, and communicative approaches.

The transformational theories consist of many varieties, which may have different names, but they have one common feature: the process of translation is regarded as transformation.

According to the transformational approach translation is viewed as the transformation of objects and structures of the source language into those of the target. Within the group of theories which may be included in the transformational approach a dividing line is sometimes drawn between transformations and equivalencies.

– According to this interpretation a transformation starts at the syntactic level when there is a change, i.e. when we alter, say the word order during translation.

– Substitutions at other levels are regarded as equivalencies, for instance when we substitute words of the target language for those of the source, this is considered as an equivalence.

? In the transformational approach we distinguish three levels of substitutions: morphological equivalencies, lexical equivalencies and syntactic equivalencies and/ or transformations.

However, the transformational approach is insufficient when the original text corresponds to one indivisible concept which is rendered by the translator as a text in another language also corresponding to the relevant indivisible concept. For instance, the translation of almost any piece of poetry cannot be explained by simple substitution of target language words and word combinations for those of source language.

This type of translation is characteristic of any text, written or spoken, rather than only of poetry or high-style poetry and the denotative approach is an attempt to explain such translation cases.

According to denotative approach the process of translation is not just mere substitution but consists of the following mental operations:

– translator reads (hears) a message in the source language;

– ! translator finds a denotatum and concept that corresponds to this message;

– translator formulates a message in the target language relevant to the above denotatum and concept.

It should be noted that, according to this approach during translation we deal with similar word forms of the matching languages and concepts deduced from these forms, however, as opposed to the transformational approach, the relationship between the source and target word forms is occasional rather than regular.

To illustrate this difference let us consider the following two examples:

(1) The sea is warm tonight – Сьогодні ввечері море тепле.

(2) Staff only – Службове приміщення.

In the first instance the equivalencies are regular and the concept, pertaining to the whole sentence may be divided into those relating to its individual components (words and word combinations): sea – море; tonight – сьогодні ввечері; is warm – тепле. In the second instance, however, equivalence between the original sentence and its translation is occasional (i.e. worth only for this case) and the concept, pertaining to the whole sentence cannot be divided into individual components.

The indivisible nature of the concept pertaining to the second example may be proved by literal translation of both source and target sentences: Тільки персонал (Staff only) and Service room (Службове приміщення). Service – тільки and room – персонал are hardly regular equivalencies (i.e. equivalencies applicable to other translation instances).

The communicational theory of translation was suggested by O.Kade and is based on the notions of communication and thesaurus.

Communication may be defined as an act of sending and receiving some information, which is called a message. In order to formulate a message, we use our system of interrelated data, which is called a thesaurus. We shall distinguish between two kinds of thesauruses in verbal communication: language thesaurus and subject thesaurus. Language thesaurus is a system of our knowledge about the language which we use to formulate a message, whereas subject thesaurus is a system of our knowledge about the content of the message.

In order to communicate, the message sender formulates the mental content of his/ her message using subject thesaurus, encodes it using the verbal forms of language thesaurus, and conveys it to the message recipient, who decodes the message also using language thesaurus and interprets the message using subject thesaurus as well. This is a simple description of monolingual communication.

! O.Kade’s communicational theory of translation describes the process of translation as an act of special bilingual communication in which the translator acts as a special communication intermediary, making it possible to understand a message sent in a different language. It is very important to understand that the thesauruses of message sender and recipient may be different to a greater or lesser degree, and that is why we sometimes do not understand each other even when we think we are speaking the same language.

In regular communication there are two actors, sender and recipient, and each of them uses two thesauruses (although they use the same language their underlying knowledge basis may differ). In translation we have three actors: sender, recipient, and intermediary (translator). The translator has two language thesauruses (source and target one) and performs two functions: decodes the source message and encodes the target one to be received by the recipient (end user of the translation).

! According to communicational approach translation is a message sent by a translator to a particular user and the adequacy of translation depends on similarity of their background information rather than only on linguistic correctness.

There is no strict demarcation line between the presented approaches. Any approach (theory) recognizes three basic components of translation and different approaches differ only in the accents placed upon this or that component. These basic components are:

Meaning of a word or word combination in the SL.

Equivalence of this meaning expressed in a word or word combination of the TL.

Extralinguistic information pertaining to the original meaning and/ or its conceptual equivalent after the translation.

To put it differently, what you can do in translation is either match individual words and combinations of the two languages directly (transformational approach), or understand the content of the source message and render it using the formal means of the TL (denotative approach) with due regard of the translation recipient and background information (communicational approach).

Usually we observe the combination of different methods.