Retaining the Principal Idea in Russian Interpretation

Restituting the meaning of a text is not the only thing translation is concerned with. Most of all, it will not reproduce a new text of finer quality and better organization than the original one. In other words, the grammar and syntax must not be neglected for the sake of meaning. The central idea in the process of translation is the restitution of 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. In order not to assimilate, naturalize or denature the target text, the translator must work extremely hard when receiving the foreign culture contained in the text. Thus, as French Translator employee Berman claims the translator can also overpoweringly distort the translating language. Berman, who is a famous theorist of translation and historian, stresses on the importance of transforming the language in order to suit it to the translator’s own imaginary world. This world can be a setting, place or event in conflict with the objective reality, which ranges from the intentional deferral of disbelief of fictional universes to the alternating realities that come as a result.

Bearing in mind that translation is a form of interpretation, the first challenge that every translator faces lies in reading and perceiving the text. During this process, the written text is translated into the reader's mental language. This happens when the reader reads a text in his or her own native language. As psychologist and Russian Translator 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. Another scholar, Pierce, claims that in the process of reading a text a series of interpretants is created. Any sign can be interpreted as an object coming either from the inside or outside. The interpretant is a psychical notion and as such it depends on and is connected to the experience of the individual through his/her thoughts and similarly the notions these thoughts express.

Furthermore, the language that we think in, according to Bruno Osimo – an English to Italian Translation theorist, is not a natural code. On the contrary, it is a specific language that can be labeled as multi-code language. As a result, the images created inside the mind of the reader following the entire reading process may differ drastically from those shaping up inside the mind of the writer. 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. For instance, if a novel by an Australian writer talks about a tea tree along the gravel bed of a river, the images in the minds of the Australian reader and the British reader will be totally different – the former will think about a Melaleuca of a paperbark tree, while the latter will imagine the shrub or low tree whose dried leaves form the tea of commerce. Therefore, the translation most probably will be incorrect because something will be lost if the translator is not acquainted with this difference when he or she proceeds to the second phase of the translation process, i.e. when the translator encodes his or her own mental language into the code of the translated text.