Analisis Del Libro The Giver

I. CH. 2. HISTORY OF TRANSLATION THEORY
By Susan Basnet.

No introduction to Translation Studies could be complete without consideration of the discipline in an historical perspective, but the scope of such an enterprise is far too vast to be covered adequately in a single book let alone in a single chapter. What can be done in the time and space allowed here is to look at theway in which certain basic lines of approach to translation have emerged at different periods of European and American culture and to consider how the role and function of translation has varied. So, for example, the distinction between word for word and sense for sense translation, established within the Roman system, has continued to be a point for debate in one way or another right up tothe present, while the relationship between translation and emergent nationalism can shed light on the significance of differing concepts of culture. The persecution of Bible translators during the centuries when scholars were avidly translating and retranslating classical Greek and Roman authors is an important link in the chain of the development of capitalism and the decline of feudalism. Inthe same way, the hermeneutic approach of the great English and German Romantic translators connects with changing concepts of the role of the individual in the social context. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the study of translation, especially in its diachronic aspect, is a vital part of literary and cultural history.

PROBLEMS OF ‘PERIOD STUDY’
George Stainer, in After Babel,1divides the literature on the theory, practice and history of translation into four periods. The first, he claims, extends from the statements of Cicero and Horace on translation up to the publication of Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation in 1791. The central characteristic of this period is that of ‘immediate empirical focus’, i.e. the statements and theories abouttranslation stem directly from the practical work of translating. Stainer’s second period, which runs up to the publication of Larbaud’s Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérome in 1946 is characterized as a period of theory and hermeneutic enquiry with the development of a vocabulary and methodology of approaching translation. The third period begins with the publication of the first papers on machinetranslation in the 1940s, and is characterized by the introduction of structural linguistics and communication theory into the study of translation. Stainer’s fourth period, coexisting with the third, has its origins in the early 1960s and is characterized by ‘a reversion to hermenutic, almost metaphysical inquiries into translation and interpretation’; in short by a vision of translation that setsthe discipline in a wide frame that includes a number of other disciplines:

Classical philology and comparative literature, lexical statistics and ethnography, the sociology of class-speech, formal rhetoric, poetics, and the study of grammar are combined in an attempt to clarify the act of translation and the process of ‘life between languages’.

Steiner’s divisions, although interesting andperceptive, nevertheless illustrate the difficulty of studying translation diachronically, for his first period covers a span of some 1700 years while his last two periods cover a mere thirty years. Whilst his comments on recent developments in the discipline are very fair, it is also the case that the characteristic of his first period is equally apparent today in the body of work arising from theobservations and polemics of the individual translator. His quadripartite division is, to say the least, highly idiosyncratic, but it does manage to avoid one great pitfall: periodization, or compartmentalization of literary history. It is virtually impossible to divide periods according to dates for, as Lotman points out, human culture is a dynamic system. Attempts to locate stages of...