Translation as Skill, Art or Science



            In the translation,skill, art and science also needed to develop. Especially in translate from English into Indonesian. Newmark (1988: 345) stated that “The dichotomy implied in the question of whether translation is an art or a science is misleading. No ones deny that translation of a literary work required a good deal of art. The question should rather be whether it is only a skill acquired by practice or whether it required also the knowledge of certain technique and procedures which can be described scientifically”.
            In addition, Fedorov (1963:71) explained that:
Translation was primarily and always a linguistic operation; that linguistic was the basic of all Translation process. Soon after, in 1958, Vinay and Dalbened published a description or method of translating from English to French. Although the method is referred to as a stylistic compare it is based on de Saussure’s linguistic theory, and the author states that to classify translation simply as an art would be to refuse it one of its intrinsic qualities, its normal inclusion is the framework of linguistics”.

            It had here a double claim: (1) that in translating priority should be given to problems of structure over matters of style; and (2) that translation should be considered as distinct of scientific investigation, a distinct branch of applied linguistics.
The only novelty in this position was that structural difficulties were not dismissed, as they were before, on the assumption that although knowledge took care of them. It was precisely this “knowledge” which was too often taken fro granted and which required a scientific basis.        
            As for the word “scientific” it suggested more than what it was actually claimed by linguistics. Nida (1964:3) explained “when we speak of the science of translation, we are of course concerned with the descriptive aspect; for just as linguistics may be classified as a descriptive science, so the transference of a message from one language to another is likewise a valid subject for scientific description”.
It must be noted, however, that the classification of linguistics as a descriptive science did not reduce it to a simple method of describing language.
            There was no need, then, to make a choice: translation was both an art and science, but the analysis of structure should to lead the preoccupation with style. The contribution of linguistics to that preliminary analysis was bought order and method to the investigation; to determine the limits between linguistic and non-linguistics problems, and their relation to each other in the total context of communication (form and content); and finally, to propose a precise terminology with which to discuss those problems. It had not all the answers but it had developed a systematic approach which should lead to more objective grasp of the translating activity.


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