Preserving the Principal Meaning in French Translation

Translation is an art that not only restitutes meaning. Most of all, it will not reproduce a new text of finer quality and better organization than the original one. To put it in different words, the letter must not be destroyed in favor of meaning. It is true that restituting the meaning is central to the translation of a text. All in all, in order to transfer a particular idea, the translator must try to stay as close as possibly to the original text. It would not be wrong to argue that the most instant meaning of a text must be preserved in the target text translation. When receiving the foreign the translator must be very careful and work extremely hard in order not to naturalize, denature or assimilate it. Thus, as French to English Translation employee Berman claims the translator can also overpoweringly distort the translating language. According to Berman, who is a distinguished translator himself, language must be transformed in a way that the translator can adapt it to his or her made up 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.

If we assume that to translate a text means to interpret it, the first thing that all translators have to do when reading a text is to perceive and assimilate it. During this process, the written text is translated into the reader's mental language. Often when the reader has to deal with a text in his own native tongue he/she applies this technique. English to Russian Translation employee and psychologist Wygotsky has demonstrated in his study of infants that thought undergoes a process of transformation into an internal code that yields to an internal dialogue inside the mind. Another scholar, Pierce, claims that in the process of reading a text a series of interpretants is created. Every sign stands for an object - be it internal or external. As the interpretant is a psychical sign, it is subjected and linked to the experience of the person through the words and, respectively, through the concepts connected to those words.

More to the point, as argued by Bruno Osimo – founder of the Italian Translation Services company, it is wrong to assume that the language we think in is a natural code. Quite the opposite, it is a particular language that can be termed as a multi-code language. The result can be that the image that forms in the mind of the reader during the process of reading may not correspond to the one formed inside the writer’s mind. When translating from one language into another, the problem becomes even more complex because one must find a graphic sign in another language. Let’s take for instance a British and Australian reader reading a novel by an Australian author who has described along the bed of a river. The perceptions of the two readers will be contrastingly different as the former will imagine the shrub or low tree whose dried leaves form the tea of trade while the latter will shape up the image of a Melaleuca of a paperbark tree. If the translator is unfamiliar with this difference, when he or she proceeds to the second phase of the translation process – that is when the translator encodes his or her own mental language into the code of the translated text – something will be lost, and most probably the translation will be incorrect.