Theories Of Translatability

Language is considered the main means of communication among human beings. It is "a type of patterned human behaviour" in which "human beings interact in social situations" (Catford, 1965, p. 1). A central criterion of language is 'mutual intelligibility' (Leech, Deucher, & Hoogenraad, 1982, p. 10); that is, the ability of the addressee to understand the addresser and vice versa. Language consists of "a set of verbal symbols that are primarily auditory, but secondarily written" (Nida, 2001, p. 13). Human languages are different; this is due to the fact that the first action that Man has taken in his intellectual confrontation with the world is to classify the phenomena, to divide what he finds before him into classes. To each one of these

Translatability can be defined as "the capacity for some kind of meaning to be transferred from one language to another without undergoing radical change" (Pym and Turk, 2005, p. 273). To what extent do translation theorists and scholars believe in translatability?

Benjamin (1932/2000, p. 17) argues that "the posited central kinship of languages" leads to "a distinctive convergence" between them. Languages, as a result, are not "strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express" (1932/2000, p. 17).

This statement may lead to Jakobson's (1959/2000, p. 115) generalization that "all cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language". Adopting a similar stance, Nida (1964, p. 50) criticizes those scholars who suppose "that certain languages (never their own, of course) could not be used to speak about certain aspects of experience". This is because "which unites mankind is much greater than which divides, and hence there is, even in cases of very disparate languages and cultures, a basis for communication" (1964, p. 2). Thus, Nida and Taber (1982, p. 4) formulate a generalization, akin to Jakobson's, which reads "Anything that can be said in one language can be said in another, unless the form is an essential element of the

273-274) classify the theorists' attitudes towards 'translatability' into three types: (a) the "rationalist", who believes that "meanings ('ideas' or sometimes 'structures') are universal and are thus generally translatable into their various language-specific representations", (b) the "relativist", who believes that "thinking and speaking are more tightly bound together", thus viewing translating as "an attempt at solving an impossible task", and (c) a third attitude is "to acknowledge that although all languages have a claim to individuality, texts should still be translatable out of them".

The present study considers 'translatability' a relative matter. That is, translating can often be achieved to a limited degree. 'Untranslatability' sometimes occurs, especially in the cases related to the formal features of the ST language and the cultural-specific references. There will always be 'bettering' and 'refining' in translation, to use Gasset's terms. The notion on which almost all theorists, practitioners and scholars may agree is that there is no perfect