The Importance Of Communicative Translation

Translation has been an inseparable element of any communication process, since it's the vehicle which transfers cultures, civilizations and sciences between different languages and diverse societies. It was conceived by different scholars from different perspectives, but they were unanimous on that translation is a matter of attitude and a translator should have a potential to take decisions, aiming to produce an idiomatic, natural text. Translator's decisions occur along a spectrum of methods to follow that runs from word-to-word translation (faithful translation) and ends on Communicative translation (beautiful translation), with six other methods in between. This spectrum of methods aroused a conflict in translators' minds: whether to

In this method, concertation is poured exclusively on the source text, where individual words of the source text are matched to their equivalent individual words in the target text. In other words, Target text should mirror source text exactly and accurately, disregarding any differences in context or special use of words. The overriding characteristic of this method is that word order, structure, and grammar of the source are preserved and rendered to the target text exactly as they are, and cultural words are translated literary. For example, the English sentence (Ali wanted to take a juice) would be translated into Arabic as (علي أراد أن يأخذ عصيرا) instead of (أراد علي أن يتناول / يشرب عصيرا). This method is mainly used in language teaching to understand the mechanics of the source language, and as a pre-translating process to analyze and understand a difficult source text. However, it is the least accurate and ,as a result, the least commonly used method; it is extremely unrecommended due to the contingent risks resulting from it. In his book, Translation as Problem and Solution, Ghazala (2008) stated several reasons that support this view. First, this method, as previously mentioned, devotes full and exclusive attention to the source language and conversely neglects the target language entirely considering it a mirror of the source language. Second, it overlooks any grammatical differences between the source language and the target language though differences may be stark between the two languages. For instance, English is an IndoEuropean, West Germanic language, whereas Arabic is Semitic. Third, it preserves the grammar and word order of the original text (Newmark, 1988: 69).