The Importance Of Unnaturalness In Translation

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It is generally said that translation plays an essential role in humankind’s knowledge perception. The international understanding, socio-cultural awareness, communicative activities and implementation of technologies are enhanced via translation. Its role is even more pivotal in the 21st century when nations around the world have come together in tremendous vigour to address global challenges and promote socio-economic development. Hence, this is a potential market as well as a huge challenge for translators, interpreters and students of translation. Nevertheless, at university level, the study of translation has long been criticized for not being proportional to reality so far. In fact, many students of translation do not meet the requirements …show more content…

It does not seriously ruin the general meaning of the text. Nonetheless, to some extent, it changes the writer’s intention, disappoints readers for not meeting that set of requirements. As a whole, unnaturalness in translation occurs in terms of the linguistic aspect and the cultural grounds in particular. In other words, translators use words, expressions, grammatical structures in a clumsy way. Moreover, translated texts may be criticized for using unfamiliar cultural concepts, which seem to be so foreign to target language (Vietnamese) readers. For instance, according to Catchword glossary, denotative component or denotation is the intrinsic, literal meaning of a word, excluding its overtones and shades of meaning while connotative component or connotation is a word’s extrinsic, figurative meaning, which includes its overtones and shades of meaning. Noticeably, most of English majors remember the denotation of a word than keeping in mind all of its connotations. Consequently, the inexperienced translators have a tendency to choose the best Vietnamese equivalent of what he has known so far, regardless if it is suitable in the context or not. In addition, the serious causes of unnatural translation are due to lack of vocabulary that affects the flow of a translated

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