Translation -- Art or Science?

One of the most interesting examples generated by the debate over the philosophy of the North American Translation Workshop is an anecdote that chronicles the practice of an experiment of Harvard students, all of whom had to translate a passage to contextually render its meaning to individuals of their own historical place in time. It is noted that this practice, of "actual translation" or enacted translation "opened up fixed ways of seeing" these received documents of their particular culture. (15) In other words even translation of the familiar is not a literal process, where a set of words takes upon the meaning of another set of words, in a language other than the original document and other than the language of the writer. Translation is a holistic interaction of language, culture, and the individual translator's artistic sensibility.

Thus, the philosophy of the North American Translation...
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