Vital Components Of Source Text Lost In Translation: A Review Paper

Translation is a kind of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural process. Yinhua (2011) claimed that translation as a kind of communication, its main rationale is to create equivalence between the source and target text. Always the equivalence finding in its full form is not established and is not possible. In the process of moving the ideas of the source text (ST) to the target text (TT), something lost, changed (Gandinn, 2009), and deformed (Berman, 2000). “Almost every time that someone compares the translation of a text with its original, there are always some aspects of the original that are inevitably left behind, even when the translator has done an outstanding job” (Gandinn, 2009, p. 77). The missing items in the process of translation are termed as loss (Nida, 1975). Nida and Taber (1982) claimed that “the basic principle of translation means that no translation in a receptor language can be the exact equivalent of the model in the source language” (p. 67). That is to say, all types of translation involve loss, addition and skewing of information. Dickins, Higgins and Hervey (2015) stated that “but it is more realistic, and more productive, to start by admitting that, because source language (SL) and target language (TL) are fundamentally different, the transfer from ST to TT inevitably entails difference, that is, loss” (p. 20). Newmark (1981) put it forward that inevitably there will be loss in the translation, since the passage contains a large number of cultural and non-equivalent words. Further, he suggested that when loss of meaning, sound-effect, metaphor or pragmatic effect in one part of a sentence occur, is compensated in another part, or in a contiguous sentence. The losses and changes which afflict the ST building blocks may result from different cultures, different linguistic structures, translators different decisions and untranslatability of the those elements.