According to roman jakobson, interlingua translation involves substituting
messages in one language not for separate code-units but for entire messages in
some other language. The role of a translator, therefore, is to read the
original carefully, codify accurately and transmit the message meaningfully in
the target language.
Can we say that translation involves two
equivalent messages in two different codes?
Roman jakobson, in his ‘on linguisticsaspects of translation’, talks about the problem of equivalence in meaning
between words in different languages. It was also pointed that there was
ordinarily no fully equivalence between code-units.
It is however also impossible to find an
exact equivalent word or expression in the target language. The reason is that
our language is based on the socio-cultural practices. Let us say, if one is
trying to translate the term ‘cheese’ in Russian language one finds that it is
very difficult to directly find an expression equivalent to the English word.
It is not a problem that is faced only by
the translators, but it is also faced by the indian english writers writing
about India. In one instance mulk raj anand had to translate the term ‘namak
haram’ into english and he coined the expression ‘spoiler of the salt’.
