Communicational approach

The communicational theory of translation was suggested by O.Kade and is based on the notions of communication and thesaurus. So, it is worthwhile to define the principal terms first.

Communication may be defined as an act of sending and receiving some information, which is called a message.

When we speak about some information we mean only spoken text. Naturally enough when communicating we inform others about something we know. That is in order to formulate a message, we use our system of interrelated data, which is called a thesaurus.

Language thesaurus is a system of our knowledge about the language which we use to formulate a message, whereas subject thesaurus is a system of our knowledge about the content of the message.

Thus, in order to communicate, the message sender formulates the mental content of his or her message using subject thesaurus, encodes it using the verbal forms of language thesaurus, and conveys it to the message recipient, who decodes the message also using language thesaurus and interprets the message using subject thesaurus as well. This is a simple description of monolingual communication.

It is very important to understand that the thesauruses of message sender and recipient may be different to a greater or lesser degree, and that is why we sometimes do not understand each other even when we think we are speaking one and the same language.

So, in regular communication there are two actors, sender and recipient, and each of them uses two thesauruses.

In special bilingual communication (i.e. translation), we have three actors: sender, recipient, and intermediary (translator). The translator has two language thesauruses (source and target one) and perform two functions: decodes the source message and encodes the target one to be received by the recipient.

O.Kade’s communicational theory of translation describes the process of translation as an act of special bilingual communication in which the translator acts as a special communication intermediary, making it possible to understand a message sent in a different language.

One may note that the communicational approach pays special attention to those aspects of translation which concern the act of communication and a process of translation as such remains unspecified. But it’s very important to remember about it while translating.

Let the original message expressed by a native speaker of English (encoded using the English language as a code to convey the mental content of the message) be:

Several new schools appeared in the area.

Let us assume then that the message sender, being a fisherman and using relevant subject thesaurus, by schools meant large number of fish swimming together rather than institutions for educating children, and the correct translation then had to be:

У районі з’явились нові косяки риби

whereas the translator who presumably did not have relevant information in his subject thesaurus translated schools as institutions for educating children:

У районі з’явились нові школи,

which naturally lead to misunderstanding (miscommunication).

According to communicational approach translation is a message sent by a translator to a particular user and the adequacy of translation depends on similarity of their background information rather than only on linguistic correctness.

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