Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Péter Ortutay: How to evaluate translation?

1. But it was just that we were too much on the opposite side of the pole (19). Csakhogy más nyelven beszélünk (21). The relation between the original and this type of translation is characterized by: a) a complete deviation of the vocabulary and grammatical structures used by the translator from those that we have in the SLT; b) the fact that on the basis of the vocabulary and grammatical structures of the two texts no explanation can be given to the semantic and syntactic transformations used by the translator to achieve equivalence; c) the impossibility of discovering real or direct logical bonds between the original and translation on the basis of which one would be able to claim that "we are speaking of the same thing"; d) the smallest contextual similarity between SLT and TLT. Seemingly in case of this type of equivalence the TLT speaks about something else; it is not the same that we have in the original SLT. Basically the above mentioned features illustrate the contextual relations of this first equivalence type 'negatively

1: it is very easy to see that the linguistic units which make the original mean what it means are not present in the translation. At the same time it is obvious that there must be a certain contextual similarity between the original and its translation because if there was none, we would have to make the claim that this translation is not equivalent to the original, consequently the translation is not a translation, and as such it cannot be the subject of translation studies. Moreover, the common features in the content of the two different texts must be, for some reasons, more important than any other factor because their preservation alone can provide translation equivalence. If these types of translation are compared with the original, then it can perhaps justly be said that they convey not the 'direct' content of the lexical and grammatical units of the original text, but the content which can be 'generated' from them and which is present implicitly, and can be derived from the whole utterance only, which is treated by the translator as a meaningful whole and one unit. Linguistic units 132