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?

participate in the creation of such a content not through their direct meaning, but indirectly only, and together with other units they will establish a kind of meaning which may serve as a point of departure or basis for creating a meaning (interpretation) of another type. The 'direct' content, as it were, is pushed to the background. The part of the content which must be preserved in types of translation examined here is termed 'the aim of communication' by the Russian translation scholar Kommissarov (1986:196). What we mean by the notion 'aim of communication' can be explained in what follows. In (1), as can easily be noticed, the text, by means of a figurative idiomatic expression conveys the idea of 'the impossibility of understanding one another': two people standing far away from each other (on the opposite side of the pole) will, firstly, look at things differently, then, secondly, will hardly be concerned with the problems of the other. The translator, however, is not willing to accept this figurative description of the information (it is not "Hungarian" after all), and uses another idiomatic expression, which is perhaps less iconic, but it also provides the necessary effect. Since in translations like this the contextual similarity between the two texts, the SLT and the TLT, is the smallest, this should be regarded as a minimum condition in providing translation equivalence. Of course, this statement is by no means equivalent with the claim that translation equivalence is in conveying the aim of communication only. Minimum condition does not equal the maximum one. Equivalence, as we shall presently see, can of course be based on a greater similarity or closeness between the original and translated texts. 2.2. The second type of equivalence is represented by translations in which the contextual similarity with the original is not based on the similarity of the linguistic devices either: 2) I made it very snappy on the phone (181). Nagyon röviden telefonáltam (153). 3) Quite a few guys came from these very wealthy families... (8) Bőven volt itt jómódú fiú is (9). In these examples the rendering of the majority of the lexical items and syntactic structures into the other language, the TL, is not possible directly (one to one), because direct, or word to word 133