Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: The objective of this paper was to establish the applicability of Communicative and Semantic Approaches to finding cultural equivalences in translation of texts in the medical field. There are a number of contending approaches around the practice of translation. Translation of medical documents from English to Kiswahili face many challenges. The translatability of a text is dependent on a number of issues including linguistic and cultural features. Even though we recognize that there has been a shift over the years from a philological approach to a more pragmatic approach in translation, we do appreciate that a well translated text is the one that reflects as much as possible the Source Text (ST henceforth). There are several approaches to translation. In trying to understand whether translation is linguistic form slavery where a translator enslaves him/herself to the target text (TT henceforth) or a cultural labyrinth where a translator finds him/herself in cultural confusion, this study employed a translation approach proposed by Newmark (1981). We used secondary data which includes translation excerpts from content translated by ‘Translators Without Borders ’ (TWB) which is an organization whose primary mandate is to translate medical texts from English to Standard Kiswahili. The analyzed data indicate that the communicative and the semantic approaches are not stand alone, but rather, are complimentary approaches in finding cultural equivalents in the translation of medical texts. Medical translations were viewed
Authors: John Paul Warambo, Erick Omondi Odero
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1534930969