This brief outline does not intend to give full details of the variety of German translational literature. Its aim is to present the most outstanding trends, names and publications. First, the translational terminology is defined and traced back to its origins, based on dichotomies loose/literal translation, translatability/non-translatability, and mainly in German theory of translation also germanization and exotization. M. Luther preferred using vivid language and germanization in his translation of the Bible, but F. Schleiermacher, vice versa, was pessimistic in the question of transcending the spirit of a language. The theory in the second half of the 20th century diverged in various directions, most significant being machine translation and linguistics, seeing language as a system of signs. In eastern Germany there was a strong 'Leipziger Schule', in the Western Germany there were centres of research and teaching of translation Mainz/Germersheim, Heidelberg (which specialized later in functional translatology), Saarbrücken, but also Werner Koller and others, who researched equivalence relations and typology. Wolfram Wilss, a classic German translatologist, focused on the translation as a process. Thematic fields of the research were: linguistic orientation (reflecting mainly scientific and pragmatic texts), literary scholarship orientation (Armin P. Frank in Göttingen and his team), and functional orientation, focusing on the function of the translation and its changeability. In the year 1986 Mary Snell-Hornby came up with a stratification model of translation. Meanwhile, in the eighties the model of inter-cultural communication was being developed (Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer), idea of translation as a cultural phenomenon and the theory of scope (Skopos-Theorie). The idea of dominance of purpose in every translation meant focus on the aim and function of the translated. In German translatology there is discussion going on also about other relevant questions, such as translational text and genre typology, special tasks in artistic and scientific (pragmatic) translation, strategies and didactics of translation. Very up-to-day topic is also a research on the management of translator knowledge (Wissensmanagement).
The subject of the article is the reaction on the voices, repeatedly mentioning the declining sub-standardisation of the quality of translations. The authoress, beware of the fact, that this theme has not been regarded as crucial in the area of the translatological reflection so far, asks through the prism of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity about the factors causing this state. The authoress considers on the one hand the contemporary accelerated and multiplied global communication and on the other hand the complicated methodology of the humanities, and thus the methodology of the translatological studies. The article presents the idea, that the thinking about translation could also integrate the culture of linguistics (J. Dolnik) and literary scholarly reflection (D. Attridge). The same inspirational value for the reflection of translation, or rather artistic translation, is given to the elaboration of the critical, in the meaning evaluative, scientific instruments.
The theoretical thinking of Anton Popovič on translation and conception of the discipline of translation studies was formed between two boundary positions: comparative literature and semiotics. Popovič’s early scholarly works published in the late 1950s focused on Russian-Slovak literary relations and, at the same time, on the more broadly understood Slovak-Slavonic literary relationship in the 19th century. He completed this linguistic and literary scope with the study of translations from English and the analysis of Slovak translations of Shakespeare. In the 1960s, he already formulated the conceptions of literary translation in the period of Slovak romanticism and in post-romantic poetry. In the work of Anton Popovič, comparative literature and history were increasingly moving towards literary theory (Slovak structuralism, formal method, theory of the verse), history of translation, but first of all theoretical questions of translation. This research finally ended in the book Poetika umeleckého prekladu. Proces a text (Poetics of Artistic Translation. Proces and Text) in 1971. The paper concentrates on the first decades in the scholarly work of Anton Popovič and sums up the starting points leading to Popovič’s understanding of translation as a semiotic category.
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