THE HISTORY OF ESTABLISHMENT OF TRANSLATION STUDIES AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE

Abstract

The article presents a historical overview of researches that resulted in the emergence of translation studies that has by now incorporated the subject matter of a wide range of disciplines. The first studies of translation dealt with religious and belles-lettres texts. Naturally, the literary theory of translation was the first to be developed by scholars. 1930s marked the start of researches in the field of translating special texts that were not related to religion or fiction. The next direction of translation studies was the linguistic one and was based on equivalence theory. In the course of time it became clear that the linguistic approach has its own limitations. The next paradigm some linguists, like Yves Gambier and Anthony Pym single out is the Internet format due to the digital environment in which translation is performed. We do not agree with this point of view as far as the new technical conditions do not justify a new approach to be distinguished. It seems logical to single out the functionalist approach as the successor of the linguistic one. Translation is regarded as an integral part of a communicative situation; therefore all the parameters of the latter are taken into account in the process of rendering a source text into a target text by means of the instruments of the target language. In 1980s linguists started researching the effect of culture on translation and vice versa. They found the influence so significant that they suggested singling out new approaches: transcreation, transadaptation, and transculturation. However, they fail to recognize that what these new terms refer to has long been known in translation studies as pragmatic or cultural adaptation. At the beginning of the XXI century researchers elaborated an integrative (or interdisciplinary) approach to translation and distinguished three possible views on its character.