valence, in which an attempt is made to translate using the words that correspond as exactly as possible in the two languages, allowing, of course, for the grammatical differences but without paying a great deal of attention to context. A second extreme is paraphrasing, sometimes called making a free or loose translation.problem with the first approach is that literal translations can be awkward. For example, it might be more "exact" to translate the Russian "отримувати" as "to obtain," but most of the time "to get" will do just as well and sounds less stuffy. An obvious problem with paraphrasing is that the translator may not accurately convey the intent of the speaker, especially where precision of language is required. So many of the best translations take a middle ground, sometimes known as dynamic equivalence - trying to convey the thoughts and intent behind the original as close as possible, veering from the literal where needed to do so.different translator very well might have used a different word, and there very well could be words that would work better. But translation is often more art than science, and that can involve judgment and creativity at least as much as it does knowing the "right" words. p align="justify">
Measuring success in translation As the goal of translation is to establish a relationship of equivalence between the source and the target texts-that is to say, both texts communicate the same message-while taking into account the various constraints placed on the translator, a successful translation can be judged by two criteria:
1. Faithfulness, also called fidelity, that is the extent to which the translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to it or subtracting from it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning; and
2. Transparency, that is the extent to which the translation appears to a native
speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.
A translation meeting the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation meeting the second criterion is said to be an "idiomatic translation". criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, for example.
The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds" wrong, and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machine translation systems, often result in patent nonsense.
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