Linguistic Perspective

Translation involves two languages and it is no surprise that linguists should be interested in the process. They study the SL and TL structures to understand translation better. In fact, translation was for a long time thought to be the natural territory of linguists.Nida acknowledges the contributions of linguists like Sapir, Bloomfield and Jakobson especially in the field of the study of the functions of language. Chomsky's transformational generative grammar was a path-breaker of sorts, helping translation theorists like Nida to find their own feet. Chomsky helped to make translation studies more precise. As Nida puts it, “its [Chomskyan] Boolean rewrite rules and seemingly precise formulas for embedding” made it valuable for computer-aided machine translation also. (“Theories of Translation”, http://www.scribd.com/doc/49330223/Theories-of-E-Nida). Philosophers interested in questions of language, like Wittgenstein, Willard Quine and Paul Ricoeur, have contributed indirectly to the growth and evolution of this perspective.They focused their attention on the language of philosophical discussions, as part of their endeavour to make philosophy more accessible to the people. This encouraged interest in the ordinary use of language and helped to avoid a naive belief in the reliability of natural language. This, according to Nida, had an indirect impact on linguistics and translation.