Translation evaluation seems to be formed years after critical approach to translation. Translation and translation criticism existed many years before translation assessments came to importance McAlester refers to translation evaluation as:" the placing of a value on a translation, i.e. awarding a mark, even if a binary pass/fail one." (McAlester:231) he explains translation criticism: "consisting in stating the appropriateness of a translation ; this also implies a value judgment, which need not however be a quantified one." he further continues to explain translation analysis: "is taken to be a descriptive study of the process of creating a target text out of a source text or of the relationship between the target and source texts without ascribing a value." (ibid: 231) in the end he refers to translation assessment and explains this term is used "to cover all other three procdures" (ibid: 231)
word meaning
Meaning is the kingpin of translation. What is essentially important in translation is meaning. A translator's job during translation is transferring meaning from SL to TL. How is it possible for the translator to do this multidimensional, complicated process while s/he has not realized the meaning of the ST? A translator therefore should be a semanticist. A translator may offer that the number of words in a language is large and that s/he has to allocate a lot of time to realize the meaning of words. But the problem of meaning is somewhat more complicated and more troublesome.
What is the most challenging of all is not the meaning of words in isolation but meaning of words within text. Meaning of single words in relation to other words in a text determines textual meaning of words.' The king pin of translation studies, without understanding what the text to be translated means for L2 users the translator would be hopelessly lost. This is why the translation scholar has to be a semanticist over and above every thing else. But by semanticist we mean a semanticist of text, not just of words, structures and sentences. The key concept for the semanticist of translation is textual meaning.' (Bell 1991. 79)
The translator may begin believing that the major problem is the word; It may be that there are words in the text which are new to the translator and whose meaning s/he does not know. However it soon becomes clear that, although the meaning of words are problematic in themselves, the greater problem is in meaning which derives from relationship of word to word rather than that which relates to the word in isolation. (ibid 83)
There is no one word to one word semantic relation between different languages. A word may have many meanings and in several cases numerous meanings of a word will cause confusion and this will become worse if the words' meaning is studied in collocations, idioms, etc. In the process of translation the meaning of a word shall be recognized then by considering the semantic, syntactic and textual role of the word translation should be taken place.
Ferdinand de Saussure proposed that there is no mutual correspondence between a word and a thing, to ascribe significance becomes much more complicated. The meaning in each situation appears as an effect of the underlying structure of signs. These signs themselves do not have a fixed significance, the significance exists only in the individual. "Sign is only what it represents for someone."
Moreover words tend to have meanings which seem not to be found in any dictionary. According to relevance theory the cognitive process of achieving cognitive effects takes place in the following way:
'The perceptual input systems respond automatically to stimuli which are very likely to have cognitive effects, quickly converting them into the sort of representational formats that are appropriate inputs to the conceptual inferential systems; these systems then integrate them, as efficiently as possible, with some accessible subset of existing representations to achieve as many cognitive effects as possible.' Sperber & Wilson (1986) and Sperber & Wilson (1995, 261-66). We find meaning by using imagination, reason, and trial and error. In the case of Time is like a river. The meaning may be that both life and a river go on endlessly.
However it seems Nida's approach to word meaning is more specific; he classifies word meaning into two categories: 1. referential meaning 2. connotative meaning. In chapter four of his book he proposes that most words have got more than one meaning and a translator should differentiate the meaning of words in two ways: syntactic and semotactic marking. "In many cases, the particular meaning of a word that is intended is clearly specified by the grammatical constructions in which it occurs; this is what we will refer as syntactic marking. In other cases, the specific meaning of a word which is intended is marked by the interaction of that term with the meaning of other terms in its environment. That is, the fact that term A is found in the context of term B means that only sense X of term A will fit. This condition by the meanings of surrounding terms we will call semotactic marking." (Nida, 56)
"As Russian formalists believe, in literature nothing is created new but recreated after many recreations." (Blanc, 1991: 10) [my translation] Nothing is written new when the new thing was written in the past. It seems as if Gilgamesh has affected many epics that were written after it. The well-known epic of Hercules is deemed to overlap the epic of Gilgamesh in many cases: "When he was eighteen he killed the Cithaeron lion". (Eliade, 1992: 100) [my translation] Killing of lions was a trait for every hero in many epics. Gilgamesh as the first epic ever known is identified to have exerted its effect in this regard. The following parts are of the epic of Gilgamesh (Monshizadeh, 1383: 81):
"If you are Gilgamesh, who killed the Guardian,
Who destroyed Humbaba who lived in the Cedar Forest,
Who slew lions in the mountain passes,
Who grappled with the Bull that came down from heaven, and
Killed him" [my translation]