Translation is the replacement of an original text with another text.
As such translation has been regarded as a kind of inferior substitute for the real thing, and it has been likened to the back of a carpet, or a kiss through a handkerchief. But it can also be seen more positively as providing access to ideas and experiences that, although represented at second hand, would otherwise be closed off in an unknown language.
So although translation can be seen as a kind of limitation, it also has the opposite function of overcoming the limitations that particular languages impose on their speakers. Instead of comparing it to such reduced activities as hygienic kissing or laying down a carpet bottom – side up, translation can also be compared to building bridges or extending horizons, metaphors which point to the positive, enabling function of translation. In this sense translation can be seen as a service: it service a need human beings apparently have to transcend the world to which their own particular languages confine them. Translations mediate between languages, societies, and literatures, and it is through translations mediate between languages, societies, and literatures, and it is through translation that linguistic and cultural barriers may be overcome.
Translation, of its nature, provides access to something, some message, that already exists, and it always therefore a secondary communication. Normally, a communicative event happens just once. With translation, however, communicative events are reduplicated for people originally prevented from participating in, or appreciating, the original event.
Kind of translation
Translation is the process of replacing an original text, known as the source text, with a substitute one, known as the target text.
The process is usually an interlingual translation in that the message in the source language text is rendered as target text in a different language, and it is in this sense that we have referred to translation so far. But sometimes the term is also used to refer to an intralingual translation, a process whereby a text in one variety of the language is reworded into another. This would be the casa where the message of a text in, say, Old English is reworked into a text in Modern English, or a text in one dialect or style is reworked into anther. And we can also speak of translation, when the replacement involves not another language but another, non-linguistic, means of expression, in other worlds a different semiotic system. In this sense we can say for instance that a poem is translation into a dance or picture, a novel into an opera or a film. Such transmutations are examples of intersemiotic translation.
What all these three processes have in common is that they involve the replacement of one expression of a message or unit of meaningful content by another in a different form.