Interdependent Relationship Between Contrastive Analysis and Translation
Interdependent Relationship Between Contrastive Analysis and Translation
Interdependent Relationship
Between Contrastive Analysis
And Translation
Dr. Samir Salih Mehdi
Department of Translation - College of Arts
Al-Mustansiriyah University
Abstract
Contrastive studies play an important role in the field of language
teaching and translation. Since the former is beyond the study of this paper,
the present study focuses on the relationship between contrastive analysis
(henceforth CA) and translation, i.e., how CA can serve translation and
how translation can serve CA.
Therefore, the aim of this paper is to find the areas in which CA can
take benefit from translation and vice versa because this use is of a great
help for both fields.
The area whereby translation can make use of CA is the bilingual
grammars and bilingual dictionaries which can help translators to perform
the process of translation.
On the other hand, translation can serve CA by providing
contrastivists with the closest translation equivalences that meet their needs
in the two areas they are interested with, viz, comparison and
contrastiveness, i.e., arriving at similarities or constants and differences
between two or more languages respectively.
1. CA: Definitions and Aims
CA is a branch of linguistics "concerned with the comparison of two
or more languages in order to determine both the differences and
similarities between them" (Fisiac et al, 1978 as in Fisiak, 1981:1). The
writers, in this definition, refer to the similarities and differences which CA
is concerned with.
James (1980:3), on the other hand, maintains that CA deals with the
differences rather than similarities between languages by pointing out that
"CA is a linguistic enterprise aimed at producing inverted (i.e., contrastive
not comparative) two-valued typologies…and founded on the assumption