Translation is an art that not only restitutes meaning. First and foremost, the new text will not necessarily be more refined or elegant than the original. To be honest, the meaning must not be governing as the text itself should not be destroyed. The central idea in the process of translation is the restitution of its meaning. However, the translator must use all possible means to remain as close as possible to conveying a certain meaning. It will not be wrong to claim that the translator must be faithful to the source text or in other words to its central idea. When receiving the foreign the translator must be very careful and work extremely hard in order not to naturalize, denature or assimilate it. The target language can become strongly perverted due to bad work by the translator according to French Translation Services ideologist Berman. According to Berman, who is a distinguished translator himself, language must be transformed in a way that the translator can adapt it to his or her made up world. This world can be a setting, place or event in conflict with the objective reality, which ranges from the intentional deferral of disbelief of fictional universes to the alternating realities that come as a result.
Having in mind that translating is a kind of interpreting, and every translator is challenged to firstly read, perceive and make sense of the text. During this process, the written text is translated into the reader’s mental language. Often when the reader has to deal with a text in his own native tongue he/she applies this technique. Russian to English Translation employee and psychologist Wygotsky has demonstrated in his study of infants that thought undergoes a process of transformation into an internal code that yields to an internal dialogue inside the mind. Reading a text involves a series of interpretants – a view shared by another distinguished scholar – Pierce. Every sign stands for an object – be it internal or external. An interpretant is a psychical sign, which is governed by and connected to the experience of the person via his/her words, and logically, via the concepts these words stand for.
More to the point, as argued by Bruno Osimo – founder of the Italian Translator company, it is wrong to assume that the language we think in is a natural code. Quite the opposite, it is a particular language that can be termed as a multi-code language. The result can be that the image that forms in the mind of the reader during the process of reading may not correspond to the one formed inside the writer’s mind. When translating from one language into another, the problem becomes even more complex because one must find a graphic sign in another language. For example, if a book by an Australian author describes a tea tree along the bed of a river, the image in the mind of an Australian reader (Melaleuca/ paperbark tree) will be totally different from the image created in the mind of a British reader (the shrub or low tree whose dried leaves form the tea of trade). Were the translator not familiar with this difference when he or she moves on to the second stage of the translation process, which involves the translator’s encoding his or her mental language into the code of the translated text, then most probably the translation would turn out to be incorrect because something will be lost.