Theory and practice of translation. History, evolution and specialized differentiations

Unusual, at first sight for a context of economic studies, this work, based on some economic and commercial considerations, aims to examine in depth the translation field, in particular that of the technical/specialized translation.
Actually, international enterprises, while adopting their own marketing policy, must keep into consideration local cultural differences, in order to make their choices winning on different markets. In particular, companies must focus on linguistic differences, which represent an interesting aspect of culture to take into consideration in the communication.
Trade, in fact, is, first of all, an act of communication with the final consumer, and only a “correct” communication will let the enterprise reach the fixed goals. Briefly, in order to sell its own product, the enterprise has to speak the language of the final consumer.
Moreover, this study allows to deepen the knowledge of a foreign language, as French, fact that can have great importance in the market of employment.
The translation analysis will present three levels, each of them examined in a different chapter.
The first chapter (1.) will show the historic-theoretic evolution of translation since the 16th century on, with a particular attention to the 20th century. In the second chapter (2.) I will face the issue of translation methodology, at its turn developed on three levels: as an introduction, in the first part, I will define our field of analysis that is technical translation (2.1); the second part, which represents the main part of the second chapter, will focus on the different phases of the translation process: decoding, comprehension of the meaning and reformulation (2.2); the third part will concentrate on different translation techniques, included in two categories: “traduction directe” and “traduction oblique”, with a particular reference to the most applied techniques (2.3.). In the last chapter, I will concentrate my attention on some specialized fields, closely related to my studies: economics (3.1), advertising (3.2) and law (3.3). These paragraphs will highlight the peculiarities of each one of these fields. In particular, as regards economics, I will highlight morpho-synctactic and lexical differences, as regards advertisement, strategies and corresponding translation techniques applied to names and slogans and, as far as law is concerned, I will underline those characteristics that make it absolutely, an unequalled (if not impossible) translation. Moreover, the study will face other specialized fields (3.4.), such as computer science (3.4.1.), newspapers (3.4.2.) and comics (3.4.3.). At last, I will mention the automatic translation (3.5), a field that, after a moment of great enthusiasm, realizes now the impossibility of reducing the richness and the complexity of mental activity to a pure mechanical act.