建制性的翻译研究历经50年的发展,主要采取还原主义的研究进路,从不同向度揭示了翻译的分殊之理,呈现典型的界面研究特征,产生了各自一体的知识结构和话语形式。反观翻译研究的历史境脉和当下状态,多元跨学科视角持续介入,但始终缺乏实质性的对话与联通基础,客观上已造成诸多知识孤岛,因而尚不能对复杂多变的翻译现象做出系统解释,也无法对现实世界的翻译活动产生整体影响。鉴于此,探寻具有普遍意义的整合概念,联结迥然各异的研究视角,建立内外连贯一致的概念框架,理应是翻译研究亟待解决的一个元理论问题。本文将翻译研究纳入知识论阐释空间,分析融合不同翻译观念的学术前提和逻辑理路,对照翻译的本体事实、逻辑事实和话语事实,解蔽翻译蕴含的跨语言知识转移本性,揭示知识翻译学之于汇通翻译观念、解释翻译现象、改善翻译生活的潜在价值,以此推动本研究方向的深度探索,提升翻译研究的学术品质,促进翻译知识的自治性建构。

Knowledge structuring is of prime importance to the internal building of any discipline in its own right and has a close bearing on its scholarly status of legitimacy and autonomy. Following this line of thought, the present article briefly re-examines the major problems with the conventional reductionist approaches to translation, including the marginalization of the central object, a lack of consilience in TS knowledge and the desirability of overall explanatory power, and for that matter, it attempts to identify a highly competitive bridge concept that is most likely to link together the linguistic, socio-cultural, cognitive, communicative and technological views of translation. To that end, it first incorporates TS into the interpretive space of epistemological analysis, then explores the potential relationship between the binary features of human cognition and translation per se, and consequently comes up with the ensuing set of claims: cognitive asymmetry serves as a necessary condition for the extensive engagement of translation in the ever-evolving world of humanity, knowledge (experiential and rational) as an end result of cognition plays a central role in any sphere of translational activity, and translation, in the ultimate analysis, is sustained by the notion of cross-linguistic knowledge transfer. The key notion taken into full account, a knowledge-centered ontological structure is mapped out to highlight translation as a core mechanism for the cross-linguistic reproduction and circulation of all forms of knowledge, which is assumed to make recourse to both re-conceptualization and re-contextualization processes in real-world scenarios of intercultural communication. The newly proposed minimalist framework of translation is expected to provide a viable point of access for generating a theoretically unified and practically relevant paradigm of Translation Studies.