Abstract:

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.

Key words: cross-linguistic knowledge transfer, experiential knowledge, rational knowledge, re-conceptualization, re-contextualization, Epistemic Translation Studies