Consideraciones sobre la traducción de textos poéticos y científico-técnicos

Abstract

Some of the reasons that have been put forward to show the untranslatability of poetry are based on the idea that no rules can be set up to establish the equivalence between texts. This idea is grounded on the fact that the text construes its own coherent meaning through a subtle bundle of metaphors, alliterations and phono-semantic correspondences. In this paper we provide support to the specific character of poetic texts in contrast with technical and legal texts. Such specificity lies primarily on the close relationship between the form and the content, which could be held as sacred and unbreakable. However, the translation of scientific or technical texts bear no comparison with that of a poetic texts, as the purpose of the former is mostly informative rather than aesthetic, their main aim being not to seek phono-stylistic correspondences with the source texts, but rather to put across a whole series of data in the simplest possible way. In order to achieve this aim those texts must handle word meanings that are univocous, in sharp contrast with the frequent ambiguities of common speech, since such ambiguities may affect the information provided by the target text.