A conference interpreter herself, Seleskovitch[2] challenged the view prevailing at the time that translation was no more than a linguistic activity, one language being merely transcoded into another.
Polysemy, ambiguity, so often mentioned in Translation Studies, do not appear in oral or written discourse unless consciously engineered by the author.
ITT always insisted that, although most words are polysemic in language systems, they lose their polysemy in a given context; the same is true of ambiguity in discourse as long as readers bring to the text the necessary relevant extra-linguistic knowledge.
At the same time, any ambiguity is ruled out when relevant knowledge combines with contextualized word meanings, resulting in an ad hoc sense.
The ITT found support for this postulate in neuropsychology, which suggests that language and thought are located in different areas in the brain.
ITT based research, however, showed that translation is always a combination of word correspondences and sense equivalences.
Explicit wording seldom makes sense unless supplemented by an implicit part consciously left unsaid by authors or speakers but understood by readers or listeners.
It gives oral and written translators a large measure of freedom and creativity in their reformulation of authors’ or speakers’ intended meanings.
Explaining the process of oral and written translation in simple terms, ITT appeals to practitioners and is particularly well suited as a pedagogical tool.
[14] Since its inception, ITT is the basis of instruction at ESIT, which has trained innumerable interpreters and translators who go on to apply its principles in their everyday work.
ITT also attracts doctoral students from all over the world, whose research demonstrate its validity for all language pairs and all types of texts.
ITT’s main objective is to study translation, but by doing so, it sheds light on the workings of language and communication.
However, none of them invalidates the ITT model that, over time, has extended to literary and poetical texts,[16] to sign language interpretation and is open to further development.
ISRAEL, F., “ Traduction littéraire et théorie du sens ”, in LEDERER, M. (ed) : Etudes traductologiques, Paris : Minard Lettres Modernes, 1990 :29-44.
ISRAEL, F., « Principes pour une pédagogie raisonnée de la traduction : le modèle interprétatif », Folia Translatologica, Vol.
LAVAULT E., Fonctions de la traduction en didactique des langues, Paris : Didier Erudition, 1985, 2° éd.
LEDERER, M., La traduction simultanée, expérience et théorie, Paris; Minard Lettres Modernes, 1981.
SALAMA-CARR M., La traduction à l’époque abbasside -L'école de Hunayn Ibn Ishaq, Paris : Didier Erudition, 1990.
SELESKOVITCH, D., Langage, langues et mémoire, Introduction de Jean Monnet, Paris : Minard Lettres Modernes, 1975.
SELESKOVITCH, D. and LEDERER, M., A Systematic Approach to Teaching Interpretation, RID, Washington DC, (first published in French as Pédagogie raisonnée de l’interprétation, 1989.