The Evolution of the Notion of Fidelity in Translation Studies The Shift From the Source Text to the Target Text Recipient

Abstract

The notion of fidelity in literary translation is extremely vague, and makes the translation task very difficult. In literary translation, fidelity means to convey the same meaning and to cause the same effect in the TT recipient using different linguistic signs. Thus, we intend through this paper to shed light on the evolution of the notion of fidelity in the theory of translation. In fact, The translator is considered as a meeting point of two competencies. The first is to receive the text in the source language while the second is to produce a text in the target language. As the translator is a recipient, there must be a correspondance between the meaning understood by the translator and the meaning intended by the author , what is considered by specialists as a first relevance. However, the translator is not an ordinary recipient because the source text is not adressed primarily to him. Actually, a perfect comprehension of the source text by the translator couldn’t happen without appealing to linguistic and non linguistic competencies.