Iv - University of Salford Institutional Repository

THE TRANSLATED TEXT
Dr Rameses Lutfi, a professor at the Faculty of Science, the
Jordanian University, translated into Arabic Steven B Oppenheimer's
book "Introduction to Embryonic Development". The Arabic translation
of the text under discussion covers pages 527-532. Dr Lutfi's
translation was published by the Jordanian Arabic Language Academy in
1983.
A scientist and an Arab, Dr Lutfi extended a great service to the
native speakers of Arabic, especially university science students
interested in embryonic development. He adopted the 'formal
correspondence' procedure in his translation. Formal correspondence
means that the translator makes his own decisions and options in his
search for lexical items in the target langauge which formally
correspond to their respective counterparts in the source language.
Scientific translation is purely idiomatic. It focuses on the
communication of the surface structure of the SL message without
attempting to probe into the deep structure of the lexical items that
constitute the original message. Accurate, precise, and idiomatic, the
langauge of science does not yield heterogeneous interpretations. But
besides being idiomatic, scientific translation should assume a
normalcy and a naturalness not foreign to the ears or sensibilities of
the TL recipients. Close fidelity to the formal structure of the SL
message without sabotaging the meaning content, of course, is a basic
principle all translators of scientific texts should strictly observe.
19 4