Empathy with the message in translation

Abstract

Translation is not an ethnocentric act of text manipulation, but an authentic and well‐informed presentation of the original message. A hermeneutic approach to translation will focus on translators reflecting on their own knowledge base in order to gain cognitive access to — and show empathy with — the world of the source text. In the receptive phase of translation, the text is understood as part of its culture, discourse‐field and conceptual universe. In the productive phase of translation, rhetorical categories such as semantics, text function, predicative mode, stylistics and shape become relevant.