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Translation is the activity that renders knowledge, whether literary or scientific, a mobile form of culture. Such mobility, in turn, is what gives human understanding a deep and lasting influence beyond the boundaries of its natural setting. Discussions related to the theory, practice, and history of translation have tried to pay attention on literary and holy texts. Yet translation services have been a central determinant in the history of scientific knowledge as well, that’s why a crucial element in its intellectual history, and continues to be so these days.
Despite such importance, science and general translation has been a theme of only sporadic scholarly study. The so-named “invisibility” of the literary translator, whose labor and worth tend to be ignored in favor of the original author, doubly applies to the scientific translator, who has been neglected even by the sphere of language study, with a few serious exclusions. These exceptions for example, concerning the transmission of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic knowledge discover an interesting truth: no less than with literary works, translators of science and medicine have often imposed new elements upon the texts they have rendered, enriching and expanding them by adaptation to new cultural contexts. Just as the world has benefited greatly from the translation of scientific and medical techniques into lots of lingvas, so has this knowledge been improved by translation in turn.

As translation theory developed, however, the consensus view expanded to include cultural, interpretive, interpersonal, cognitive, and even technical factors as well. With the advent of the functionalist approach in translation theory, the function or purpose of translated texts as communicative tools moved into the spot of attention, where it remains these days.

Although this piece of text lacks space to even outline the great variety of factors that have been investigated until now, it is fair to point out that translation studies as a spot has moved radically in the direction of embracing an integrative approach to translation that sees itself as a cross-subject with virtually no aspect of the communicative process being outside its scope of reference. Maybe one of the most overriding shifts in translation theory has been from the static to the dynamic: from seeing the translation process as one of establishing equivalence between original and translated texts to seeing it instead as one of cognitive, social, and communicative action. Results of think-aloud studies on the mental processes involved in translation, stopping primarily on the interplay between intuitions and strategies, suggest that mental process research can be a fruitful source of knowledge about how experts and novices translate differently.
This study may really make necessary contributions to translation pedagogy in the future, for example in specifying a role for strategy and creativity training.
Partly as a result of the equivalence-to-action shift in translation theory, there is an rising awareness that translation experts must be widely engaged in the growth of individually adapted skills for dealing with the myriad unforeseeable sets of factors that they will definitely face in their professional work. Language like an ocean cannot be ever measured!