J. C. CATFORD
John Cunnison Catford (called "Ian" by his students), was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. After his secondary and university studies, he studied phonetics. He taught English abroad (in Greece, in Palestine and in Egypt), including during World War II.
He met his wife, Lotte, while he was living in Jerusalem. Lotte was from Vienna and spoke German. However, she had moved to Palestine and while she was young she learned other languages, such as Hebrew, English and Arabic. This was one source of Catford's knowledge about languages and their phonetics.
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WHO IS HE?
Catford founded the School of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, as well as another department in the same university that undertook the mapping of different English dialects throughout Scotland.
Catford could identify where people were from exclusively through their speech.
ACADEMIC CAREER
His expertise - which included formal phonetics, the aerodynamic and physiological production of speech, phonetic peculiarities in speech, and an astounding ability to reproduce words, and even speeches, backwards – led him to be invited to the University of Michigan.
There, he headed the English Language Institute and the Laboratory of Communicative Sciences (current the Laboratory of Phonetics).
He taught most of the Linguistics subjects in the same university.
THEORY
Translation is Unidirectional
(from source language to a target language)
Catford examined several issues involved in the translation process like extent, meaning, level of languages , phonological and graphological translation, to evolve his theory of translation.
He also stated that the central task of any translation is to find out the target language’ equivalents. A textual equivalence is defined as any target language, text or portion of text which is to be equivalent of a given source language text or portion of text.
WHAT IS TRANSLATION FOR CATFORD?
An operation performed on languages, a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another.
