ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how translation scholars have viewed and explained the phenomenon of translation. As a system for producing texts, rhetoric traditionally comprised a number of different phases, such as inventio, in which ideas suitable for a certain purpose were discovered in a text producer's mind, dispositio, whereby these ideas were ordered to fit the text producers' intention, or elocutio, involving the realization of ordered thoughts with appropriate linguistic expressions. It is necessary to keep this tradition in mind, since it links with many later developments in linguistics and stylistics, speech act theory and linguistic pragmatics that have strongly influenced translation studies later on. Post-structuralist scholars have often been inspired by Walter Benjamin's ideas about translation in his famous essay 'Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers' (The Task of the Translator), arguing that it is from its important function of providing an 'afterlife', that a translation gains its true value.
