Sociolinguistics as a crucial factor in translating and interpreting

"In writing some year ago about translating as an «ethnolinguistic endeavor» I may have been one of the first to speak about the broad cultural factors of interlingual communications, but I failed at that time to realize the full implications of sociolinguistics as a crucial factors in all translating and interpreting. I also mistakenly described translating to the Linguistic Society of America as a «comparative linguistic undertaking», entirely too narrow a view. It is true that in all translating and interpreting the source and target languages must be implicity or explicitly compared, but all such interlingual communication extend far beyon the mechanics of linguistic similarities and contrasts. In order to appreciate fully the role of sociolinguistics in translating and interpreting, it is essential to recognize two basic realities".