The impossibility of absolute equivalence

An Overview of Basic Terminology and Course Aims

What is translation?

As a means of interlingual communication, translation is a transfer of meaning across cultures. More specifically, translation is the process and result of creating in a target, or translating, language (TL) (переводящий язык — ПЯ) a text which has approximately the same communicative value as the corresponding text in the source language (SL) (исходный язык — ИЯ).

Translation is always an approximation.

The target text (TT) (текст перевода), or translation, that is created by the translator never perfectly reflects, either in meaning or tone, the original source text (ST) (текст оригинала). The form and content of the original and its translation always differ. This is due to the constraints imposed on the translator by the formal and semantic differences between the source language and the target language. Nevertheless, the users of the target language usually accept a translation as the functional, structural, and semantic equivalent of the original.

The impossibility of absolute equivalence.

Even a very simple translation illustrates the formal and semantic dif­ferences between the original and its translation. Leaving aside considerations of context, the English sentence "The student is reading a book" can be translated as "Студент читает книгу". On a formal, or grammatical level, the Russian sentence is devoid of the meaning of the articles and the present continuous tense. The Russian sentence does not contain any explicit indication that a specific student is reading some unspecified book. Nor does it indicate that the process of reading is most likely taking place at the moment of speaking. However, the Russian sentence carries some grammatical meaning which is absent in the English sentence. The verb "читает" is marked for person, number and conjugation while the noun "книгу" is feminine and is used in the accusative case. On a semantic level, the Russian sentence also contains some information absent from the English original. It is clear from the Russian translation that the student is male and a college or university undergraduate while the English original may refer to a grade or high school student or even a scholar. Some of the information lost or added in the process of translation may be irrelevant for effective communication and some of the information may be supplied or neutralized by context. It is important to under­stand that equivalence achieved in translation is relative.