Home > Positioning > Subjects > Translation theory > Equivalence and its limits

Equivalence and Its Limits

What equivalence between two texts could mean is the field’s second conflict, and the linguists and philosophers of the mid-twentieth century are the ones who tried to say. Their answers gave translation theory its standard divisions and its working vocabulary, and in the same years Quine set a philosophical limit on what any such answer could claim.

Roman Jakobson’s “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959) gave the field its standard division into three kinds: intralingual translation, or rewording within one language; interlingual translation, or translation proper; and intersemiotic translation, between sign systems, as from a novel to a film. Translation proper, on his account, involves two equivalent messages in two different codes, and the problem of the field is equivalence in difference: languages differ not in what they can convey but in what they must, since grammar forces choices (gender, number, tense, aspect) that another language may leave open. Where grammatical categories carry the meaning, as in poetry, translation proper gives way to what he called creative transposition.

W. V. O. Quine’s Word and Object (1960) set a limit to the whole enterprise from the philosophy of language. A field linguist hearing a native utter gavagai as a rabbit runs past can never determine from behaviour alone whether it means rabbit, undetached rabbit part, or rabbit stage; and more radically, whole manuals of translation can be built that fit all the evidence and yet are incompatible with one another. This is the indeterminacy of translation: there is no fact of the matter about the one correct translation, only manuals that work. Translators have mostly gone on as before, and the thesis is contested: Chomsky replied in 1969, in the volume Words and Objections, that its behaviourist premises about language learning were the weak point, and Donald Davidson recast radical translation as radical interpretation, in which meanings and beliefs are attributed together and indeterminacy becomes a feature of interpretation rather than a defect of it. Contested or not, the thesis is the standing philosophical challenge to any claim of equivalence.

Eugene Nida, working from Bible translation, made equivalence the operative concept of a would-be science of translating. Toward a Science of Translating (1964) and, with Charles Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation (1969) distinguished formal equivalence, which matches form and content as closely as the languages allow, from dynamic equivalence, which aims at the closest natural equivalent and at an equivalence of effect, so that the new readers stand to the message as the first readers did. He later renamed the second functional equivalence. Nida’s programme was the point of departure for the linguistic translation theories of the 1960s and 1970s, and the target of most of what followed: the receiver-orientation was charged with erasing the foreign text, and equivalence of effect with presupposing a measure of effect nobody had.

The same years produced the field’s working taxonomies. Vinay and Darbelnet’s Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais (1958) set out seven procedures, from the direct (borrowing, calque, literal translation) to the oblique (transposition, modulation, equivalence, adaptation), and the list is still used to train translators. J. C. Catford’s A Linguistic Theory of Translation (1965) named the departures from formal correspondence shifts, of level (grammar to lexis and back) and of category (structure, class, unit, intra-system), and gave the field a vocabulary for describing what a translation had done without yet asking whether it should have.