3.

0 Introduction

Watch the introductory video on the companion website.

In order to avoid the age-old opposition between literal and free translation (see Chapter 2),
theoreticians in the 1950s and 1960s began to attempt more system- atic analyses. The
new debate revolved around certain key linguistic issues. The most prominent were those
of ‘meaning’ and ‘equivalence’, discussed in Roman Jakobson’s 1959 paper (see section
3.1). Over the following twenty years many further attempts were made to define the nature
of equivalence. In this chapter we shall look at several major works of the time: Eugene
Nida’s seminal concepts of formal and dynamic equivalence and the principle of
equivalent effect (section 3.2), Peter Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation
(section 3.3), and Werner Koller’s Korrespondenz and Äquivalenz (section 3.4).

3.1 Roman Jakobson: the nature of linguistic meaning and equivalence

In Chapter 1 we saw how, in his paper ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’ (1959/2012),
structuralist Roman Jakobson describes three kinds of translation: intralingual, interlingual
and intersemiotic, with interlingual referring to translation between two different written
sign systems. Jakobson goes on to examine key issues of this type of translation, notably
linguistic meaning and equivalence.

Jakobson follows the theory of language proposed by the famous Swiss linguist Saussure
(1857–1913). Saussure distinguished between the linguistic

EQUIVALENCE AND EQUIVALENT EFFECT 59

60 INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES

system (langue) and specific individual utterances (parole). Central to his theory of langue,
he differentiated between the ‘signifier’ (the spoken and written signal) and the ‘signified’
(the concept), which together create the linguistic ‘sign’. Thus, in English the word cheese is
the acoustic signifier which ‘denotes’ the concept ‘food made of pressed curds’ (the
signified). Crucially, the sign is arbitrary or unmotivated (Saussure 1916/1983: 67–9).
Instead of cheese, the signifier could easily have been bread, soup, thingummyjig or any
other word. Jakobson also stresses that it is possible to understand what is signified by a
word even if we have never seen or experienced the concept or thing in real life. Examples
he gives are ambrosia and nectar, words which modern readers will have read in Greek
myths even if they have never come across the substances in real life; this contrasts with
cheese, which they almost certainly have encountered first-hand in some form.
Jakobson then moves on to consider the thorny problem of equivalence in meaning
between words in different languages, part of Saussure’s parole. He points out (1959/2012:
127) that ‘there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code-units’. Thus, the Russian syr
is not identical to the English cheese (or, for that matter, the Spanish queso, the German
Käse, the Korean chijeu, etc.) since the Russian ‘code-unit’ does not include the concept of
soft white curd cheese known in English as cottage cheese. In Russian, that would be
tvarog and not syr. This general principle of interlinguistic difference between terms and
semantic fields importantly also has to do with a basic issue of language and translation.
On the one hand, linguistic universalism considers that, although languages may differ in
the way they convey meaning and in the surface realizations of that meaning, there is a
(more or less) shared way of thinking and experiencing the world. On the one hand,
linguistic relativity or determinism in its strongest form claims that differences in languages
shape different conceptualizations of the world. This is the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
that had its roots in the behaviourism of the 1920s and in the anthropological study of the
native American Hopi language, which, according to Whorf (1956), had no words or
grammatical categories to indicate time. Another claim that is often made is that Eskimos
have more words for snow because they perceive or conceive of it differently. This claim,
and indeed linguistic determinism itself, is firmly rejected, amongst others, by Pinker (1994:
57–65; 2007: 124–51), who points out that the vocabulary of a language simply reflects
what speakers need for everyday life. The absence of a word in a language does not mean
that a concept cannot be perceived – someone from a hot climate can be shown slush and
snow and can notice the difference.

Full linguistic relativity would mean that translation was impossible, but of course
translation does occur in all sorts of different contexts and language pairs. In Jakobson’s
description (ibid.), interlingual translation involves ‘substitut[ing] messages in one
language not for separate code-units but for entire messages in some other language’.
Thus, a translation of cottage cheese would not be the TT unit for cottage plus the unit for
cheese; the message cottage cheese would be consid- ered and translated as a whole. For
the message to be ‘equivalent’ in ST and TT, the code-units will necessarily be different
since they belong to two different sign systems (languages) which partition reality
differently (the cheese/syr example above). In Jakobson’s discussion, the problem of
meaning and equivalence focuses on differences in the structure and terminology of
languages rather than on any inability of one language to render a message that has been
written or uttered in another verbal language. Thus, Russian can still express the full
semantic meaning of cheese even if it breaks it down into two separate concepts.1 The
question of trans- latability then becomes one of degree and adequacy (see Hermans
1999: 301).

For Jakobson (ibid.: 129), cross-linguistic differences, which underlie the concept of
equivalence, centre around obligatory grammatical and lexical forms: ‘Languages differ
essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey’. Examples of
differences are easy to find.