The problem with all forms of communication including translation is that breakdowns might occur in the course of reception of the message. Even in same language communication, there is no guarantee that the receiver decodes the sender’s message in the way s/he had intended. This is true of translation also; in fact, chances of miscommunication are higher as the sender’s and receiver’s codes are different and also because it is mediated through a third figure of the translator. This is why there is the assumption that there is “loss” in the translation process, that complete equivalence is impossible.

The cultural differences between sender and receiver also complicate matters. Susan Bassnett gives an example of how complicated the translation of even ordinary prosaic words can become. The ordinary affirmative ‘yes’ in English can become ‘ja’ in German, ‘si’ in Italian and ‘si’ or ‘oui’ in French. The choice of words in French becomes a problem. While ‘oui’ is the common term used, ‘si’ is used especially when there is disagreement of some sorts. There is also the culturally specific manner of repeating the affirmative in all the three languages: ja ja or si si. But repeating the affirmative in English (yes, yes) is very uncharacteristic of the English people as a whole. The good translator has to be aware of all of these minute cultural differences even before starting off on the process of translating even a simple word like ‘yes’ (Bassnett, 16-17).

The complicated process that goes into the translation of ‘yes’ into French, according to the Nida model is this:
        a) The sender’s message (code) is ‘yes’
        b) This is analysed (decoded) by the receiver
        c) The context in which the message is sent is taken into account and then recoded
        d) The recoded message of ‘oui’ or ‘si’

What happens here, according to Roman Jakobson, is interlingual transposition, or substitution of one language with another language. Another theorist A. Ludskanov terms it ‘semiotic transformation’: “Semiotic transformations are the replacements of the signs encoding a message by signs of another code, preserving (so far as possible in the face of entropy) invariant information with respect to a given system of reference” (qtd in Bassnett 18).  The invariant information in the above given situation would be that of the affirmative ‘yes’; so, according to Ludskanov, the sign ‘yes’ is replaced by ‘oui’ or ‘si’ depending on the system of reference which is the social context of France.