Equivalence

From here, Translation Studies moves on to the other fundamental concept of equivalence. Equivalence or similarity with the SL text in meaning and structure is what most translations aim to do. The notion of untranslatability would negate the concept of equivalence, but in the period starting with the 1960s we find theorists who believe in the ability of translations to convey a message that is more or less accurate. If we believe in equivalence, naturally we have to accept certain universal standards in literature and culture that can be understood irrespective of differences. There were two forms of equivalence: formal and pragmatic. Formal equivalence meant that the translation would retain its cultural specialities or in other words its ‘foreignness’; pragmatic equivalence is more conscious of the reader in the TL and appears almost like a text in that language. If formal equivalence advertised the fact that the work was a translation, pragmatic equivalence tried to hide this. In a way, as Venuti points out, this is but another way of debating the ‘word for word’ or ‘sense for sense’ debate of the ancients (122).   

Basically the focus was on the functional aspect of translation or whether the translation conveys the SL text to the reader. There was a growing need for translations that were functional in nature like that of official documents, news reports and operation manuals, where equivalence was important. Literary translations were a different matter altogether. Theorists like Itamar Evan-Zohar argued that literature is a ‘polysystem’ of interrelated forms where equivalence is a relative term. A translation was a system in its own right and had a unique relationship  with the original. The concept of polysystem was a significant departure in the history of translation theory. This group led by Evan-Zohar and Gideon Toury, is known as the Tel Aviv group  in Translation Studies, and has been influential in evaluating translations against their cultural contexts.

It is in this period that Translation Studies emerges as a discipline in its own right, as distinct from linguistics and literature. J. C. Catford and George Steiner are other major names in this field. Steiner’s After Babel (1975) was a prominent work. Steiner was opposed to the linguistics-oriented translation theories and went back to the hermeneutic concept of language. He believed that translation was interpretation and need not always communicate meaning. In fact he felt that “great translation must carry with it the most precise sense possible of the resistant, of the barriers intact at the heart of understanding” (qtd in Venuti 124). Catford, however, believed in certain universal elements that could surmount the cultural differences between languages.

Susan Bassnett’s Translation Studies published in 1980 marks a defining moment in the area of translation. This small book delimited the area marked out for translation studies and was a comprehensive account of the theories and theorists in the field. More importantly, it proved the right of translation studies to exist as a discipline in its own capacity.  Like Itamar Even-Zohar, theorists believed that translated literature had an independent existence apart from the SL text and also from the TL literature. Functionalism is at the heart of many of the theories of this period and this could be attributed to the large number of translations that had to be undertaken regularly in the case of ‘informative literature’ like news reports or operation manuals that were fundamentally informative in nature.