Equivalence
Table of contents
Dynamic, formal, functional, communicative, connotative, denotative, text-normative, pragmatic, textual, total, approximative, one-to-one, one-to-many, one-to-nil, semantic, content, stylistic, lexicographical… equivalence types galore. Indeed, the question of equivalence is as old as translation practice itself. For Mary Snell-Hornby (1988: 18–19), it was Roman Jakobson's 1959 “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” that “unleashed” the heated debate on equivalence that marked the following decades. For Kevin Windle and Anthony Pym, the “first concepts of equivalence” date back to Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet's 1958 Stylistique Comparée du Français et de l'Anglais (Windle & Pym 2011: 16). Wolfram Wilss, in contrast, goes as far as to claim that equivalence has been in the spotlight of theoretical reflection on translation since ancient times (Wilss 1977: 156).