The Concept of Equivalence in the Age of Translation Technology
Equivalence in translation has been seen in the last four decades as theoretically untenable. Nevertheless, a major part of the activity of terminology management inevitably involves a theory of equivalence in meaning.
If recent theoretical developments in Translation Studies have gradually moved away from the concept of equivalence, or at least of narrow equivalence, the ideas of alignment, parity and sameness which underlie all contemporary translation technology seem to go against the grain of these theoretical evolutions. Even though translation theory has paid relatively little attention to the complexities involving high-end technology, in particular the management of terminological data, the activity plays a vital role in professional translation practice today globally, relying heavily, as it does, in the very notion of equivalence which translation theory has a contention for. In this way, the two are intrinsically linked.
Crucially, theorists and practitioners have now begun to discuss other ways of conceiving what distinguishes one kind of approach to equivalence from another, ideas which are not necessarily linguistic but strategic, cultural and pragmatic. A case in point is the work of the scholar Anthony Pym, for whom equivalences, regardless of their nature does not take place between locales, they are created by ‘internationalization’ or translation of one kind or another. The scholar goes on to say that equivalences ‘are necessary fictions without necessary correlative beyond the communication situation’. Equivalences might be fictions in their very essence but nevertheless true and realistic in the context of globalised neoliberal communication practices. Pym defends the equivalence paradigm by analysing two competing conceptualisations: ‘directional’ as opposed to ‘natural’ equivalence. If the latter is presumed to occur between languages or cultures prior to the translating act, which in Pym’s view is a misconception based on the historical circumstances of national vernacular languages and print culture, the former stresses the ‘strange way that a relation of equivalence can depend on directionality’, and it is valuable because it allows the translator to choose between several translation strategies. Both models analysed by Pym should be considered in all their complexity.
The notion of equivalence, with its ‘vaguely mathematical heritage’ has been understood primarily in connection to ideas of accuracy, correspondence, fidelity, correctness and identity. In this context, equivalence is concerned with the ways in which the translation is connected to the target text. John C. Catford suggests that ‘reproductions’ of an ‘original’ text in a second, third or multiple languages are analogous to notions of mathematics. The implicit idea in Catford’s theory is that translation is a symmetrical and reversible process, a question of substitution (replacement) of each word or item in the source language by its most adequate equivalent in the target language. This notion of equivalence has generated a lot of controversy amongst theorists and practitioners, not least because the very word ‘equivalence’ is rather polysemic and a number of different meanings coexist under its rubric. Mary Snell-Hornby considers the concept of equivalence as presenting ‘an illusion of symmetry between languages’, and Pym complements this assertion by stating that equivalence creates a ‘presumption of interpretative resemblance’ and, in this sense, it is always ‘presumed’. Nevertheless, the semiotic situation involving equivalence relations in terminology databases today seems to imply something rather different. Terminologists, unlike theorists, are generally bound to perform an enforced, fixed form of pressuring terms into natural equivalence, and to some degree they exemplify what Pym conceives as ‘conceptual geometries of natural equivalence’. In such an environment, which encompasses the localization industry as well as machine translation and translation memory technology, equivalence makes a pragmatic return to corroborate the artificial imposition of controlled patterns of meaning on a global scale. This is one way in which equivalence and the terminology industry have become inevitably, if forcefully, reconciled.
- A section of this article have appeared previoulsy in AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume 2, Number 2, May 2018
Works cited:
Catford, J.C.. 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics, (London: Oxford University Press)
Pym, Anthony. 2010. Exploring Translation Theories (London: Routledge)
Snell-Hornby, Mary (1988). Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach (Amsterdam: John Benjamins)
