Sunday, 11 September 2016

In 1968, Otto Kade, a scholar from Leipzig, proposed that equivalence - at the word level - came in four modes. The first one is One-to-one:

One start-language item corresponds to one target-language item: English lion corresponds to German Löaut;we and this relation may be considered "total equivalence" for as long as neither culture has intimately different relations with lions. The surer examples are technical terms like the names of chemical elements.

This is what most people assume translation to be: one source word to one target word, allowing for the differences between inflexive and non-inflexive verbs. But it is often not available - then what do you do?