Monday, 12 September 2016

Otto Kade's second mode of equivalence is One-to-several (or several-to-one):

An item in one lamguage corresponds to several in the other language. There are two ways to understand this. For example, the English word key corresponds to llave, tecla and clave in Spanish. In context, however, the translator will usually know what kind of key is being referred to and will have few real choices to make. A differentexample would be the Spanich term competencia (domain of activity exclusive to a governmental or administrative organisation), which could by rendered by "responsibility", "mandate", "domain", "competence" and so on. Unless a one-to-one equivalent has been established in a certain situation the translator will have to choose between the alternatives. The result will be "choice-based equivalence".

We see a lot of this in Bible translation, though many are not aware of it and some would be horrified. The translator gets to make a choice? Heaven forfend!