Equivalence in Translation

Mona Baker’s approach to equivalence

Introduction

Mona baker published a book called In other Words: A course book on translation, in 1992, where she discuss the term equivalence and distinguishes four types of it. These four types had never been separated before her did, that is to say that she assigned new adjectives to the concept of equivalence. The different categories are the following:

Ø      Equivalence at word level and above word level

Ø      Grammatical equivalence

Ø      Textual equivalence

Ø      Pragmatic equivalence

Equivalence at word level and above word level

1)      At word level:

According to her, this kind of equivalence is the first thing or element that a translator has to considerate before translating. That is because when a translator starts working with the source text, he or she looks at the words as single units and try to find a direct equivalent to these words.

    2) Above word level:

About this kind of equivalence Baker states “ No book was ever turned from a language into another, without imparting something of its native idiom; this is the most mischievous and comprehensive innovation; single words may enter by thousands, and the fabric of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once..”

It goes without saying that words rarely occur on their own; words always occur in the company of other words. But they are not strung together at random in any language; there are always restrictions on the way they can be combined to convey meaning. Restrictions which admit no exceptions, and particularly those which apply to classes of words rather than individual words, are usually written down in the form of rules.

Grammatical equivalence   

This type of equivalence has to do with the different grammatical categories of different languages. As it is explained above that there are rules or restrictions to words there are also grammatical rules that across different languages that may pose some problems in terms of finding a direct structure to translate a SL structure into a TL one. Furthermore, Baker explains that by making changes on the structures when you translate into the TL following its rules and grammatical structure the translator may change the way that the message or the information is carried across.

Textual equivalence

This type of equivalence refers to equivalence between both source and target texts referring to information and cohesion.

Cohesion is the network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which provides links between various parts of the text.

A translator cannot always follow the thematic organization of the original. If at all possible, he or she makes an effort to present the target text from a perspective similar to that of the source text. But certain features of syntactic structure such as restrictions on word order, the principle of end-weight, and the natural phraseology of the target language often mean that the thematic organization of the source text has to be abandoned. What matters is that the target text has some thematic organization of its own, that is reads naturally and smoothly, does not distort the information structure of the original, and that it preserves, where possible, any special emphasis signaled by marked structures in the original and maintains the coherent point of view as the text in its own right.

Pragmatic equivalence

Pragmatics is the study of language in use. It is the study of meaning, not as generated by the linguistic system but as conveyed and manipulated by participants in a communicative situation.

This equivalence, therefore, refers to the implicatures and strategies of avoidance during the translation process. The translator has to interpret the implied meanings to carry the ST message across.

In this case there two notions that are important: coherence and cohesion.

Coherence vs Cohesion

Like cohesion, coherence is a network of relations which organize and create a text: cohesion is the network of surface relations which links words and expressions to other words and expressions in a text, and coherence is the network of conceptual relations which underlie the surface text. Both concern the way stretches of language are connected to each other. In this case of cohesion, stretches of language are connected to each other by virtue of lexical and grammatical dependencies. In the case of coherence, they are connected by virtue of conceptual or meaning dependencies as perceived by language users.

Hoey sums up the difference between cohesion and coherence as follows:

We will assume that cohesion is a property of the text and that coherence is a facet of the reader’s evaluation of the text. In other words, cohesion is objective, capable in principle of automatic recognition, while coherence is subjective and judgments concerning it may vary from reader to reader.

Conclusion

These four types of equivalence have to be taken into consideration by any translator when translating. First of all there is the equivalence at word or above word level, that has to do with the direct equivalent of the word or the rules that he or she has to take into account.

Second the differences in grammar across different languages. That is important since a structure may change the way the information is expressed.

At last but not least, the textual equivalence and pragmatic equivalence.  The first one is important in terms of information and cohesion, and it depends on the audience, the purpose of the text and type of text. The second one has to do with the meanings implied in the translation. This one involves the coherence and cohesion of both ST and TT.

Trabajo realizado por las alumnas Pereyra Iraola Magdalena y Petz Karen para Traducción básica en el año 2011.