Equivalents of simple and complex sentences

Situational level
The source and the target texts can describe the same situation from different angles with different words and structures: I meant no harm. – Простите, я нечаянно.(the situation in the bus); Who shall I say is calling? – Кто его спрашивает?(the situation on the phone); Wet paint. – Осторожно: окрашено!(the situation in the park).
There are no parallel lexical or structural units in these counterparts. Therefore, their content is different, the word semes are different, grammar relations between the sentence components are different. Nevertheless, the utterances correspond to each other in their communicative functions and in the similarity of the described situation. Because of this identity, V. Komissarov calls this type of equivalence «identification of the situation»
Frequently one and the same situation is referred to in different languages. This is particularly true of set phrases: Fragile. – Осторожно: стекло! Beware of the dog! – Осторожно, злая собака! Push/Pull – От себя/К себе.
Some situations cannot be translated: for example, Приятного аппетита! has no corresponding phrase in English. In place of this lacuna, English people use the French idiomBon appetit!. There is also no equivalent for the RussianС легким паром.
Semantic paraphrase
Dealing with the transformation of meaning implies a semantic variation, or semantic paraphrase of the source language utterance. For example, the sentence in the original can be translated as if the situation were viewed from a different angle: He was not unlike his mother. – Он довольно похож на свою мать. He is my son. – Я - мать этого мальчика. Or some words of the source language sentence are paraphrased in translation: After her illness, she became as skinny as a toothpick. – После болезни она стала худая, как щепка. Or the target sentence can verbalize the idea in more detail than the source language sentence: Сегодня Борису не до шуток. – Boris is in no mood for joking today.
On this level of equivalence, the source and the target sentences have the same function (aim), they describe the same situation, and their meanings are approximately identical, whereas their grammar structures are different. As is known, the meaning of each word consists of semes, the smallest sense component. The set of semes in the source and target sentences is the same, but they are grouped differently and, therefore, are verbalized in different ways and do not have the same syntactic structure.
V. Komissarov states that on this level the two sentences match because they have approximately the same method of the situation description.