Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

The Empirical aspects
Translation is not a replacement of a source text by a target text. It is essentially a 
communicative act employed across time and language. It therefore involves the same 
problems and parameters that characterize an act of communication between any two 
persons, between the writer and his or her audience, complicated by the additional hurdle of 

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the interlinguistic barrier and the intervention of a third writer and reader. The latter, the 
translator, as it were, faces both ways, directing his or her gaze toward both the world of the 
ST and that of the TT which involves yet another audience or set of readers.
Some of them will be relating to the TT as an original text, others to it as a translated 
one; yet others will be responding simultaneously to both the ST and TT especially if they are 
both printed alongside or interlineally. To characterize TE it will therefore be necessary to 
articulate all of the features of the total text situation processed consciously by the translator 
which subsequently condition the finished products in a variety of ways. 
Functional Equivalence 
Seeking an equivalent or approximate correspondence for all these variables may 
seem a formidable or even impossible task. When the cultural gap is wide some translation 
theorists have indeed maintained that the task is impossible. The answer to this assertion is 
twofold. First, TE is not identify but must be regarded as approximate correspondence 
involving resourceful manipulation by the translator to compensate for the language 
differences. 
Second, not all these variable are relevant in every situation. For instance, spatial 
equivalence is relevant in a newspaper headline situation, phonic matching in film dubbing, 
in poetic alliteration, or where a songwriter is translating to fit a musical score.
Equivalence is a matter in each case of weighing up priorities, sometimes sacrificing 
the natural syntactic ordering of the TL in the interests of reproducing a particular poetic 
effect that the translator feels to be functional at the time. 
The determination of what is functional is a decision taken either deliberately or 
intuitively by the translator every time he or she translates. This is the case even when the 
identical ST is being retranslated by the same or a different translator; accounting for the fact 
that one ST will produce may ‘equivalent’ TTS, particularly if they are meant for different 
audiences, at different periods of history. 
To determine functional equivalence the translator must adopt, as in any 
communicative situation, a top-down approach, considering first the general nature of the 
whole discourse from both the ST and TT angles and then working down to matching the 
lowest level of linguistic units. TE will usually be regarded as most complete and faithful 
where there is ‘matching at the lowest possible level’ (Haas 1970: 18-19).