Malinowski's influence is still discernible today in the computer-based processing of texts. His concept of a 'coefficient of weirdness', referring to strange language which becomes less strange in its context of use, and linking the user of language and the things s/he is trying to influence or connect with, has been adopted and adapted to shape statistical procedures for identifying specialist terms semi-automatically, originally for translation purposes. The basis of this is not any magical properties which specialist terms may exhibit, but rather their distributional characteristics compared with the distribution of content words in general-language texts, which are lexically less dense (cf. Ahmad & Rogers, 2001).

As one of the first 20th-century linguists to show a concern with the importance of translation, in his 1956 paper Firth (1968a: 86) recognises four different types of translation. The first type he calls 'creative translation', intended primarily as literature in the language into which it is rendered by the translator. The second type of translation to which Firth refers is 'official translation', the kind of language transfer used in documents and treaties in so-called 'controlled' or 'restricted' languages, and most closely related to what today we would call specialist translation, in which terminological studies of special domains play an important part.

The third type of translation selected by Firth for special attention is translation as used by linguists engaged in the description of a particular language, and the fourth, to which we return below, is 'mechanical translation'. As an example of the third type, we can cite Firth's description of an Indian novelist writing in English making repeated references to Urdu and its pronominal system and terms of personal address, for which there are no equivalents in English. In this case, a contrastive analysis involving the principles of translation may help to illustrate the lack of equivalence between the different pronominal systems in the two languages. Firth also discusses the problem of carrying grammatical structures across what he calls the 'bridge' of translation, reflecting the contrastive method employed by the Prague linguists who arrived at important insights into the differences in information structure between European languages. This important text-based characteristic can, in turn, be related to different formal characteristics of the languages in contrast. While the non-finite construction your having done that will spoil your chances is prevalent in English, in translation into other European languages, Firth (1968a: 92) points out that it is likely to require a separate clause with a verb in the finite form. In cases of this type, that is, of structural difference, he feels that linguistics, in providing this information, would be able to make a contribution to translation. In fact, one of the earliest English-language attempts to map out a systematic approach to the study of translation - Catford’s (1965: 1) study ? explicitly acknowledges his debt to Halliday, and in turn, Firth: 'The general linguistic theory made use of in this book is essentially that developed at the University of Edinburgh, in particular by M.A.K. Halliday and influenced to a large extent by the work of the late J.R. Firth'. While Catford has been in later years much criticised for what has generally been described as an approach which reduces translation to a linguistic decoding/encoding exercise, interestingly, he espouses a contextual view of language 'as related to the human social situation in which it operates' (Catford, 1965: 1), echoing Firth's concern with 'context of situation' and the functional orientation of Halliday's model of grammar. His notion of 'shifts' in particular can be usefully applied to the description of translation solutions from a formal point of view, a perspective which may still be pedagogically useful and still has relevance for certain aspects of professional translation.

For example, we could still imagine at least two further contexts of application for Firth's observation on clause correspondence. Firstly, it would be a construction to avoid in the drafting of documents for translation into many other languages, such as in the European Union, although from a stylistic point of view it is the absence of variation that constitutes one of the reasons for the blandness of such international documents, contributing to what has come to be known as 'Euro-English' (cf. Wagner, 2005). Secondly, for similar reasons of translatability, the type of English-specific clause contraction described above would be a good candidate for elimination in the pre-editing stage of machine translation, which brings us to Firth's fourth and last type of translation, namely 'mechanical translation'. As an example of this type, he cites the work pioneered by Dr Andrew Booth who, by the end of 1952, had produced an electronic stored programme computer in full operation at the Birkbeck College Computation Library, University of London. In this context, Firth also makes tentative reference to the ease with which set phrases and cliche´smay be handled by machine translation. The path to the present-day use of computers in translation ? particularly in Computer-Assisted Translation with its stored 'translation memory', that is, adatabase of pre-translated phrases and even sentences ? is not difficult to detect, as repetitive formulations lend themselves most easily to this kind of treatment. While the increased power of modern-day computers speeds processing and facilitates the storage of large amounts of data in memory, the use of computer programs to 'understand' text through rule-based systems is still very limited (cf. Quah, 2006 for a summary); this goes some way to explaining why automatic translation systems, for instance, are highly constrained in their use, in relation either to subject field and genre, or to purposes for which the output is fit (for example, information only). Statistically or lexically based systems may prove more fruitful, as foreshadowed in the early work on corpora by Sinclair and Halliday suggesting that 'grammar' is highly localised and lexically based (cf.'lexicogrammar').

Throughout the discussion in ‘Linguistics and Translation’, the thinking that was to inspire Michael Halliday and John Sinclair is not difficult to detect. In words that were to be echoed by Halliday in discussions of his approach to a theory of grammar, Firth (1968a: 90, emphasis added)writes: 'the whole of our linguistic behaviour is best understood if it is seen as a network of relations between people, things and events, showing structures and systems just as we notice in all our experience'. Equally discernible in Firth's discussion is the semantic notion of 'collocability' (as discussed in Sinclair, 1966: 417).

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