Eugene Nida distinguishes two types of equivalence, formal and dynamic, where formal equivalence ‘focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content. In such a translation one is concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, and concept to concept.’ Nida calls this type of translation a ‘gloss translation’, which aims to allow the reader to understand as much of the SL context as possible. Dynamic equivalence is based on the principle of equivalent effect, i.e. that the relationship between receiver and message should aim at being the same as that between the original receivers and the SL message. As an example of this type of equivalence, he quotes J.B.Phillips rendering of Romans 16:16, where the idea of ‘greeting with a holy kiss’is translated as ‘give one another a hearty handshake all round’. With this example of what seems to be a piece of inadequate translation in poor taste, the weakness of Nida's loosely defined types can clearly be seen. The principle of equivalent effect which has enjoyed great popularity in certain cultures at certain times, involves us in areas of speculation and at times can lead to very dubious conclusions. So E.V.Rieu’s deliberate decision to translate Homer into English prose because the significance of the epic form in Ancient Greece could be considered equivalent to the significance of prose in modern Europe, is a case of dynamic equivalence applied to the formal properties of a text which shows that Nida’s categories can actually be in conflict with each other.

It is an established fact in Translation Studies that if a dozen translators tackle the same poem, they will produce a dozen different versions. And yet somewhere in those dozen versions there will be what Popovič calls the ‘invariant core’ of the original poem. This invariant core, he claims, is represented by stable, basic and constant semantic elements in the text, whose existence can be proved by experimental semantic condensation. Transformations, or variants, are those changes which do not modify the core of meaning but influence the expressive form. In short, the invariant can be defined as that which exists in common between all existing translations of a single work. So the invariant is part of a dynamic relationship and should not be confused with speculative arguments about the‘nature’, the ‘spirit’or ‘soul’ of the text; the ‘indefinable quality’that translators are rarely supposed to be able to capture.

In trying to solve the problem of translation equivalence, Neubert postulates that from the point of view of a theory of texts, translation equivalence must be considered a semiotic category, comprising a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic component, following Peirce's categories.16 These components are arranged in a hierarchical relationship, where semantic equivalence takes priority over syntactic equivalence, and pragmatic equivalence conditions and modifies both the other elements. Equivalence overall results from the relation between signs themselves, the relationship between signs and what they stand for, and the relationship between signs, what they stand for and those who use them. So, for example, the shock value of Italian or Spanish blasphemous expressions can only be rendered pragmatically in English by substituting expressions with sexual overtones to produce a comparable shock effect, e.g. porca Madonna—fucking hell.17 Similarly, the interaction between all three components determines the process of selection in the TL, as for example, in the case of letter-writing. The norms governing the writing of letters vary considerably from language to language and from period to period, even within Europe. Hence a woman writing to a friend in 1812 would no more have signed her letters with love or in sisterhood as a contemporary Englishwoman might, any more than an Italian would conclude letters without a series of formal greetings to the recipient of the letter and his relations. In both these cases, the letter-writing formulae and the obscenity, the translator decodes and attempts to encode pragmatically.

The question of defining equivalence is being pursued by two lines of development in Translation Studies. The first, rather predictably, lays an emphasis on the special problems of semantics and on the transfer of semantic content from SL to TL. With the second, which explores the question of equivalence of literary texts, the work of the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguists, together with more recent developments in discourse analysis, have broadened the problem of equivalence in its application to the translation of such texts. James Holmes, for example, feels that the use of the term equivalence is ‘perverse’, since to ask for sameness is to ask too much, while Durišin argues that the translator of a literary text is not concerned with establishing equivalence of natural language but of artistic procedures. And those procedures cannot be considered in isolation, but must be located within the specific cultural—temporal context within which they are utilized.

Let us take as an example, two advertisements in British Sunday newspaper colour supplements, one for Scotch whisky and one for Martini, where each product is being marketed to cater for a particular taste. The whisky market, older and more traditional than the Martini market, is catered to in advertising by an emphasis on the quality of the product, on the discerning taste of the buyer and on the social status the product will confer. Stress is also laid on the naturalness and high quality of the distilling process, on the purity of Scottish water, and on the length of time the product has matured.

The advertisement consists of a written text and a photograph of the product. Martini, on the other hand, is marketed to appeal to a different social group, one that has to be won over to the product which has appeared relatively recently. Accordingly, Martini is marketed for a younger outlook and lays less stress on the question of the quality of the product but much more on the fashionable status that it will confer. The photograph. accompanying the brief written text shows ‘beautiful people’ drinking Martini, members of the international jet set, who inhabit the fantasy world where everyone is supposedly rich and glamorous. These two types of advertisement have become so stereotyped in British culture that they are instantly recognizable and often parodied.

With the advertising of the same two products in an Italian weekly news magazine there is likewise a dual set of images—the one stressing purity, quality, social status; the other stressing glamour, excitement, trendy living and youth. But because Martini is long established and Scotch is a relatively new arrival on the mass market, the images presented with the products are exactly the reverse of the British ones. The same modes, but differently applied, are used in the advertising of these two products in two societies. The products may be the same in both societies, but they have different values. Hence Scotch in the British context may conceivably be defined as the equivalent of Martini in the Italian context, and vice versa, in so far as they are presented through advertising as serving equivalent social functions.

Mukařovský’s view that the literary text has both an autonomous and a communicative character has been taken up by Lotman, who argues that a text is explicit (it is expressed in definite signs), limited (it begins and ends at a given point), and it has structure as a result of internal organization. The signs of the text are in a relation of opposition to the signs and structures outside the text. A translator must therefore bear in mind both its autonomous and its communicative aspects and any theory of equivalence should take both elements into account.

Equivalence in translation, then, should not be approached as a search for sameness, since sameness cannot even exist between two TL versions of the same text, let alone between the SL and the TL version. Popovič’s four types offer a useful starting point and Neubert's three semiotic categories point the way towards an approach that perceives equivalence as a dialectic between the signs and the structures within and surrounding the SL and TL texts.

责任编辑：admin