1. Introduction Equivalence and equivalent effect

3.1 Exploration: Interlinguistic difference

Look again at Jakobson’s comment that ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.’ Find examples from your own languages that illustrate this. How are these dealt with in translation?

The questions of meaning, equivalence and translatability became a constant theme of translation studies in the 1960s and were tackled by a new ‘scientific’ approach followed by one of the most important figures in translation studies, the American Eugene Nida (1914–2011).