Historical Overview of Equivalence in Translation Studies

Abstract

The concept of equivalence has been of specific concern to many Western translation scholars. It was an essential feature of translation theories in the 1960s and 1970s, which sited it within the framework of structural linguistics. This paper will primarily discuss the notion of equivalence in a comprehensive way according to translation scholars since the 1950s. The first part of this paper will review the earlier debate on meaning and equivalence as one of the key linguistics issues in the 1950s. The general view of equivalence at that time attempted to explain how the source text (henceforth ST) and target text (henceforth TT) share some kind of similarity. This is followed by further efforts to explain this term according to the perspectives and approaches of several theorists. The second part focuses on contemporary translation scholars investigating equivalence in broader terms. Contemporary theorists have shifted from looking at differences in each type of equivalence and the effect of meaning to another perspective where equivalence is seen as a relationship between two texts.