Equivalence as a Historical Paradigm: Word for Word and Sense for Sense

Although the term “equivalence” was introduced by Jakobson (1959), ideas about equivalence had existed before then. A year earlier, Forster (1958: 11) used the word

“symbol” to refer to “the unit of utterance which is to be converted into the other language”

(Forster 1958: 11), in other words, the unit of equivalence. He identifies three units of utterance: individual word, phrase or sentence, and the whole text (Forster 1958: 11).

Forster (1958) observes that the first type is the preferred option in the translation of sacred texts, including the Bible, while the second option is applied mainly to non-sacred texts. In the third option, the words and phrases that compose it are subordinated to the whole text. This option is generally used in the translation of genres like lyric poetry and short stories. One could add that the third option foreshadowed Katharina Reiss’ (1971) text-linguistic approach to translation research.

Meanwhile, as early as the 4^th century AD, the idea of equivalence and the unit for identifying and describing it had bothered translators. This is seen in the dilemma of whether to translate word for word or sense for sense. Jerome ([395 AD] 2004: 23)¹⁹, for instance, declares that “except for the case of Sacred Scriptures, where the very order of the

19 Jerome wrote this letter in defense of his translation of a letter sent by Pope Epiphanus to Bishop John of Jerusalem. The letter was much talked about among the clergy that Eusebius of Cremona, who could not speak Greek, requested that Jerome translate the letter into Latin for his (Eusebius’) personal use. The said letter got into the hands of Jerome’s detractors who accused him of not translating word for word.

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words is a mystery – I render not word for word, but sense for sense” to avoid producing a translation that sounds absurd in the target language. He justifies his decision in these words:

It is difficult, when following the lines of another, not to overshoot somewhere and arduous, when something is well put in another language, to preserve this same beauty in translation. To a degree signification is one with the very property of a word: I do not have a comparable word in my language with which to express it, and in seeking to satisfy the meaning, I take a long way around to convey barely the space of a few words. Joined to this difficulty are the twists of hyperbaton, the differences in grammatical case, the variety of rhetorical figures and, finally, what I might call the peculiar native character of the language: if I translate word by word, it sounds absurd; if out of necessity I alter something in the order or diction, I will seem to have abandoned the task of a translator. (Jerome [395] 2004: 24) In the excerpt, Jerome ([395]2004) lists the challenges he faces because of the peculiar lexical, semantic, grammatical, stylistic and pragmatic features of the source and target languages. Hence, rather than translate with individual words as the unit of translation, he argues for translating the sense of the text instead. Despite these reasons for a sense for sense translation, Jerome maintains that he would not apply the method in the translation of Sacred Scriptures because “the very order of the words is a mystery” (Jerome [395]

2004: 23). In other words, not maintaining the exact order of the words in the target text has the potential of distorting the message or impinging on its sacredness. It is, however, doubtful whether Jerome indeed maintains this word for word translation in his translation of the Vulgate²⁰, for Comfort (2000:105) suggests otherwise, i.e., that Jerome did sense for sense translation in parts of the Vulgate.

The position that sense for sense translation is not good for translating Scriptures was, however, overtly challenged by Martin Luther in his translation of the Bible into German.

20 The Vulgate is said to be Jerome’s translation of the Bible from the Hebrew and Greek into Latin. It is called Vulgate “because it was in the language of the vulgus, the common people of Rome” (Gabel and Wheeler 1986:

226)

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Nonetheless, Luther was criticized by some bishops for his translation method. In his defence, Luther insisted that his translation was meant for the receiving culture and not the culture of the source language. So, a word for word translation would not have made sense to his audience, as he explained in this excerpt:

What they can’t see is that it²¹ fits the meaning of the text, and if you want to translate it into strong and clear German, you’ve got to put it in there. You see, I wanted to speak German, not Latin or Greek, since German was the language I was translating into. (Luther [1530] 2002: 86)

For his audience to get the sense of the text, he as translator must present it in the current, natural language and not bend it to reflect the source language in his bid to retain the words of the source language, or to avoid adding extra information to the source text. To get the right idiom, Luther insists that one must

go out and ask the mother in her house, the children in the street, the ordinary man at the market. Watch their mouths move when [they] talk, and translate that way. Then they’ll understand you and realize that you’re speaking German to them. (Luther [1530] 2002: 86, emphasis in original) Nevertheless, Luther does not insist on sense for sense translation in all instances. He maintains that he and his assistants “studied them [the texts of the Scriptures] very carefully, so that when a lot seemed to be riding on a passage, I stuck to the letter and didn’t deviate from it quite so freely”, and that he would rather “do violence to the German language than to stray from the word” (Luther [1530] 2002: 88). The idea here is that he first understands the message of the source text, and then transfers that message into the form of the target language. Maintaining the syntactic pattern of the source language in the translation only becomes necessary when not doing so would change the meaning of the text.

21 Luther’s letter is a response to his critics who oppose his inserting the German word allein “alone” in his translation of Romans 3: 28, whereby the word is not in the Latin version. The pronoun “it” in the quote refers to the inserted word allein

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The implication of Luther’s strategy is that it shifted attention from the source text and source culture to the target language and target culture. He de-emphasizes the place of the source text in the translation and emphasizes the place of the target language in the translation. This laid the foundation for later theorizations on translation that resulted in the so-called “dethronement” of the source text as seen in Vermeer’s ([1989] 2004) Skopostheorie, and the gradual erosion of the concept of equivalence as highlighted above.

It is ironic that such a shift was introduced by Bible translators, considering that the translators normally believe the Bible to be God’s word and so are very sensitive and cautious not to change the content.

So, even though the term “equivalence” is not overtly used by Jerome ([395] 2004) and Luther ([1530] 2002), or by other translation scholars prior to Jakobson (1959, c.f. Nicolas Perrot D’Ablancourt [1640] 2004 and John Dryden [1680] 2004), the dilemma of whether to translate the word or the sense of the text in question is a search for equivalence. It is a search for the unit of translation that would enable the translator to adequately convey the message of the source text. The problem was where to locate the value to be conveyed, on the individual words (word for word) or on a group of words that front an idea (sense for sense).

Very importantly, although Jerome and Luther may not be translation scholars per se since they had their professions as clergymen and translation was what they did in passing, their reflections on translations, both given as responses to critics of their translations, were illuminating and formed the foundation on which future translation scholars would build.