ABSTRACT
This chapter wants to look in some detail at one functional-typological approach, the systemic functional one, which has placed particular emphasis on the relationship between form and function, and which has proved to be most useful for the study of translation as demonstrated by. While Blum-Kulka and Toury have largely relied on case studies and impressionistic qualitative work, involving informed intuition and richly contextualized pen and paper analysis, all the other researchers mentioned above have relied on, and copiously praised the methodological advantages of, corpus-based qualitative and quantitative work. Translation is undeniably an act that operates on language. Depending on one's preference of formal or functional-typological approaches to explaining linguistic phenomena, one can state that universals proposed in these approaches must also apply to translation. Obviously, however, translation is not identical with language as such, let alone with the two linguistic systems involved in translation. Translation is no more and no less than a practical activity.
