ABSTRACT
Toury's equivalence postulate, as well as his broad definition of a translation as whatever is regarded as a translation in the target culture ( 1980a; 1 995) , allow him to broaden the scope of translation studies to investigate previously marginalized phenomena. Thus equivalence based translation theories can escape the cen sure of other schools of thought, where it is widely held that equivalence implies a prescrip tive, non-inclusive approach to translation. There are, however, objections to what is viewed as too wide a notion of equivalence: Snell-Homby ( 1988: 2 1 ) suggests that the notion of equivalence in the English-speaking world has become so vague as to be useless; while Pym ( 1992a, 1 995) , Neubert ( 1994) and Koller ( 1995) would like to see a more restric tive view of equivalence reinstated, not least because a more constrained view of equivalence allows translation to be distinguished from non-translation. Pym ( 1995 : 1 66) quotes Stecconi (forthcoming) to support this point: 'Equivalence is crucial to translation because it is the unique intertextual relation that only translations, among allconceivable text types, are expected to show' .
