ABSTRACT
Conceptualization is likely to become one of the key concepts in future thinking about translation, so much so, in fact, that it may even succeed in giving “equivalence” a new lease of life, albeit in a negative sense: namely that it is impossible for the author and the translator to conceptualize a situation in equivalent terms, especially in the case of situations remote in time (the dubbing of knights in the Middle Ages, for instance) or space (present-day wedding ceremonies in Polynesia). Not only do individuals (authors and translators) not conceptualize the same situation in the same way, languages tend not to do so either. Or rather, languages tend to select different features of a situation for “overt” expression. No author, no language, ever describes a situation in all its details. Rather, some kind of outline is sketched which is then left to evoke the full situation in the reader’s mind, though not necessarily in precisely the way the author held it in his or her individual mind, or the language in its collective mind. The different features of a situation selected for overt expression usually do not correspond on the semantic level, to name but one of the levels of “old style” equivalence. Birds, for instance, “sit” in Bulgarian, whereas they “perch” in English. Indeed, literal translation of the overt features of a situation that have been selected may lead to confusion, rather than communication. In this case the translator (and his or her teacher) must be aware of a kind of “equivalence” that is operative on the level of language itself and cannot be segmented into any kind of constitutive elements whatsoever without both losing its own meaning and impeding communication whenever the segmented elements are likely to be reconstituted in another language. It is at this level that cognitive and contrastive linguistics intersect. Their 102 yoking together may prove to be of great importance for the translation pedagogy of the future.
