ABSTRACT
Translation and linguistics 124 What could that be? (abduction) 126 Laying down tracks (induction) 129 Teaching transfer patterns (deduction) 133 Discussion 140 Exercises 140 Suggestions for further reading 146
THESIS: Texts are also easiest to translate when you think of them not as syntactically structured collections of words and phrases but as channels through which people influence each other’s actions, describe what they see and do, make sense of their worlds; linguistics is a useful reduction of the complexity of actual language use to a few simple stable structures; even more useful than the actual structures it offers, however, is the process of reduction by which the linguistic theorist moved from complexity to simplicity, actual use to ideal model, dynamic change to static structure.
