ABSTRACT
Meaning is a central concept in Translation Studies because translations are supposed to offer meaning. However, the notion of ‘meaning’ is not unambiguous. The reflection on how to deal with meaning in translation began during Roman times, when translation was used to enrich the Latin language on the level of words. Further on, the topics of precision in the rendering of meaning and the general bases of linguistics were discussed. Translation Studies as an academic discipline, with the development of a series of formalised translation theories, became established only after the Second World War, especially from the 1970s onwards. Looking at the development of translation theories, we can discern a movement of scholarly perspectives from observing language and linguistic units, over the pragmatic activity and social contexts of communication, towards the acting translators themselves. The analysis moved from the transfer of the language structure (lexical units, sentences, paragraphs), over form and style (genre, literal virtuosity, register) to pragmatics (rhetoric, text function, speech acts). Meaning in texts is determined by the content such as information, reference, technicality, and by the ideological setting, for example political positioning, discourses, values, cultural norms.
