ABSTRACT
T here has been no unanimous agreement among translation theorists as to what the concept of equivalence in translation means. This notion has always been used in a fuzzy sense;
there has been even a call to abandon the term but "no other useful term has been offered in its place" (Neubert and Shreve 1992:143). For Catford (1965:20), it is the replacement of textual material in one language (source language) by equivalent textual material in another language (target language). Snell-Hornby (1995:19) rightly claims that Catford's concept of equivalence is more general and abstract, a circular definition which leads nowhere. Catford's definition, however, cannot be validated for languages like Arabic and European languages which are both linguistically and culturally incongruous. This is, therefore, a flawed definition since it presupposes that all languages are symmetrical. As for Newmark (1982:x), the concept of translation equivalence is "a dead duck - either too theoretical or too arbitrary". Snell-Hornby (1995:22) takes a similar view that equivalence is unsuitable as a basic concept in translation theory: the term equivalence, apart from being imprecise and ill-defined (even after a heated debate of over twenty years) presents an illusion of symmetry between languages which hardly exists beyond the level of vague approximation and which distorts the basic problems of translation.
