ABSTRACT
To a great extent, translation strategies are linked to different translation units, ‘literal’ being very much centred on adherence to the individual word, while ‘free’ translation aims at capturing the sense of a longer stretch of language. This chapter begins to examine more systematic approaches to the unit of translation. Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet reject the word as a unit of translation since translators focus on the semantic field rather than on the formal properties of the individual signifier. The lexicological units described by Vinay and Darbelnet contain ‘lexical elements grouped together to form a single element of thought’. A translator working with the sentence as the translation unit would therefore need to pay particular care to preserving the features of the source texts. The unit of translation is normally the linguistic unit which the translator uses when translating.
