ABSTRACT
This chapter considers, from the standpoint of the reality-construction view of language, what it means for two linguistic expressions to have the 'same' meaning to 'say the same thing'. A translation preserves the same conceptual event if the verb of the original expression is translated by the verb of the target-language expression and each of the arguments of the original is translated by an argument in the same case relation in the target-language expression. Isomorphic translation translates each sentence as a separate unit it is a sentence-by-sentence mapping between the languages. In any case, the translator's role is to bring about the understanding which the original speaker intended, and the translation should be designed according to considerations analogous to those which governed the design of the original utterance. Likewise, one must assume the perlocutionary-intertranslatability claim to envisage criteria for judging the understanding elicited by a translation which would also reflect the considerations which motivated the original speaker.
