ABSTRACT
The ultimate goal of the various translation techniques and strategies is to achieve equivalence, a concept that has probably cost the lives of more trees than any other in translation studies. Snell-Hornby takes the view that 'equivalence is unsuitable as a basic concept in translation theory' because it is imprecise and ill-defined. There have been many definitions of equivalence, and it would be tedious to go through them all here. The most famous are probably those of Catford and Nida. Snell-Hornby describes equivalence as a 'key term' and tells us that 'The central problem of translation practice is that of finding target-language (TL) translation equivalents. Four years after Catford's book, Eugene Nida's even more famous attempt to deal with translation correspondence under the heading of 'dynamic equivalence' has subsequently led to denunciation rather than just criticism.
