Correspondence Between Units Of Translation And Their TL Equivalents

The problem of the unit of translation is very important in translation studies. According to Brachudarov, the unit of translation is an element in the source language text for which we can find an equivalent in the target language text, while its components, taken alone, have no equivalents in the target text. In other words, UT is the smallest unit of language in the SLT that has an equivalent in the TLT. On this issue, translators and translation theorists have done a lot of research work, but they tend to be of different opinions.This thesis holds that, in actual translating activities, the existence of the unit of translation cannot be denied, and the selection of the unit of translation is ever changing. Theoretically, any length of language can be a unit of translation, including phoneme (grapheme), syllable, morpheme, word, phrase (or collocation), clause, sentence, and in very rare and special case, including the whole text or discourse. The selection of the unit of translation is subjected to the influence of many factors, among which the meaning of the source text and the target language norms are the most important.The main task of this thesis is to probe into the problem of the correspondence between units of translation and their TL equivalents, and it recognizes three categories of corresponding relations. The first category includes one-to-one, one-to-zero and zero-to-one correspondence: One-to-one correspondence means that a unit of translation has an equivalent in the TLT; one-to-zero correspondence refers to the fact that a UT is omitted in the TLT for some reason; and zero-to-one correspondence means that for some reason the translatoradds something that does not exist in the SLT or that is not expressed explicitly in the TLT. The second category includes equal-rank and rank-shifted correspondence. The former means that the UT and its TL equivalent are at the same rank, while the latter means that the two are at different ranks. The last category of correspondence includes formal correspondence and correspondence in meaning. Formal correspondence means that the UT and its TL equivalent correspond to each other in aspects of phonological and graphological features, morphological structures, and word order, etc. This kind of correspondence is on the surface level. In translation between English and Chinese, two typologically quite different languages, formal correspondence would, more often than not, give way to correspondence in meaning, which is more complicated and more important, and in which the essence of translation lies. Linguists and translation theorists have done much research work on meaning, and recognized various kinds of it, including the conceptual, associative, and figurative meaning of words and phrases, and the prepositional meaning and illocutionary force of clauses and sentences. When these units of language are used as units of translation, they should correspond with their TL equivalents in terms of these varieties of meanings. Of course, not all these varieties of meanings can or should be conveyed in translating. Some kinds of meanings have priority over the others, and some are to be neglected in translating, which is determined by the characteristics of two language systems and the differences between them in their abilities to express in a certain context.To sum up, translation is the process in which we segment the source text into units of translation on the basis of a thoroughcomprehension of it, then find their equivalents in the target language, and combine these equivalents into a target text according to the target language norms.