On The Unit Of Translation

The unit of translation (UT thereafter) is a significant and controversial issue in the study of translation theories and practice. Most translation theorists in China and abroad have been studying and illustrating this problem from various perspectives for many years. But there is no satisfactory answer to this question, and the issue remains controversial. The author of this paper holds that this confusing situation is mainly caused by the fact that most translation theorists confused the connotation with denotation of UT. As a matter of fact, the connotation and denotation of UT are different, though they may use the same term, UT to express it. While most translation theorists do not realize the existence of these two meanings at all and therefore not able to make a distinction between them, they have chosen one or the other as the default meaning in their discussion. What they focus on is simply one of the two meanings of this concept, particularly its denotative meaning. Obviously, the discussion of UT only on its connotative meaning is far from enough. These misunderstandings, therefore, cause the messy situation of the discussions of UT.In this paper, discrimination between the two meanings of this concept and an initial analysis and explanation for them are tried so as to make the two meanings as clear as possible. After analyzing the definitions offered by most translation theorists, the author attempts to define the connotative meaning of this concept first. The connotation of the unit of translation is the essential nature of the unit, namely, the question of whether UT is linguistic units or nonlinguistic units, such as units of thoughts etc. The analyses and explanations of this problem from diverse points prove that the unit of translation should be linguistic units. This inevitably leads to the second question that focuses on the confirmation of the denotative meaning of this concept, that is, what linguistic unit we should use so that it can serve translation practice and translation teaching better.The method we used to test this hypothesis is empirical. Several paragraphs fromthe texts of five genres are selected, and then were divided into separate sentences. The testees are required to translate these separate sentences independently without the knowledge of context. The final result reveals that determining sentence as UT can satisfy the basic requirements of translation. All the translations composed of singular sentences translated separately by different testees in comparison with the standard translations, can express the general ideas of the original texts. What's more in particular, the denotation of the unit of translation is always changing in accordance with the concrete situations of every translation practice and the factors, which bring about these changes, should be the key of the UT research.