Terminological equivalence: probability and consistency in technical translation’

Abstract

With the growth of Translation Studies as a discipline, the key notion of ‘equivalence’ has become increasingly problematised. In this paper I would like to renew our acquaintance with Catford’s (1965) early notion of ‘textual equivalent’, which is expressed in terms of probabilities of occurrence. Using the notion that an equivalence probability of 1 can be understood as a fully determinate ST term-TT term relationship, actual correspondences will be investigated in the translations of a safety-critical medical text from German into French and English. The correspondences will be analysed in the linguistic framework of lexical cohesion in terms of lexicogrammatical chains. It will be argued that even in genres and subject fields which might be assumed to be highly-determinate with respect to lexical selection, terminological correspondences in texts can be variable.

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