Translation scholar Mona Baker explains that interest in translation is almost as old as human civilization itself. There is a vast amount of literature on the subject, going back at least to Cicero in the first century BC (2001, p. 277). However, Baker points out that the academic field of Translation Studies is relatively new—only a few decades old. Although translation was studied in academic settings in the past (such as in comparative literature or contrastive linguistics), it wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that scholars began calling for systematic research on translation and the development of consistent translation theories (2001, p. 277).

Translation Studies brings together knowledge from many other disciplines, including linguistics, literary theory, communication theory, history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and cultural studies.

In this section, you will complete a translation activity. But first, you’ll explore an important concept in translation theory that will help you understand some of the challenges translators face.

The key concept we’ll focus on is equivalence. When you translate a text into another language, can you say that the two texts are equivalent? Or, to put it another way, is translation simply about replacing a word in the source language with its ‘equivalent’ in the target language? Scholars have debated these questions and proposed different ways of understanding equivalence. Some have even challenged the very idea of equivalence, arguing that seeing translation only in these terms reduces it to a mechanical linguistic process—just swapping words between languages—without considering the broader cultural context, the type and purpose of the text, who commissioned the translation, and the needs of the target audience.