Translation Procedures

A basic survey across a given language pair normally reveals units that are structurally incongruent with one another, which demonstrates that translation cannot be reduced to establishing a straightforward correspondence between individual words. To properly render the meaning of the source text, translators must introduce translation shifts, i.e. departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the source language to the target language. This chapter reviews a taxonomy of translation procedures used for dealing with the translation shifts proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958), which has been regarded a springboard for later taxonomies of translation techniques and strategies.