2025/1 Translation

Vinay and Darbelnet’s categorization of translation procedures is very detailed. They name two ‘methods’ covering seven procedures: 

 1. direct translation, which covers borrowing, calque and literal translation, and 

 2. oblique translation, which is transposition, modulation, equivalence and adaptation. 

 These procedures are applied on three levels of language: a. the lexicon b. the grammatical structures and c. the ‘message’, which is used to refer to the situational utterance and some of the higher text elements such as sentence and paragraphs. At the level of lacunae message, Vinay and Darbelnet discuss such strategies as compensation, an important term in translation which is linked to the notion of loss and gain.