From Word to scenario: the influence of linguistic theories upon models of translation

In the late twentieth century any given model of translation was constrained by the code model of communication and by the theory of linguistics upon which it was based. Whereas the code model supplied the notion of equivalence as the standard by which a translation was evaluated, the linguistic theory supplied what was regarded as the minimal unit of translation. Accordingly, as linguistic theories were formulated to account for increasingly larger units of text, translation models were redesigned so that the notion of equivalence mirrored the size of these linguistic units. Ultimately, the notion of equivalence became so broad that attempts to achieve it were regarded as illusionary. The result was a Kuhnian revolution of sorts, with two claimants: relevance theory and cognitive linguistics. The remainder of the paper highlights how recent insights of cognitive linguistics are important in the translation praxis.