Parameters of Equivalence in Translation: A Comparative Analysis of French and Turkish
Muzaffer Kaya
Abstract. This article returns to the much-debated notion of equivalence and examines it through one specific language pair, French and Turkish. The argument is straightforward enough to state but harder to honour in practice: equivalence cannot be reduced to the hunt for matching words. It is closer to a series of judgements, made more or less consciously, in which sense, style, grammar, the organisation of the text, and cultural reference all press their claims at the same time. The discussion begins with the familiar theoretical landmarks—Jakobson, Nida, Catford, Vinay and Darbelnet, Newmark, Baker, Koller, Berman—but treats them as a connected argument rather than a checklist. It then proposes five parameters along which French–Turkish difficulties tend to cluster: semantic-signifying, connotative-stylistic, grammatical-syntactic, textual-pragmatic, and cultural-discursive. Every parameter is worked through with sentence-level examples taken from literary, legal, and scientific-technical material, and the resulting model is finally set beside the recent wave of corpus-based and machine-translation research. Full equivalence between the two languages, the analysis concludes, is the exception rather than the rule; what remains reliably available is a set of defensible, functional solutions, provided the translator weighs text type, audience, and communicative purpose together. Equivalence here is not a fixed identity but something the translator builds, and ranks, anew in each text.
Keywords: translation studies, equivalence, translation theories, French–Turkish translation, comparative analysis