Semantic "Voids" as a Problem in the Translation Process

The approach to translation adopted in this paper is linguistic, not literary. That is to say, translation is viewed as an attempt to achieve a relationship of equivalence between two languages (the SL and the TL), an attempt which, by its very nature, focusses attention on all those incommensurabilities of the two languages concerned that render such equivalence difficult (if indeed possible) of attainment. Translation theory is thus taken to be part of comparative (or rather, in view of the focus on differences, contrastive) linguistics.' The purpose of this paper is, then, to analyze a certain type of interlingual anisomorphism and its implications for our understanding of translation as a linguistic process and of the nature of translation equivalence. The particular languages on which the analysis is based and from which the exemplifications are taken are (contemporary) Hebrew and (contemporary) English, but the findings are applicable, mutatis mutandis, to any two languages. The as yet undefined key-term, equivalence, is to be understood in the Saussurean sense of equal linguistic value, i.e., as the relationship existing between an item in SL and one in TL, when the TL item performs as nearly as possible2 the same semantic function in TL as the SL item in SL.