Meaning

Translation is broadly defined as the rendering of meaning from one language into another. A crucial issue both in translation theory and in day-to-day translation practice is the interpretation of the notion of meaning. This entry presents a brief survey of approaches to meaning as related to translation and relevant to issues of translational equivalence between a source language and a target language text. Approaches to linguistic meaning such as objectivism, invariantism semantics, and cognitive approaches  to semantics are discussed, together with the culture- and language-bound conditions foregrounded in the sections devoted to the universality of semantic concepts in different theories of meaning and to translatability as a test for semantic theories. The final section emphasizes the quantitative properties of texts and their probabilistic measures, which contribute to the modeling of linguistic meanings at present.