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proceeds to confirm that the content of the message should be
preserved at any cost considering the form, except in highly
structured poetic texts, as largely marginal since the rules of
relating content to form are extremely complex, arbitrary, and
variable. Transferring the message from one language to another is
compared to packing clothing into two different pieces of luggage; the
clothes remain the same, but the shape of the suitcases may vary
considerably. The validity of this parallelism is subject to critical
judgement; for in communication the form of the message can either
distort or highlight the content. Excessive fidelity to formal
transfer will inevitably result in semantic loss which can be
compensated for through grammatical and syntactic transformations not
incompatible with the linguistic conventions and norms of the receptor
language. Thus, the expected loss of the semantic content will be
minimized without jeopardizing the stylistic appeal of the original
message.
An enormous corpus of literature on the concept of equivalence
exhibits widely varied and, quite often, interconflicting attitudes
towards such a highly problematic and controversial issue.
As early as 1791, A F Tytler published a volume entitled 'The
Principles of Translation' in which he laid down three basic principles
for translation. They are:
(1) The translation should give a complete transcript of the idea of
the original work.
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