It is widely agreed these days that translation equivalence, whatever it is, is better conceived of as a kind of similarity rather than as a sameness. Yet little note seems to have been taken so far of philosophical and psychological research into the concept of sameness, and how people make judgements of similarity. (True, Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances has been taken up by several translation scholars.) A recent article on the concept of similarity (Sovran 1992) raises a number of points that seem of direct relevance to translation theory.

References

Chesterman, Andrew

Forthcoming. Contrastive Functional Analysis.  

Goodman, Nelson

1972 “Seven Strictures on Similarity”. Nelson Goodman. Problems and Projects. Indianapolis, IN.: Bobbs-Merrill 1972 437–447.

[ p. 163 ]

Kelly, Louis G.

1979 The True Interpreter. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sovran, Tamar

1992 “Between Similarity and Sameness”. Journal of Pragmatics 18:4. 329–344.  

Toury, Gideon

1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.  

Tversky, Amos

1977 “Features of Similarity”. Psychological Review 84. 327–352.