About adequacy, equivalence and translatability in human and machine translation

This paper examines the concepts of adequacy, equivalence and translatability in human translation and how in particular the concept of adequacy evolves with respect to the evaluation of the quality in Machine Translation. The paper starts with the analysis of the notions of translated sense and adequacy as discussed in translation theory and highlights how the considerations on the nature of human translation lose their theoretical strength if applied to Machine translation (MT). The different ways of conceiving the sense in human and machine translation with regard to the concepts of adequacy and equivalence, lead to different interpretations of the relationship between source and target text.