4. Grammatical Equivalence

Grammar is the set of rules which determine the way in which units such as words and pharases can be combined in language and the kind of information which has to be made regularly explicit in utterance.

4.1. Grammatical vs lexical categories

The most important difference between grammatical and lexical choices,as far as translation is concerned,is that grammatical choices are largely obligatory while lexical choices are largely optional.grammatical structure also differs from lexical structure in that it is more resistant to change.however deviant grammatical configurations are simply not acceptable in most contexts.This means that,in translation,grammar often has the effect of a straitjacket,forcing the translator along a certain course which may or may not follow that of the sorce text as closely as the translator would like it to.

4.2. The Diversity of grammatical categories across languages

A brief discussion of some major categories,with examples,is intended to illustrate the kinds of difficulty  that translators often encounter because of differences in the grammatical structures of source and target languages.

4.2.1 Number

Unlike japanese,chinese amd vietnamese,most languages have a grammatical category of number,similar but not necessarily idential to that of english.information on number can therefore be encoded lexically.however as with any grammatical category,a translator working from a language with a category of number into one without such a category must be careful not to overspecify this type of information in the target text.

4.2.2 Gender

Gender is a grammatical distinction according to which a noun or pronoun is classified as either masculine or feminine in some languages.Gender distinctions are generally more relevant in translation when the referent of the noun or pronoun is human .Gender distinctions in inanimate objects such as’car’or ‘ship’ and in animals such as’ dog’ and ‘cat’ are sometimes manipulated in english to convey expressive meaning ,particularly in literature,but  they do not  often cause difficulties in non-literary  translation.

4.2.3 Person

The category of person relates to the notion of parcipant roles. In most languages,parcipant roles  are systematically defined through a closed system of pronuns which may be organized along a variety of dimensions.in addition to the main distinction based on participant roles,the person system may be organized along a variety  of other dimensions.

4.2.4 Tense and aspect

Tense and aspect are grammatical categories in large number of languages.the form of the verb in languages which have these categories usually  indicates two main type of information: time relations and aspectual difference.

4.2.5 Voice

The use of the passive voice is extremely common in many  varieties of written english and can pose various problems in translation,depending on the availability of similar structures,or structures with similar functions, in the target language.

4.3. a brief note on word order

The sytantic structure of a language imposes restrictions on the way messages may be organized in that language,the order in which functional elements such as subject,predicator,and object may occur  is more fixed in some languages than in others.

4.4. introducing text

Following brown and yule (1983 :6),text is defined here as ,the verbal record of a communicative event; it is an instance of language in use rateher than language as an abstract system of meanings and relations.

4.4.1 text vs non-text

The nearest we get to non-text in actual life,leaving aside the works of those poets and prose writers who deliberately set out to create non-text,is probably in the speech of young children and in bad translations.a text,then,has features og organization which distingish it from non-text,that is,from a random collection of sentences and paragraph.

4.4.2 features of text organization

Another important feature of text organization derives from the overlapping notions of genre and text type .both relate to the way in which textual material is packaged by the writer along patterns familiar to the reader.