Based on a modified concept of the “Meaning ↔ Text” – model (see
Mel'čuk, Apresjan et al.), the author tries to plead for a linguistic
foundation to translation theory. In most cases translation can be thought
of as an unsuccessful effort of structure-saving substitution and a
following successful effort of structure-changing paraphrasing – already
in the realm of the mother-language. For illustration the author uses
Russian-German material, presented in an article by M.V.Raevskij:
Russian verbs with the prefix “za-”, expressing the meaning of
beginning, and various types of German translation. In order to
determine the position of the units in the interlingual Deep Syntactic
Structure, especially in the interlying combinatory dictionary, a formal
description of the Russian-German inventory is given. Finally the
probable reasons for the given cases of paraphrasing translation are
looked for – beginning with the local and immediate reasons.
