Cognitive Equivalence and Its Epistemological Significance

The ideal pursuit of formal or functional equivalence in translation has been a conundrum for translation theorizing, in that its theoretical prerequisites are derived from structuralist linguistic theory which is, in itself, deficient in separating form from meaning.The paper instead advocates "Cognitive Equivalence" and defines it as the ontological commonalities or cognitive schemas across languages.This concept achieves an explanatory consistency for both translation practice and theorizing, for it is based on the Cognitive Linguistics view that language consists of an inventory of conventional symbolic units, and thus unifies the subjective and objective, the general and the individual, the static and the dynamic in translation.The paper also points out that inequivalence results from the translator's cognitive subjectivity which leads to conceptualisation differences in construal and ways of expression.The theoretical advantage of Cognitive Equivalence lies in the fact that it has expounded the root cause for formal or functional inequivalence and clarified the logic of plausibility in translation, which paves the way for efficient communication across languages and cultures.