1. The lexicon;

2. the grammatical structures;

3. the ‘message’, which is used to refer to the situational utterance and some of the higher text elements such as sentence and paragraphs.

At the level of message, Vinay and Darbelnet discuss such strategies as compen­sation, an important term in translation which is linked to the notion of loss and gain.

COMPENSATION, LOSS, GAIN

A translation technique used to compensate for translation loss. The trans­lator offsets an inevitable loss at one point in the text by adding a suitable element at another point, achieving a compensatory translation gain. For example, an informal text in Russian using the second personal pronoun ты might be rendered in English by informal lexis (you) or use of the first name or nickname. Compensation in an interpretive sense, restoring life to the TT.

These translation procedures have influenced later taxonomies by, amongst others, van Leuven-Zwart, who attempts a very complex analysis of extracts from translations of Latin American fiction. However, despite a systematic means of analysis based on the denotative meaning of each word, the decision as to whether a shift has occurred is inevitably subjective since an evaluation of the equivalence of the ST and TT units is required. Some kind of evaluator, known in translation as a tertium comparationis (a non-linguistic, intermediate form of the meaning of a ST and TT. The idea is that an invariant meaning (общее значение / денотативное значение для двух языков) exists, independent of both texts, which can be used to gauge or assist transfer of meaning between ST and TT) is necessary.

Attempts at objectifying the comparison have included van Leuven-Zwart’s concept where the dictionary meaning of the ST term was taken as a comparator and used independently to evaluate the closeness of the ST and TT term. However, the success of this concept rests upon the absolute objective dependability of the decontextualized dictionary meaning and the analyst’s ability to accurately and repeatedly decide whether a shift has occurred in the translation context. In view of the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of achieving this, many theorists have moved away from the tertium comparationis. Gideon Toury is the Israeli scholar who has been the prime proponent of Descriptive Translation Studies, a branch of the discipline that sets out to describe translation by comparing and analysing ST-TT pairs. In his work, Toury initially used a supposed ‘invariant’ as a form of compari­son, but in his major work «Descriptive Translation Studies – and Beyond» he drops this in favor of a more-flexible ‘ad-hoc’ approach to the selection of features, dependent on the characteristics of the specific texts under consideration. Importantly, he warns against ‘the totally negative kind of reasoning required by the search for shifts’ in which error and failure and loss in translation are highlighted. Instead, for Toury translation shift analysis is most valuable as a form of ‘discovery’, ‘a step towards the formulation of explanatory hypotheses’ about the practice of translation.