Mona Baker: Equivalence Above Word Level
Mona Baker's In Other Words organised equivalence as a hierarchy of layers, each with its own failure modes. The book became the default introductory text in translation programmes worldwide.
Five layers
- Word level: denotation, connotation, semantic field.
- Above word level: collocations and idioms.
- Grammatical equivalence: number, gender, tense, voice.
- Textual equivalence: theme/rheme, cohesion.
- Pragmatic equivalence: implicature, coherence.
Why the layers matter for AI
Generic LLM translation drifts most visibly at the above-word and textual layers, because each chunk solves its own local collocation and loses the document's thematic spine. Glossary fixes above-word drift. Framework choice plus register profile fix textual and pragmatic drift. The layers tell us where to spend orchestration.
Further reading: glossary strategy, consistency failure modes.