Jakobson's Three Types of Translation
Roman Jakobson opened his 1959 essay by separating translation into three kinds. The taxonomy looks innocuous and turns out to organise most disagreements in the field.
Three types
- Intralingual: rewording within one language (a legal clause restated in plain English).
- Interlingual: rewording across languages (the canonical case).
- Intersemiotic: rewording across sign systems (novel to film, prose to diagram).
Why the taxonomy still cuts
Jakobson argued no two languages share lexical fields exactly, so interlingual translation is always also intralingual rewording in the target. AI translation pipelines exploit this: register analysis chooses the target idiolect, glossary fixes the lexical field, and the model performs intralingual paraphrase inside the target language as much as cross-lingual transfer.
Further reading: Nida equivalence, register.