Family resemblance in translation: a legacy revisited

The theory of family resemblance is rarely mentioned in translation studies. Where it was, the legacy was strong. This paper revisits the legacy and renews the call for treating a translated text as a contextual variant of its original and as holding prototypical links with the latter. In this sense, the well-intended pursuits for translational equivalence seem to have overlooked the philosophical tension between the classic Aristotelian way of seeking exact human perceptions of the world and the more modern and complementary approach to the world's fuzzy traits and boundaries. It was an oversight due to historical reasons and in view of the rapidly changing landscape of translation teaching and research worldwide, the task of characterizing the nature and properties of the source and the target text(s) and the relations between them would be practically and theoretically more profitable when the frame of reference is shifted from equivalence to family resemblance.