Translation: A functionalist perspective

Why is it that translation seems to be a mysterious phenomenon? There are a good number of reasons for this but chief among them is the fact that Translation Studies (traductologie) has been dominated (and to a certain degree still are) by the long debate about the status and function of literary texts, and preoccupied (mainly) with the translation of literary masterpieces. And it is so in spite of the fact that, in today's world, the vast majority of translated texts are not literary but "utilitarian" - administrative, legal, technical, scientific, and so on. This paper argues that, from the point of view of Functional Linguistics, a translation, even a literary one, has to be described in terms of communication, functional equivalence and transfer of pertinent information.