“What does it mean to translate? The first and reassuring answer should be: to say the same thing in another language. If it did not mean that, in the first place we would experience numerous problems in establishing what ‘to say the same thing’ truly means, and we would not know this because of all those operations that we call paraphrasis, definition, explanation, or rephrasing, not to mention the so-called sinonimic substitutions. In the second place, we would experience numerous problems because we do not know what the ‘thing’ is when we are faced with a text requiring translation. Finally, in some circumstances, one wonders even what ‘to say’ means.”
Umberto Eco
