In Defense of Communicative-functional Approach to Translation

At the present stage of translatology development we witness a collision of two approaches to translation: the text-focused approach and the communicative-functional approach. This paper offers arguments in defense of the communicative-functional approach and proves that this approach is a convenient tool of revealing the intrinsic nature of translation as a human activity. It is instrumental in solving traditional problems of translatology, including the problem of translation quality assessment. Translation quality is assessed in terms of adequacy defined as the conformity of the target text to the translation goal and the purposes of the activities performed by the communication actors.