An-Najah Staff

Globalization seems to have imposed a new paradigm on us whether we approve of it or not we ought to adapt and adjust to the matrix we live in and this involves complying with what appears to be practical and feasible.    This appears to be consistent with what Thomas Kuhn (1996) conceives of the conditions and circumstances which induce ‘paradigm change’ in the theories and mechanisms we use in some of the social sciences or humanities which we subscribe to in order to account for a particular transaction be that translation or a communication encounter between two individuals. To be precisely candid, what takes place in the process of translation along with the heightened debate among translation scholars concerning the question of ‘equivalence’ has ushered in such a state of affairs which calls for a real solution or a paradigm change in our overall approach to translation equivalence.   This particular approach has taken into account the applicability of the mechanisms with which one can account as intelligibly as possible for both the fragility of the notion of translation ‘equivalence’, and the possibility of considering the act of translation as an act of inter-cultural communication encounter. Therefore, this paper is designed to underlie the existence of a paradigm shift in the process of translation equivalence and underscore the countless merits of adopting the proposition which subscribes for ‘skopos theory’ or a functionalist approach as a viable solution to so many problems confronting every translator as well as communicators.    My rationale for such a claim comes from various but highly salient reasons one of which is that the existing translation approaches on ‘translation equivalence’ do not seem to provide inclusive remedies to what confront the translator in translating technology terms, nor do some of these approaches acknowledge the significance of the elevation of the role of the translator to an author status; and the merit of prioritizing the target text over the source text on a more practical and rational basis.Keywords:Translation, functional equivalence, technology terms, paradigm change