Why "Cheese" Is Not Сыр: Translation, Linguistic Value, and the Organization of Meaning
Introduction Translation is often imagined as a process of finding the right equivalent. Dictionaries reinforce this expectation by pairing words across languages as though each term corresponded neatly to another. Roman Jakobson challenged this assumption in his classic essay On Linguistic Aspects of Translation . Using the seemingly straightforward English word cheese , he demonstrates that lexical equivalence is rarely complete. The difficulty has little to do with dairy products. Instead, it reveals something fundamental about language itself. Jakobson's discussion gains additional depth when read alongside Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of linguistic value and Jonathan Culler's exposition of that theory. Together, these three thinkers suggest that languages do not merely assign different labels to the same world. They organize the conceptual plane differently. Translation therefore exposes the structure of linguistic meaning rather than simply transferring words fr...
