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ntic terms--« sense and reference, » « hyponomy, » « changes of meaning » and « context »--giving many examples to illusrate the importance of having some general knowledge of semantics and of understanding the relationship between semantics and translation. This article is clearly written and readers can easily draw inspiration from it. These linguistics approaches shed new lights on the criteria of « faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance » defined by Yan Fu. Chinese scholars began to criticize the vagueness of these three criteria and endeavored to give them concrete significance through the theories of western linguistics. The result is that the content of these three traditional criteria has been greatly enriched, especially by the effect equivalence theory, which in a broad sense means that the target language should be equivalent to the source language from a semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic point of view. But we are still unable to evaluate translations in a very scientific way. Therefore, Chinese scholars like Fan Shouyi, Xu Shenghuan and Mu Lei embarked on quantitative analyses of translations and used the fuzzy set theory of mathematics in accomplishing their analysis. Fan published several articles on this field of study. His 1987 and 1990 articles evaluate translations according to a numerical quantity of faithfulness. Xu's article « A Mathematical Model for Evaluating a Translation's Quality » presents a normal mathematical model. He states that it is difficult to produce an absolutely accurate evaluation of translations with this model because of the uncertainty and randomness of man's thought process. Making such analysis more accurate and objective would require further research. The unit in translation is a hard nut to crack. Without solving this problem, no research in translation studies will ever be sufficient. To date, very few people have focused their research on this area. Nida holds that the unit should be the sentence, and in a certain sense, the discourse. Barkhudarov (1993: 40), Soviet linguist and translation theorist, suggests that: translation is the process of transforming a speech product (or text) produced in one language into a speech product (or text) in another language. [...] It follows that the most important task of the translator who carries out the process of transformation, and of the theorist who describes or creates a model for that process, is to establish the minimal unit of translation, as it is generally called, the unit of translation in the source text. Though he notes the importance of the unit of translation in a text and considers that this unit can be a unit on any level of language, he fails to point out what a text is and how it might be measured in translation. Halliday's notion of the clause might be significant in this case. To him, a clause is a basic unit. He distinguishes three functions of a clause: textual, interpersonal and ideational. According to Halliday, these functions are not possessed by word or phrase. But he is not quite successful in analyzing the relationship between clause and text (cf. Halliday 1985). In China, some people have tried to solve this problem. Wang Dechun (1987: 10) more or less shares Bakhudarov's view that the translation unit cannot be confined just to sentences. In some ways, the phoneme, word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or even text can all serve as a uni