Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The text‐based or textual approach to translation regards a text as a communicative act which takes place in a situationally and culturally significant context. In this sense, translation is more than a mere interlinguistic transcoding activity. The text to be translated, or, as is often referred to by translation scholars and translators, the source text (ST), is viewed as a coherent chunk of lexical items and is analyzed globally at the supra‐sentential level by looking at its overall meaning, textual features, and communicative function(s). The translation unit is no longer the word or sentence, as is the case with the traditional linguistic approach, but rather the text as a whole. This entry describes how the translator's task is to produce a translation or target text (TT) that is textually and communicatively equivalent to the ST.</jats:p>