Division of ST and TT into the units of translation is of particular importance in Vinay and Darbelnet’s

work as a prelude to analysis of changes in translation.As an illustration of how this division works,
and how it might illuminate the process of translation, look at the following example.
Example
A poster located by the underground ticket office at Heathrow airport, London:
Travelling from Heathrow?
There are easy to follow instructions on the larger self-service touch screen ticket machines.

A translator approaching this short text will most probably break it down into the title (Travelling
from Heathrow?) and the instructions in the second sentence. While that sentence will be taken as a
whole, it might also in turn be sub-divided more or less as follows:

There are/
[easy to follow/instructions]/
[on the/larger/self-service/touch screen/ticket machines]

Here, the slashes (/) indicate small word groups with a distinct semantic meaning that might be
considered separately, while the brackets ([. . .]) enclose larger units that a practised translator is
likely to translate as a whole.
In practice, the translation unit will typically tend to be not individual words but small groups of
language building up into the sentence, what the famous translation theorist Eugene Nida
(1964:268) calls ‘meaningful mouthfuls of language’.
According to Newmark (1988), ‘literal’ and ‘free’ translation are linked to different translation units,
‘literal’ being very much centered on faithfulness to the individual word, while ‘free’ translation aims
at capturing the sense of a longer stretch of language.