This paper examines the concepts of adequacy, equivalence and translatability
in human translation and how in particular the concept of adequacy evolves with
respect to the evaluation of the quality in Machine Translation. The paper starts
with the analysis of the notions of translated sense and adequacy as discussed in
translation theory and highlights how the considerations on the nature of human
translation lose their theoretical strength if applied to Machine translation (MT).
The different ways of conceiving the sense in human and machine translation with
regard to the concepts of adequacy and equivalence, lead to different
interpretations of the relationship between source and target text
