‘Intralingual translation’: A desirable concept?

There has recently been an upsurge of articles about 'intralingual translation': producing a version of a medical document that will be suitable for a lay readership or updating the language of classic literary texts. It is argued here that updating and dialect rewording are really instances of interlingual work, while preparing plain-language derived texts for lay readerships is so different from interlingual work that the word ‘translation’ should not be used. Such intralingual work differs procedurally, formally and in particular functionally from interlingual work. The main function of those preparing such texts is to explain or to make a text more readable, whereas most translators spend most of their time engaged in ‘equivalencing’: producing a target-language wording which they think means more or less the same as the corresponding passage in the source text. Translating is best seen as invariance-oriented work between languages, with non-equivalencing activities playing a minor though important role. Intralingual work on the contrary is varianceoriented; such work would be pointless if the aim was to preserve the style and the detailed denotative meaning of the source. Among the topics discussed are paraphrasing, editing, respeaking, repeating and intralingual reported discourse. The article concludes with a discussion of why the title question matters.