However, it is subsequently felt that there is something wrong with the view of translation. The defects of this view become too apparent. Coming back to the problem of 'Dharma' again. The earlier mentioned etymological meaning of 'Dharma' may not be acceptable to the schools of philosophy other than that Hinduism. In Buddhism, for example, 'Dharma' has different meaning in different contexts. At one end, therefore, 'Dharma' has been translated as a "logical element of a proposition" and at another it is translated as "the Norm", "righteousness" etc. There has been an endless discussion on what could be the correct English translation of 'Dharma'. But no one could come to any acceptable translation. The reason is that there cannot be any such translation since the meaning of the word 'Dharma' changes as the context changes. The question here is not that literal or word for word translation is hard to achieve. It is, on the other hand, much more basic than any of the practical problem associated with the literal translation. One, thus, questions the very objective of such translation. In other words, it is impossible (of course, ignoring a few minor cases) to have a literal translation of the word and note that the impossibility does not arise only from practical difficulties from the theory of translation itself, namely, what is it that we want to translate?

     The difficulty raised here is essentially a philosophical difficulty questioning the legitimacy of such a basic notion like 'literal meaning' without which certainly there cannot be anything called literal translation. The question raised is: "Can there be disembodied meaning? If there is, "When do we observe them?" and again, "How do we observe them under their changeable verbal clothing?" But all these questions continue to exist as unanswered possible because there are no answers to such questions.

     The reason for which these questions are raised are the reason for which they could not be answered is same. The reason is that there is essentially something wrong with our understanding of the term 'meaning' - 'meaning' understood as disembodied, eternal, pure and so on. First of all, this conception of meaning involves an untenable dualism. It is dualism between two orders. There is, on the one hand, abstract, disembodied meaning existing in translator's mind and the linguistic sign on the other through which this meaning is expressed. Now the theory of translation based on this dual notion of meaning accordingly assumes a triadic scheme of translation, where translation is thought to be an operation with three terms, namely two expressions and the meaning they share.

     The defects of the dualist notion of meaning will be evident if we try to see how it works in the context of exact translation. A particular piece of translation, for example, can be judged better or worse on the ground of the extent to which there is a correspondence between the given original expression and the expression used in translation. While this is a perfectly understandable procedure the problem comes when we try to deal with pure meaning or ideas. What could we say about the operation with pure meaning? We simply do not know in what way that pure meaning corresponds to linguistic expression. In the absence of having a clear cut procedure to do so the proposal that meaning corresponds to linguistic expressions becomes a mystery. This is the untenable dualism - a dualism between pure meaning and a linguistic sign. On the same ground a theory of translation based on this conception of meaning cannot be an effective theory. The notion of 'meaning' is treated as if it is an entity which has a separate existence. I think the error lies with the interpretation of the phrase 'meaning of'. Traditionally the word 'of' does not imply any relation of correspondence. The absence of relation of correspondence accordingly suggests that a translation is not an operation with three terms. Meaning is not a third term existing apart from the linguistic signs. The fall of literal meaning is thus responsible for the realization that the theory of literal translation may not be an effective mode of translation. It cannot be effective because the kind of semantic equivalence that we are looking for cannot be achieved in a frame word where meaning is taken to be an entity corresponding to expressions. This calls for a radical change in our conception of meaning.