Some help needed with translation

[enci 0]

I’m working on some translator qualification paper, which is due Monday. Among other things it involves translation, surprise Anyway, I've got stuck with a phrase and I’d be eternally grateful if anyone helped me out. I’m also offering free cookies

 

So what does “like with like” mean? Here’s the context:

 

„Two actors, structurally very different, faced with a fluid world order. The interaction is there, and has become significant, but it is not an interaction of ‘like with like’, structurally and perhaps ideationally”

 

It’s a text on the China-EU relations and after some googling, my wild guess would be that ”like with like” means something along the lines of ”identical with identical”, but I’m really not sure and I just can’t get these things wrong

 

Could anyone shed some light on this?

[Genenut 8]

my opinion based on the context in the sentence is like minded people

ie "like minded with like minded"

The two having the same opinions on many topics and getting along well because they share very similar or like opinions .

[enci 0]

Ok, gonna go with that, thanks

[Ike 1]

"Like with like" generally refers to grouping things or sets of things that are similar. So to put your fruit like with like, you would group apples with apples, bananas with bananas, and oranges with oranges. [Or perhaps citrus fruit together, apples together, and bananas/plantains together.]

 

As a side note, ideationally isn't really a word. To the extent that it is, it is not in common usage. I would replace: "structurally and perhaps ideationally" with "in terms of structure, and perhaps ideas." They may actually mean 'ideals' instead of ideas as well. Hard to say.

 

- Ike

[enci 0]

Agreed, the article has some interesting choice of wording. It was a poor choice of text, but it’s too late for me to start a new one. In fact after finishing the first page I had to check if the author was a native speaker of English. Turns out that he is, but he uses very weird sentence structures. After a year of translating almost exclusively legal texts, I didn’t think that I would find a text weird anymore

Thanks again for the clarification