1. “Extratextual Factors in Translation Text Analysis”
Lecture 1.
Systematic Framework for External Analysis
Introduction
Most writers on translation theory agree that before embarking upon any translation the translator should analyze the text comprehensively, since this appears to be the only way of ensuring that the source text (ST) has been wholly and correctly understood. Various proposals have been put forward as to how such an analysis should be carried out and how particular translation problems might best be dealt with. These tend, however, to be based on models of text analysis which have been developed in other fields of study, such as that of literary studies, of text or discourse linguistics, or even in the field of theology.
But what is right for the literary scholar, the text linguist is not necessarily right for the translator: different purposes require different approaches. Translation-oriented text analysis should not only ensure full comprehension and correct interpretation of the text or explain its linguistic and textual structures and their relationship with the system and norms of the source language (SL). It should also provide a reliable foundation for each and every decision which the translator has to make in a particular translation process. For this purpose, it must be integrated into an overall concept of translation that will serve as a permanent frame of reference for the translator.
The factors of the communicative situation in which the source text is used are of decisive importance for text analysis because they determine its communicative function. I call these factors "extraj
textual" or "external" factors (as opposed to the "intratextual" or "internal" factors relating to the text itself, including its non-verbal elements). Extratextual factors may, of course, be mentioned, i.e. "verbalized", in the text, and in this case we speak of "metacommunicative utterances". The interplay between extratextual and intratextual factors can be conveniently expressed in the following set of "WH-ques-tions". Depending on their relationship to either the communicative situation or the text itself, these questions can be assigned to the extratextual or intratextual factors of analysis.
Who
transmits On what subject matter
to whom
does s/he say
what for what
by which medium (what not)
where in what order
when using which non-verbal elements
why in which words
a text in what kind of sentences
with what function
? in which tone
to what effect?
Extratextual factors are analysed by enquiring about the author or sender of the text (who?), the sender's intention (what for?), the audience the text is directed at (to whom?), the medium or channel the text is communicated by (by which medium?), the place (where?) and time (when?) of text production and text reception, and the motive (why?) for communication. The sum total of information obtained about these seven extratextual factors may provide an answer to the last question, which concerns the function the text can achieve (with what function?).
Intratextual factors are analysed by enquiring about the subject matter the text deals with (on what subject matter?), the information or content presented in the text (what?), the knowledge presuppositions made by the author (what not?), the composition or construction of the text (in what order?), the non-linguistic or paralinguistic elements accompanying the text (using which non-verbal elements?), the lexical characteristics (in which words?) and syntactic structures (in what kind of sentences?) found in the text, and the suprasegmental features of intonation and prosody (in which tone?).
The extratextual factors are analysed before reading the text, simply by observing the situation in which the text is used. In this way, the receivers build up a certain expectation as to the intratextual characteristics of the text, but it is only when, through reading, they compare this expectation with the actual features of the text that they experience the particular effect the text has on them. The last question (to what effect?) therefore refers to a global or holistic concept, which comprises the interdependence or interplay of extratextual and intratextual factors.
Since the situation normally precedes textual communication and determines the use of intratextual procedures, it seems natural to start with the analysis of the external factors although, in view of recursiveness and circularity, the order of the analytical steps is not a constituent of the model. In written communication, the situation is often documented in the "text environment" (i.e. title and/or bibliographical references, such as name of author, place and year of publication, number of copies, etc.). This is what is usually called a "top down" analysis. If no information on the external factors can be inferred from the text environment (for example, in the case of old texts whose original situation of production and/or reception is uncertain or unknown), the analysis of internal features, again in a recursive procedure, can yield information from which the translator is able to make fairly reliable conjectures about the situation the text was used in.14
The latter procedure is referred to as a "bottom-up" analysis.
The application of the model will show that normally both procedures have to be combined, demonstrating once more the recursive character of the model.
Extratextual factors
External versus internal situation
In classifying the situational factors as "extratextual factors" we have to make the following fundamental qualification. When referring to "situation" we mean the real situation in which the text is used as a means of communication, and not any imaginary setting of a story in a fictional text). The characteristics of a person who speaks in a fictional text do not belong to the dimension of sender, but have to be regarded as an intratextual factor which is analysed in connection with the internal dimension of "content". It is the author of the text who has to be regarded as "producer" of the fictitious utterance, whereas the fictitious speaker is a "secondary sender" (S').
This qualification also applies to the so-called complex text types, where a text of a certain genre is embedded into a frame text belonging to another genre. Complex text types occur not only in fiction, but also in non-fiction. For example, in newspaper reports authors often cite remarks made by third persons in literal quotations in order to show that they do not share the speaker's opinion. In this case, the sender of the quoted utterance is not identical with the sender of the frame text.
Example
After King Juan Carlos of Spain had received an honorary doctorate from New York University, the journalist who commented on the event in a Spanish newspaper quoted verbatim parts of the King's speech of thanks. For the translation of the quotation, the King has to be regarded as sender, whereas for the translation of the framing newspaper report, the journalist is the sender (and author). The formulation of the two texts has to conform to the different situations and positions of the two senders.
For both fictional and non-fictional complex texts it is advisable to analyse the constituent texts separately according to the principle of recursiveness. The necessary information on the situational factors of the embedded text is usually given within the frame text.
Systematic Framework for External Analysis
If we want to encompass the whole situation of a text by means of a model that will serve for the analysis of any text with any possible translation skopos, we must ask the following fundamental question:
What information on the various factors may be relevant to translation?
Neubert ([1968]1981: 60) regards "age, origin, social environment, education etc." as relevant information about the language user. Vermeer ([1974b] 1983: 23) in a matrix relates attitude, status, role, strategy, behaviour and activity of the participants of communication to the corresponding features of the type of situation in order to furnish evidence of the conformist or deviant behaviour of the participants. Schmidt (cf. 1976: 104) lists the following data: (a) socio-economic conditions (role, status, economic situation), (b) socio-cultural and cognitive-intellectual conditions (text and world knowledge, education, experience, models of reality), and (c) biographical-psychical conditions (individual competences and dispositions, present biographical situation, plans, intentions). Gulich & Raible (1977: 28) even regard "hoarseness, cheerfulness, unhappiness" and the picture that speaker and hearer have of each other as factors which may influence the communicative act.
This list is in no way complete, but it clearly shows that the situation or world of a text cannot be analysed by a mere compilation of informational details. We have to find the categories by which we conceive the world, which will apply equally to the world of a text, i.e. to its historical situation.
This applies to the situation of a text as well.
(a) The basic categories of any historical situation are time and space. The category of time also comprises the historic conception a world has of itself. The first fundamental aspect of analysis will therefore be the temporal and spatial dimension of the situation.
(b) The situation of a text is always a part of human culture. The second fundamental aspect of analysis therefore has to refer to the culture-specific features of the situation.
(c) In its world, the text has a function which establishes its textuality. The third fundamental aspect therefore comprises the relationship between situation and communicative function of the text
The communicative function of a text has to be considered within the framework of the transcultural, possibly universal, communicative functions of language in general.
We find four basic functions of communication: (a) the referential (also denotative or cognitive) function, focussed on the referent or context referred to by the text, (b) the expressive or emotive function, focussed on the sender, the sender's emotions or attitude towards the referent, (c) the operative (also appellative, conative, persuasive or vocative) function, focussed on the orientation of the text towards the receiver, and (d) the phatic function, serving primarily "to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication between sender and receiver, to check whether the channel works, to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention. The phatic function is also responsible for the development of the social relationship between sender and receiver.
Apart from space, time, and culture, it is the influence of these basic functions that constitutes the "world" of a text. They will therefore form the systematic framework for the range of possible questions which can be asked regarding the situational factors of our analytical model (see the standard or model questions in the "checklist" at the end of each chapter). In order to illustrate the interdependence of factors and dimensions, the last question will always refer to the expectations raised by the analysis of the factor in question.
Sender
Sender vs. text producer
Although in many cases these two roles are combined in one persona (e.g. in the case of literary works, textbooks, or newspaper commentaries, which are normally signed by an author's name), the distinction seems to be highly relevant to a translation-oriented text analysis.
Many texts do not bear any author's name at all. These are usually non-literary texts for practical use, such as advertisements, laws or statutes, or operating instructions. Nevertheless, there has to be a sender who, even if not named explicitly, can be identified implicitly. For example, the sender of an advertisement is usually the company selling the product, and the sender of statutes is normally the legislative body of a state. The fact that no text producer is named in these cases leads to the conclusion that either they are not relevant as a person or - as is the case with certain genres - they do not wish to be known.
If a text bears the name of both sender and text producer, the latter usually plays a secondary role because s/he is not expected to introduce any communicative intention of her or his own into the text.
The sender of a text is the person (or institution, etc.) who uses the text in order to convey a certain message to somebody else and/or to produce a certain effect, whereas the text producer writes the text according to the instructions of the sender, and complies with the rules and norms of text production valid in the respective language and culture. The formal design of the text, such as the layout, may be assigned to another expert, and in some cases, the text is presented to the public by yet another person (e.g. a news reader or an actor).
Example
The imprint on the back of a tourist information brochure of the city of Munich reads as follows: "Edited by the Tourist Information Office of Munich (...). Text: Helmut Gerstner." The Tourist Information Office, which intends to inform the visitors and to promote the beauties of the town, is the sender of the text. Mr Gerstner is the text producer, and he is the person responsible for the stylistic features of the text, but not for the sender's intention. The imprints on the English, French, and Spanish versions of the brochure contain the same information, which in this case is obviously wrong. Although the Tourist Information Office is the sender of these texts, too, it is the respective translators who have to be regarded as text producers. Their names ought to be mentioned in addition to, or instead of, that of Helmut Gerstner.
As is shown by the example, it is usually the text environment (imprint, reference, bibliography, etc.) that yields information as to whether or not the sender and the text producer are different persons. If the author's name is the only one given, she can normally be assumed to be the text producer. However, this cannot be regarded as a hard and fast rule, as is illustrated by the following example.
Example
In her book Estudio sobre el cuento espahol contempordneo
(Madrid 1973), Erna Brandenberger has included the short story "Pecado de omision" by the Spanish author Ana Maria Matute to give an example of a certain type of plot which she calls a "fast moving story". For the German version of the book, Brandenberger (as sender and translator in one person) has translated the story into German with the intention of showing the typical features of a fast moving story. If the same story is published in a collection of modern Spanish short stories, however, it is the author herself who acts as sender, and in translation it would be her intention that determines translation strategies.
The situation of a translator can be compared with that of the text producer. Although they have to follow the instructions of the sender or initiator and have to comply with the norms and rules of the target language and culture, they are usually allowed a certain scope in which to give free rein to their own stylistic creativity and preferences, if they so wish. On the other hand, they may decide to stick to stylistic features of the source text as long as their imitation does not infringe the text norms and conventions of the target culture.
Another aspect of sender pragmatics is the question as to whether a text has one or more than one sender (monologue vs. dialogue, question/answer, discussion, exchange of roles between sender and receiver, etc.). If there is more than one sender, the corresponding data have to be analysed for each of them.
What to find out about the sender
Within the framework established by time, space, culture and the basic functions of communication, what we regard as being relevant to translation is all data which may throw light on the sender's intention, on the addressed audience with their cultural background, on the place and time of, and the motive for, text production, as well as any information on the predictable intratextual features (such as idiosyncrasies, regional and social dialect, temporal features, knowledge presuppositions, etc.).
Example
a) If a text is written in Spanish, it may be vital for comprehension to know whether the author is from Spain or Latin America, since a large number of words are used with different meanings in European and American Spanish. Even if a Peruvian like Mario Vargas Llosa writes in a Spanish newspaper for Spanish readers, he can be expected to use americanisms. b) In a Spanish edition of Cuban short stories (Narrativa cubana de la revolution,
Madrid 1971), certain cubanisms are explained to the Spanish readers in footnotes, e.g., duro:
"moneda de un peso cubano" (which was then a five peseta coin in Spain), or neques:
"sorpresas, golpes imprevistos". For the translator, these footnotes may be important not only in the comprehension phase, but also - if the TT skopos requires the preservation of the effect the book has on the European Spanish-speaking reader - in the transfer phase, c) The Portuguese eclogue Crisfal
can be ascribed either to Cristovao Falcaos or to Bernadim Ribeiro. In the first case, the text has to be interpreted literally as a naturalistic poem, while in the second case, it must be regarded as an allegory. As Kayser points out, "the words may have a completely different impact if they come from an author who really was put into prison for his love, who really was separated from his lady, and whose lady really was forced to stay in the cloister of Lorvao" (Kayser 1962: 36, my translation).
How to obtain information about the sender
How can the translation-relevant information about the sender (or the text producer) be obtained? The first clues are provided by the text environment (imprints, blurbs, preface or epilogue, footnotes, etc.). The author's name may already carry further information which either belongs to the receiver's or translator's general background knowledge or can, if necessary, be obtained. The name of a writer usually evokes some knowledge of their literary classification, artistic intentions, favourite subject matters, usual addressees, status, etc.; similarly, the name of a politician evokes his or her political standpoint, function or position, public image, etc. Since this is culture-specific knowledge, which belongs to the "hinterland" of the text, it cannot be presumed that it is shared by the target receiver. Therefore, the translator has to consider whether the TT receiver might lack information. Whenever such a lack interferes with text comprehension, it should be compensated for by some additional piece of information given in the target text or in the TT environment.
Example
If ex-Prime Minister Edward Heath writes an editorial in a British newspaper, British readers will immediately know what political party the author belongs to. If the text is translated and published in the German weekly paper DIE ZEIT, many German readers may not be able to "classify" the author as easily. If, however, the classification is relevant for the comprehension and/ or interpretation of the article, the information has to be supplied in a few introductory lines or even in the text itself, if possible.
Further information about the sender may be provided by other factors of the communicative situation (either individually or as a combination of several factors). There may be clear and unambiguous information, which I call "data", or there may be hints which may allow the necessary information to be inferred. If the analyst knows, for instance, by which medium, at what time, and for which function a text has been published (local newspaper of the day X, death announcement), s/he is able to tell who the sender may be (relatives, employer, or friends of the dead person). The place of publication points to the origin of the sender or possible origin, if the language is spoken in various countries (Great Britain - United States - Australia - India; Portugal - Brazil; Spain - Latin America -Bolivia), and the medium can throw light on the possible status of the sender (specialized journal - expert; newspaper -journalist), etc.
Sometimes it may even be possible to ask the sender in person, or a person related to him or her.
Another source of information is the text itself. If the text environment does not provide the necessary details, the analyst has to look for internal hints about the characteristics of the sender. The use of a certain regional or class dialect may reveal the (geographical or social) origin of the text producer (although not necessarily that of the sender, if they are not the same person), and the use of obsolete forms may tell the analyst that the text producer probably lived in another age. These questions, however, can only be answered after completing the intratextual analysis.
Checklist
The following questions may help to find out the relevant information
about the sender:
1.Who is the sender of the text?
2.Is the sender identical with the text producer? If not, who is the text producer and what is his/her position with regard to the sender? Is s/he subject to the sender's instructions? Is s/he an expert in text production or an expert on the subject?
3.What information about the sender (e.g. age, geographical and social origin, education, status, relationship to the subject matter, etc.) can be obtained from the text environment? Is there any other information that is presupposed to be part of the receiver's general background knowledge? Can the sender or any person related to him or her be asked for more details?
4.What clues as to the characteristics of the sender can be inferred from other situational factors (medium, place, time, motive, function)?
5.What conclusions can be drawn from the data and clues obtained about the sender with regard to
(a)other extratextual dimensions (intention, receiver, medium, place, time, occasion, function) and
(b)the intratextual features?
The difference between intention, function, and effect
In order to ascertain the dimension of intention we have to ask what function the sender intends the text to fulfill, and what effect on the receiver s/he wants to achieve by transmitting the text. It may seem difficult to distinguish the concept of intention from that of function and effect. Biihler (1984), for example, equates "author's intention" with "purpose and effect". The three concepts are three different viewpoints of one and the same aspect of communication. The intention is defined from the viewpoint of the sender, who wants to achieve a certain purpose with the text. But the best of intentions does not guarantee that the result conforms to the intended purpose. It is the receiver who "completes" the communicative action by receiving (i.e. using) the text in a certain function, which is the result of the configuration or constellation of all the situational factors (including the intention of the sender and the receiver's own expectations based on his/her knowledge of the situation). The question "What is S aiming at with the text?" can therefore not be assigned to the factor of text function, but belongs to the dimension of intention.
Text function is defined "externally", before the receiver has actually read the text, whereas the effect the text has on the receiver can only be judged after reception. It is, so to speak, the result of the reception and encompasses both external and internal factors.
It is true that certain genres are conventionally associated with certain intentions, but these need not necessarily be realized in the communicative situation. Some ancient genres, for example, such as magic spells or epic poems, are received today in a function which differs considerably from that intended by the original sender.
Ideally, the three factors of intention, function and effect are congruent, which means that the function intended by the sender (= intention) is also assigned to the text by the receiver, who experiences exactly the effect conventionally associated with this function. Methodologically, the three factors have to be distinguished because their separate analysis allows for a different treatment (preservation, change, adaptation) in the translation process. If the intention has to be preserved in translation, we must often be prepared for a change in function and/or effect.
The intention of (he sender is of particular importance to the translator because it determines the structuring of the text with regard to content (subject matter, choice of informative details) and form (e.g. composition, stylistic-rhetorical characteristics, quotations, use of non-verbal elements etc.). At the same time, the specific organization of a text marks the text type and is a pre-signal which tells the receivers in which function they are expected to use the text.
Example
A set of operating instructions is meant to inform the user about a certain piece of equipment, e.g. a hairdryer, and to explain its correct use. Therefore, the text producer chooses the conventional forms of text organization (composition, sentence structures, lexical cliches, etc.). Taking the text out of the box with the hairdryer, the receiver recognizes the particular forms of text organization and immediately knows that the sender wants to inform about the hairdryer and the way it has to be used. Therefore receivers will normally utilize the text in this particular function. In this case, the text type is linked with a particular intention on the part of the sender, which leads to the corresponding text function on the part of the receiver. The effect will be that of "conventionality".
The sender's intention is also important in connection with the principle of loyalty. Even if the text function is changed in translation, the translator must not act contrary to the sender's intention (if it can be elicited).
The information on the dimension of intention can throw some light on other external factors (e.g., what effect on the receiver might be intended, which medium may be most appropriate or conventionally used to realize the intention in question, or whether there is a link between intention and genre), and, to a large extent, on the intratextual features (e.g. composition, use of rhetorical devices or non-verbal elements, tone, etc.).
What to find out about the sender's intention
What different types of intention can be associated with a text? There may be forms of "communication", where the sender is his or her own addressee: somebody may write something down either to ease the burden of their memory or to sort out their ideas and thoughts, or they may just scribble something on a piece of paper while making a phone call ("zero-intention"). These forms would not appear to be relevant to translation. In normal communication with two or more participants, the possible intentions correspond with the four basic functions of communication described above in connection with the systematic framework. We may ask, for example, whether the sender wants to inform the receiver about a certain issue (referential intention) or intends to express her/his feelings or attitude towards things (expressive intention), whether s/he plans to persuade the receiver to adopt a particular opinion or perform a certain activity (appellative intention), or whether s/he just wants to establish or maintain contact with the receiver (phatic intention).
Of course, a sender may well have more than just the one intention. Several intentions can be combined in a kind of hierarchy of relevance. For pragmatic reasons, this hierarchy may have to be changed in translation.
How to obtain information about the sender's intention
Normally, the receiver is not informed explicitly about the sender's intention, but receives the text as the result of the sender's communicative purposes. One means of obtaining explicit or implicit information about the intention(s) of the sender or text producer, therefore, is the analysis of intratextual features.
However, if we stay with the extratextual factors (sender, receiver, medium, place, time, motive, and function), these can throw some light on the intention the sender may have had in transmitting the text. Paralinguistic phenomena, such as manifestations of the sender's excitement or indignation, may have to be taken into account as well.
In determining the sender's intention we have to consider the role the sender adopts towards the receiver in or through the text, a role which is quite separate from the "real", status-based relationship between the two. A sender who is superior to the receiver because of greater knowledge about the subject in question may nevertheless try to play down this knowledge in order to gain the receiver's confidence. If the analyst knows the sender's role (in relation to status), s/he may be able to draw some conclusions as to the sender's intention.
The sender's intention is of particular importance when analysing literary texts or texts marked as a personal opinion (e.g. political commentaries, editorials) because there is no conventional link between genre and intention. In these cases, the translator may have to take account of the author's life and background, events that have influenced his or her writings or any literary classification (such as "romantic" or "politically/socially committed literature"). There is no doubt that for a translation-relevant text analysis translators must exploit all sources at their disposal. The translator should strive to achieve the information level which is presupposed in the receiver addressed by the author. For a literary text this will not be the level of a literary scholar, but certainly that of a "critical receiver".
Example
a) Bertolt Brecht is a representative of German politically committed literature. If the receivers know that his story "Measures against Violence" was first published in 1930, they may take this as a clue that the author intended to warn his readers about Nazi tendencies, b) If a text is published in a newspaper on the pages specially devoted to political commentaries (which in quality papers is often separate from news and reports), this medium of publication can be taken as a clear hint that the sender's intention was that of "commenting" on recent political events or tendencies, c) In a text marked as a "recipe" the reader can be quite sure that the sender's intention was to give directions for the preparation of a particular dish and to give a list of the necessary ingredients. However, if the same recipe is embedded into a larger unit, e.g. a novel, the sender's intention may have been quite different.
Sometimes senders themselves give a metacommunicative explanation as to their intentions, as is shown in the following example.
Example
In the preface of his story Los cachorros
(Barcelona 1980), the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa writes: "I wanted Los cachorros
to sound like a story that is sung rather than told, and therefore the criterion for the choice of each syllable was not only a narrative but also a musical one. I somehow had the impression that the authenticity of the story depended on whether the reader really felt that he was listening to the story and not reading it. I wanted him to perceive the story with his ears." (My translation)
Such a statement by the author is no guarantee that the source text (actually, or even in the author's opinion) conforms to this intention.
Checklist
The following questions may help to find out the relevant information about the sender's intention:
1.Are there any extratextual or intratextual statements by the sender as to his or her intention(s) concerning the text?
2.What intention(s) are by convention associated with the genre to which the analysed text can be assigned?
3.What clues as to the sender's intention can be inferred from other situational factors (sender - especially his or her communicative role -, receiver, medium, place, time, and motive)?
4.What conclusions can be drawn from the data and clues obtained about the sender's intention with regard to
(a)other extratextual dimensions (receiver, medium, and function) and
(b)the intratextual features?
Lecture 2. Audience, Medium and Place of Communication
Source-text audience vs. target-text audience
During the process of text analysis the translator elicits those textual elements or features which can be considered to be determined by the particular audience-orientation of the source text. Since each target text is always addressed to receivers-in-situation different from those to whom the source text is or was addressed, the adaptation of precisely these elements is of particular importance.
Example
If the source text is a report on a recent event published in an American newspaper, it is addressed to a large, non-specific audience in the United States. In order to capture the attention of the readers the author chooses a sensationalistic title plus an additional, informative subtitle and uses small text segments and quotations as sub-headings for the paragraphs. The text is accompanied by two photos. All these features are intended as "reading-incentives" for the receiver. If this text is translated for a journalist who has herself initiated the translation because she is interested in the information provided by the text, the reading-incentives are superfluous, and the paragraph headings may even have a confusing effect.
Every TT receiver will be different from the ST receiver in at least one respect: they are members of another cultural and linguistic community. Therefore, a translation can never be addressed to "the same" receiver as the original.
Addressee vs. chance receiver
First of all, we have to distinguish between the addressee of a certain text (i.e. the person or persons addressed by the sender) and any chance receivers who happen to read or hear the text, even though they are not addressed directly, such as people listening to a panel discussion or watching a televised parliamentary debate. In some cases, the "chance receiver" is actually a secondary addressee; for example, when a politician pretends to be answering a question asked by an interviewer but is, in reality, addressing his/her words to potential voters.
This aspect is relevant not only in cases where the chance receiver's comprehension of the message differs from that of the real addressee (which may have consequences for the participants), but particularly where translation or interpreting is concerned. The transfer decisions of the translator will have to depend on which of the two audiences is supposed to be addressed by the target text.
The case may even arise where the translator has a "chance receiver". If the SL participant in an interpreting session has a passive command of the target language or if a translation is published page-to-page with the original in a parallel text edition, the afore-mentioned SL participant or the reader with some SL knowledge, who compares the translation with the original, might be regarded as being a kind of "secondary receiver" as well. They are interested not only in the message of the text but also in the way this message is transmitted to the TL reader. In view of such secondary receivers it may be advisable for the translator to comment on certain translation strategies in a preface or post-script.
What to find out about the audience
After all the available information about the intended TT receiver has been extracted according to the normal circular course of the translation process, then the translator can check this against the characteristics of the ST receiver: age, sex, education, social background, geographic origin, social status, role with respect to the sender, etc.
Example
A report on drugs published in a magazine for young people is written with teenage readers in mind. In order to appeal to the receivers and warn them of the risks of drug addiction, the author uses words and phrases from juvenile slang and drug jargon. A translation of the text which is also addressed to young people may use the corresponding TL slang, whereas if the" same translation text (using slang words and jargon) were to appear in a section of a news magazine, whose readership is a mainly adult one, it would either not be understood or would not be taken seriously.
The communicative background of the addressees, i.e. all their general background knowledge and their knowledge of special areas and subject matters, is of particular importance for translation-oriented text analysis. According to the assessment of the audience's communicative background22
, a text producer not only selects the particular elements of the code that will be used in the text but also cuts or omits altogether any details which can be "presupposed" to be known to the receiver, whilst stressing others (or even presenting them with extra information) in order not to expect too much (nor too little) of the addressed readership.
How much knowledge can be presupposed in a reader depends not only on their education or familiarity with the subject but also on factors relating to the subject matter itself, e.g. its topicality. In this respect, the situation often varies widely for ST and TT receivers, as there is usually (at least in written communication) a considerable time lags between ST and TT reception.
Example
For a Spanish receiver, the heading "Nuestra integration en Europa" above a commentary published in the Spanish paper El Pais
in February 1984 is not a thematic title which informs about the content of the text, but refers to the then current discussion on special agricultural problems connected with the negotiations on the Spanish entry into the European Community. For German ' ''' or French newspaper readers the issue was not of topical interest at that time; under the heading "Spain's entry into the EC" (or "Our integration into Europe", for that matter) they would have expected an article on the issue of Spanish (or German/French!?) integration into the European Community.
Like the author, who has a specific intention in transmitting the text, the receiver, too, has a specific intention when reading the text. The receivers' intention must not be confused either with their expectations towards the text, which is part of their communicative background, or with their reaction or response to the text, which takes place after text reception and is thus part of the text effect.
The information obtained about the addressee may throw some light on the sender's intention, on the time and place of communication (in relation to the receiver's age and geographic origin), on text function (in relation to the receiver's intention), and on the intratextual features (e.g. the presuppositions).
As was pointed out in connection with the sender, a fictitious receiver is part of the "internal" communicative situation and not of the external communicative situation. But even externally a text can be directed at different possible receivers.
Example
Whilst imprisoned for being a member of the Resistance movement against the Nazi regime, the German writer G. Weisenborn (1902-1962) wrote some letters to his wife, Joy Weisenborn, which were published after the war. In the original situation, these letters had one precisely defined and addressed receiver. Published later in a book together with some answering letters from his wife and some songs and poems, they address a group of receivers that is much larger and not so clearly defined, i.e. anyone interested in the documents and personal testimonies of Resistance in the Third Reich. If a young man gives this book, which contains many tender love-letters, to his girlfriend many years later, the conditions of reception will be different again, not to mention those of a translation of the book into English, Dutch, or Spanish.
Therefore, the translator must analyse not only the characteristics of the ST addressees (or receivers) and their relationship to the source text, but also those of the TT receiver, whose expectations, knowledge and communicative role will influence the stylistic organization of the target text.
The stronger the orientation of the ST towards a particular SL addressee or audience, the higher the probability that the ST has to be translated in a documentary way, which means that the target text can only give information about the source text in its situation but not fulfil an analogous function.
How to obtain information about the addressed audience
As in case of the sender, information about the addressees can first of all be inferred from the text environment (e.g. dedications, notes), including the title (e.g. Bad Child s Pop-Up Book of Beasts).
It can also be elicited from the information obtained about the sender and his/her intention or from the situational factors, such as medium, place, time, and motive. Standardized genres often raise equally standardized expectations in the receivers.
Example
A housewife normally expects a recipe to contain instructions for the preparation of a certain dish, and, indeed, that is why she reads it. Her attention is directed at the content of the text (e.g. what ingredients will she need, what has she got to do?). Recipes usually have a rather conventionalized form, not only with regard to their composition (first a list of ingredients, then the instructions in chronological order) but also with regard to syntactical structures (e.g. imperatives, parataxis) and lexical features (e.g. terminology and formulaic expressions, such as "bring to the boil", "stirring constantly", etc.). The reader will only become aware of the text form if it is not as expected: if, for example, the recipe is written as a poem or if the list of ingredients is missing.
The expectation of the receiver can sometimes lead to a certain tolerance. For example, when reading a menu, whose text function can clearly be inferred from the situation, but which is translated badly into their own language, tourists in a foreign country may not feel annoyed, as they normally would, but rather amused by the orthographic mistakes or unidiomatic collocations as long as they get some information about what to eat or drink.
Normally, of course, the text producer will try as far as possible to meet the expectations of the addressed audience. There are cases, however, where an author disregards or even deliberately ignores the addressees' expectations in order to make them sit up and take notice or to make them aware of certain patterns of thinking, etc.
Checklist
The following questions may help to find out the relevant information
about the addressed audience and their expectations:
1.What information about the addressed audience can be inferred from the text environment?
2.What can be learned about the addressees from the available information about the sender and his/her intention?
3.What clues to the ST addressee's expectations, background knowledge etc. can be inferred from other situational factors (medium, place, time, motive, and function)?
4.Is there any information about the reactions of the ST receiver(s) which may influence translation strategies?
5.What conclusions can be drawn from the data and clues obtained about the addressee regarding
(a)other extratextual dimensions (intention, place, time, and function), and
(b)the intratextual features?
Medium
Speech vs. writing
The concept of medium or channel has to be interpreted rather broadly. We refer to "medium" as the means or vehicle which conveys the text to the reader (in communication theory, "channel" stands for sound waves or print on paper). The translator is, however, interested less in the technical distinctions and more in the aspects of perceptibility, storage of information and the presuppositions of communicative interaction.
First of all we have to ask whether the text is being transmitted in a face-to-face communication or in writing. The means of transmission affects not only the conditions of reception, but more particularly also those of production. It determines how the information should be presented in respect of level of explicitness, arrangement of arguments, choice of sentence types, features of cohesion, use of non-verbal elements such as facial expressions and gestures, etc. The effect of the chosen medium on the intratextual factors can be illustrated by looking at the deictic aspect: situational references, which in face-to-face communication do not have to be verbalized explicitly because the participants are a part of the situation, must be expressed much more clearly in written communication.
Example
In face-to-face communication, deictic expressions, such as here, by my side,
or today,
or expressions referring to the participants of communication, such as all of us,
or as the speaker before me correctly remarked,
are unambiguous. However, in a written text they can only be decoded correctly in connection with the information on time, place, sender, receivers, etc. given in the text itself or in the text environment, such as title page, imprint, introduction lead, etc.
The categories of speech and writing cannot, however, always be separated completely, as there are spoken texts which are reproduced in a written form (e.g. a statement made by a witness) and written texts which are spoken (e.g. lectures). Crystal & Davy (1969) therefore introduce the concept of complex medium, comprising "language which is spoken to be written, as in dictation, or language written to be spoken, as in news-broadcasting", and even subclassifications such as "language written to be read aloud as if written".
This shows that for our purposes it would not be wise to aim at a mere "labeling" of texts as regards medium. What we have to do is elicit specific features of the medium such as coincidence or discontinuity of text production and reception, indirect or direct form of communication, spontaneity of text production, opportunities for feedback operations, one-way communication, etc.
What to find out about the medium
In spoken communication, the dimension of medium includes the technical devices for information transfer (such as telephones or microphones), and these, of course, affect the production, reception and comprehension of the text. In written communication, on the other hand, it is the means of publication that is referred to as the "medium", i.e. newspaper, magazine, book, multi-volume encyclopedia, leaflet, brochure, etc., as well as subclassifications such as business news, literary supplement, etc.
The dimension of medium is relevant because it provides some clues as to the size and identity of the addressed audience. The readership of a national daily newspaper is not only much larger, but usually represents a different level of education and information with different expectations and different standards of stylistic quality from that of a medical, not to mention a neurosurgical, journal. The cheap paperback edition of a novel would be expected to reach a wider public than an expensive, multi-volume collection of Cantonese love poems. A personal letter is directed at one individual receiver whereas a standard business letter can be addressed to any number of companies on a mailing list, and a poster on an advertising board is targeted at anyone passing by, etc., etc.
In addition, the specification of the medium may give some clue as to the sender's intention (e.g. in the case of a poster or a picture postcard) and to the motive for the communication (e.g. in the case of a death announcement in a newspaper). Since the range and conventions of medium use may vary from culture to culture and from one generation to another, the specification of medium may even give some idea of the time and place of text production.
Although the choice of a particular medium obviously provides pre-signals for the receiver's expectations regarding the intended text function, function and medium must not be automatically associated or even equated. The receivers' expectations are certainly based on their experience with the medium in question, but, again, a particular sender may intend to surprise or disappoint the receiver by using a medium for a purpose quite different from that usually associated with it. For the translator it is important, too, to take into account the fact that the "same" media may have quite different functions in another culture.
As a general rule, however, the medium determines the receiver's expectations as to text function. A leaflet distributed at the entrance of a famous church is expected to contain basic information on the objects of interest in the form of a guided tour. The text in a guidebook usually has the functions of information plus advertising, and an article in an encyclopedia is expected to provide detailed information not only on the positive but also on the negative aspects of a place.
Example
a)This plan draws your attention to some of the main features of the building. More details may be obtained from guide books on sale in the shop. The Nave, begun in 1291 and finished in the 1350's in the Decorated Gothic style, is one of the widest Gothic naves in Europe. It is used for services throughout the year. The pulpit on the left commemorates Archbishops Temple and Lang, and the brass lectern has been used since 1686. The Great West Window is being repaired and cannot at present be seen. (First paragraphs of the information leaflet Welcome to York Minster.
There is a plan with numbers on the opposite page.)
b)THE MINSTER (by the late Chancellor F. Harrison)
Beloved to Yorkshiremen, renowned the world over. This is true. Of great and noble churches in this country, probably three attract the greatest number of visitors. These three are Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral and York Minster). (...) The east window deserves a note of its own. Seventy-six feet high and thirty-two feet broad, containing therefore more than two-thousand square feet of medieval glass - the great window at Gloucester Cathedral measuring seventy-two feet by thirty-eight feet, and containing more than two-thousand-three-hundred square feet of glass, but not wholly coloured - this great and grand window never ceases to excite admiration and wonder. The master-glazier, John Thornton, of Coventry, received for his work, in all, the sum of Ј 55 in three years, worth in modern currency - Ј 2,000? Who knows, even approximately? This was the pay of only one man. (From the brochure City and County of the City of York,
Official Guide, 112 pages. I have left out the 12 pages on the history of the Minster.).
c)There are many small old churches, quaint and often glorious towers and the breathtaking spectacle of the Minster. It took two-and-a-half centuries, from 1220 to 1470, to complete this poem in stone. Inside, a kaleidoscope of light explodes from windows of medieval stained glass that are among the art treasures of the world. (Last of the three paragraphs on York, from the book AA Illustrated Guide to Britain,
544 pages)
d)York Minster is the largest of England's medieval cathedrals. The result of 250 years of building, it shows a variety of styles. The transepts are the earliest part of the present building, dating from 1220-1260; the nave, chapter house, and vestibule were built in 1291-1345 in Decorated style; the choir in 1361, the central tower in 1400-1423, and the western towers in 1433-1474 in early and late Perpendicular. The Minster contains some of the earliest glass and the biggest acreage of stained glass in Britain. The lancet lights of the "Five Sisters" in the north transept are a particularly fine example of 13th-century grisaille glass. (Paragraph on York Minster - under the heading "York" -from The New Caxton Encyclopedia,
18 vols.)
For translation-oriented text analysis, it is most important to elicit features typical of the medium, i.e. features of content and/or form, and to classify them as culture-specific or transcultural or even universal. This is particularly relevant in those cases where the target text is to be transmitted through a medium or channel different from that of the source text.
How to obtain information about the medium
If the source text is not available in its original medium, but only in a copy or typescript (which actually occurs fairly frequently in translation practice), the translator must insist on having detailed information about the medium, as it is rather difficult to identify the medium from intratextual analysis alone. There may be some clues in the dimensions of the sender and his/her intention or motive; time and place, too, sometimes narrow the field of possible media. In some cases, the choice of medium is determined by convention since there are favourite media for particular communicative purposes in every culture (e.g. posters or newspaper advertisements for product promotion, leaflets for tourist information, etc.).
Checklist
The following questions may help to find out the relevant information about the dimension of medium or channel:
1.Has the text been taken from a spoken or a written communication? By which medium was it transmitted?
2.Which medium is used to present the text to the target audience? Is there any extratextual information on the medium?
3.What clues as to medium or channel can be inferred from other situational factors (sender, intention, motive, function)?
4.What conclusions can be drawn from the data and clues obtained about the medium as regards
(a)other extratextual dimensions, such as the addressees and their expectations, motive, and function, and
(b)the intratextual features?
Place of communication
The dimension of space refers not only to the place of text production, i.e. the actual situation of the sender and the text producer, but also, at least in connection with certain media, to the place of text reception. It cannot be equated with the dimension of medium. The dimension of space is of particular importance where languages exist in various geographical varieties (such as the Spanish spoken in Spain as opposed to Latin America or even Peru, Mexico, Argentina etc., and the English spoken in Great Britain as opposed to the United States, Australia, India etc..
Example
The Portuguese version of the information brochure published by the Tourist Office of Munich was accepted unhesitatingly as being correct and appropriate by a group of Brazilian teachers in a seminar on translation, whereas their colleagues from Portugal classified the text as "more or less understandable, but unidiomatic and not conforming to normal usage". In this case, an analysis of the dimension of place could not throw any light on this problem because the text had been produced in Munich for "Portuguese"-speaking receivers. As the name of the translator was not specified in the text imprint, the participants in the seminar could only assume that the translator - whether he or she was a native speaker or not - had used the Brazilian variety of Portuguese. The sender/initiator (the Tourist Office) had probably not been aware of the problem. For the German version of this brochure, however, the dimension of place (of reception) would suggest that the text is written in the variety used in Germany (as opposed to Austria or Switzerland).
In addition to the linguistic aspects, the dimension of space can be important for the comprehension and interpretation of a text in that the place of text production may be regarded as the centre of a "relative geography". The distance or significance of other places must often be judged in relation to this centre. The translator has to take into account that the "relative geography" from the standpoint of TT production may be quite different from that of ST production.
Example
a)The difference in cultural or social level could be called "downgrade" or "upgrade", depending on whether it is seen from the lower or the higher level.
b)The distance between London and Liverpool is much "shorter" as perceived by a Texan than by an Englishman,
c) The names of places, areas and tribes listed in Act 2, 9-11, do not make sense as a description of the "horizon of the Jewish world" unless Syria is assumed to be the place of text production, and not Jerusalem, where the Pentecostal event is set.
What to find out about the dimension of space
In the dimension of space we have to consider not only linguistic aspects but also cultural and political conditions. A text published in a country where literature is censored must be read "in another light" than a text whose author has not been subject to any restrictions, since authors under censorship often write "between the lines".
In addition to the name of the state or country the text comes from, it may even be necessary to know the exact area or town of text production in order to be able to interpret the deictic elements correctly. This applies to the ST as well as to the TT, which would normally be read in the target cultural environment.
Example
In the case of newspaper articles, the place where the paper is published is normally taken to be the place of text production as well. Therefore, readers of the Sunday Times can assume that the information "Mortgage cut in sight" refers to Great Britain, while all articles on the first page of the international edition of the Herald Tribune have to indicate the place the article refers to: "U.S. Banks Lower Prime Interest Rate", "In Leipzig, Protesters Fear Resurgence of Communist Power", "Tamil Guerrilla Army Nears Goal in Sri Lanka", etc. If correspondents send their reports from somewhere else, the place of text production is usually specified together with the author's name ("By David Binder, New York Times Service, Bucharest") or at the beginning of the text ("LEIPZIG, East Germany"), so that the reader can interpret a sentence as "Now everything is quiet around here again" correctly. In a translation, too, the dimension of place has to be specified either externally (e.g. in an introduction) or internally (e.g. "Now everything is quiet around Leipzig again").
Information about the place of text production also gives an indication of the cultural affiliation of the sender and/or the addressees, the medium (in the case of culture-bound or culture-specific media), the motive (at least where combined with the dimension of time) arid the in-tratextual features (such as regional dialect or deictic expressions).
How to obtain information about the dimension of space
As a rule, information about the dimension of space can be found in the text environment in the form of the place of publication, the name of the publishing company, the first edition details, or newspaper headlines, or in the secondary literature. Sometimes, it is presupposed to be part of the receiver's general background knowledge (e.g. in the case of publications by international organizations or institutions or by world-famous writers). From the intratextual point of view, certain linguistic features may provide a clue as to where the text was written or intended to be read.
Other clues may be obtained from the information about the sender (e.g.: Where did s/he live, work, etc.?), the addressed audience (e.g.: What culture-specific information may be presupposed to be known by the receiver?), medium (e.g.: Is it bound to a certain culture?), or motive (e.g.: Is it a culture-specific motive?).
Checklist
The following questions may help to find out the relevant information about the place of communication:
1.Where was the text produced or transmitted? Is any information on the dimension of space to be found in the text environment? Is any information on space presupposed to be part of the receiver's general background knowledge?
2.What clues as to the dimension of space can be inferred from other situational factors (sender, receiver, medium, motive)?
3.What conclusions can be drawn from the data and clues obtained about the dimension of space as regards
(a)other extratextual factors (sender, receiver, medium, motive) and
(b)the intratextual features?
Lecture 3.
The relevance of the dimension of time and text function
Time of communication
Every language is subject to constant change in its use and its norms. So the time of text production is, first and foremost, an important pre-signal for the historical state of linguistic development the text represents. This applies not only to language use as such (from the sender's point of view) but also to the historical comprehension of linguistic units (from the receiver's point of view), which is itself bound to a certain period or epoch, since linguistic changes are usually determined by socio-cultural changes.
Moreover, this process of change affects the area of text types. Certain genres are linked to a particular period (e.g. oracles and epic poems as opposed to weather reports and television plays), and, of course, genre conventions also undergo change. Depending on the age of the text, the receiver/translator may have totally different expectations as to the typical features of the text type in question. S/he may even expect obsolete forms that are not used any more.
Example
Being asked what they thought to be the typical syntactic feature of a German recipe, the majority of competent native speakers of German mention the subjunctive of the present tense: "Man nehme...", whereas modern German recipes are written exclusively in infinitive constructions. Today, thesubjunctive is used only to give a recipe an old-fashioned touch, as if it was from Grandmother s Recipe Book.
In addition to the linguistic aspects, the dimension of time can throw some light on the communicative background of the sender and the addressed audience, and thus provide a clue to understanding the sender's intention. In the case of text types of topical interest, such as news items and news reports, political commentaries, election speeches, weather reports, etc., the dimension of time can be the decisive criterion as to whether there is any point in a text being translated at all, or, if there is, under which circumstances and with which skopos it may be worthwhile.
In connection with the dimension of space, deictic elements refer directly to the situation. Like spatial deixis, temporal deixis can only be interpreted correctly if the receiver knows the time of text production.
Example
In the International Herald Tribune
of January 9, 1990, we find the following notice: "NEW YORK - The hopes entertained that the grippe was relaxing have been destroyed by the mortality returns of yesterday (Jan. 7), which show an increase of nearly 100 over the toll given three days ago, with 134 deaths traceable to the epidemic." No need to be alarmed: the notice is to be found under the heading "100, 75 and 50 years ago", and dates from 1890.
However, it may also be necessary to know the genre conventions in this respect, as the following example shows.
Example
In Madras, I was surprised to read in the morning paper lying on my breakfast table that "there was a train crash this afternoon". Of course, the text had probably been written late at night, and the author was quite right to say "this afternoon" - but in a German newspaper (and normally in British and American papers as well) the author would have written yesterday afternoon
because it seems to be a convention here for newspaper writers to imagine themselves in the situation of the reader who receives the text the next morning, whereas obviously the Indian readers are expected to put themselves in the writer's shoes.
 Sometimes it may be wise for the translator to check on the validity of the information given in the source text (if possible) or at least to point out to the initiator that some information in the text may not be up to date.
Example
In some tourist information leaflets, the information on opening hours, prices etc. or warnings such as "is being repaired" (cf. example 3.1.4./2a) are not up to date. For example, the latest (translated) published information on the famous Altamira caves in Northern Spain specifies that the caves can be visited by anybody "on request". When I went there to have a look at the prehistoric paintings, I found out that there was a pavilion with beautiful reproductions of the paintings - but the caves had not been open to the public for the past few years. Only persons presenting proof of a particular research project were allowed to enter.
The dimension of time influences directly or indirectly the dimensions of sender (e.g.: Is s/he a contemporary of the receiver/translator or not? What situational presuppositions can be made?), intention, audience (expectations, temporal distance between ST and TT addressees), medium (historical or modern forms of medium), motive (e.g. topicality), and, above all, intratextual features (e.g. presuppositions, historical language variety, deictic elements).
The traditions and conventions of translation
The dimension of time encompasses not only the time of ST production and reception but also that of TT production (= translation) and reception. The original communicative situation as well as the inter-cultural communicative situation are determined by their respective temporal contexts.
In connection with the dimension of time, we must therefore look at the traditional translations of classical texts and consider the problems involved in translating or re-translating old texts. Whether and how the dimension of time has to be taken into account for the translation of, say, Homer's Iliad,
Shakespeare's King Lear,
or Cervantes' Don Quixote
depends on the translation skopos. Popovic ([1977]1981: 103f.) distinguishes between the "synchronous translation" of a contemporary author and modern translations of older texts, which in his opinion can be either "re-creative" (i.e. actualizing) or "conservative" (i.e. historicising).
Which approach is regarded as the "correct" one depends on the prevailing translation tradition or concept, which may be regarded as akind of culture-specific convention.
How to obtain information on the dimension of time
Information on the dimension of time can sometimes be inferred from thedate of publication of the text or other clues from the text environment, although this is not always reliable, as texts are often published yearsafter they have been written. However, they cannot be published text type, it will be mainly the following intratextual features that are determined by the motive of communication: content (insofar as the motive is explicitly mentioned in the text), vocabulary and sentence structure (e.g. in a memorial address), suprasegmental features (memorial address vs. election speech), and non-verbal elements (e.g. black edging round a death announcement).
How to obtain information about the motive for communication
Although the motive for communication is closely linked with the dimension of time, the two factors must not be confused. While the dimension of time is part of the communicative situation (in the narrower sense), the dimension of motive relates the communicative situation and the participants to an event that is outside, or rather prior to, the situation.
It is not always easy therefore (and not always relevant to translation!) to find out which event has motivated a certain text. Sometimes the motive is referred to in the text or mentioned in the text environment (e.g. in the title: To Honor Roman Jakobson on the Occasion of his 70th Birthda
); but there are communicative situations in which the motive is only an indirect reason for the author to deal with a loosely connected subject.
Example
On March 12th, 1984, the Spanish daily paper El Pais
published a commentary under the title "El Dfa de la Mujer" (International Women's Day). It is the motive for text production this title alludes to and not the subject matter, because the text deals with the situation of working women in Spain in 1984. The newspaper reader was expected to be familiar with the occasion, International Women's Day, since it had been commented on quite frequently at the time. If the text is to be translated, it is the motive for translation (as well as the dimensions of time and place) that has to be taken into account. Only a few days later the date will have been pushed into the background by other events, and a title like "International Women's Day" will arouse specific expectations about the subject matter, which the text cannot meet.
As is illustrated by the example, the dimension of motive is of as much interest to the translator as that of time, because s/he has to contrast the motive for ST production with the motive for TT production and find out the impact this contrast has on the transfer decisions. While the motive for ST production is often to be found in the "environment" of the sender or text producer, the motive for TT production can be inferred from what is known about the transfer situation, i.e. the initiator and the translation brief. The effect of the motive on intra-textual features - as opposed to that of the dimension of time - is often merely an indirect one.
We can restate that the clues as to the motive or motive type are to be inferred from certain situational factors, such as medium (e.g. political section of a newspaper), place and time (in connection with the receiver's general background knowledge), and, of course, text function, if this is specified by unambiguous pre-signals, such as genre designations (e.g. "protocol") or text-type features (e.g. black edging). The information obtained on the sender and the intention usually permits only indirect conclusions as to the motive for communication.
Checklist
The following questions may help to find out the relevant information about the motive for communication:
1.Why was the text written or transmitted? Is there any information on the motive of communication to be found in the text environment? Is the ST receiver expected to be familiar with the motive?
2.Was the text written for a special occasion? Is the text intended to be read or heard more than once or regularly?
3.What clues as to the motive for communication can be inferred from other extratextual dimensions (sender, intention, receiver, medium, place, time, function)?
4.What conclusions can be drawn from the data and clues obtained about the motive for communication as regards
(a)other extratextual factors (expectations of the receiver, sender and intention), and
(b)the intratextual features?
5. What problems can arise from the difference between the motive for ST production and the motive for translation?
Text function
The relationship between text function and genre
Let me briefly restate that the notion of text function means the communicative function, or the combination of communicative functions, which a text fulfils in its concrete situation of production/reception. It is derived from the specific configuration of extratextual factors (sender/sender's role, intention, receiver/receiver's expectation, medium, place, time, and motive). The notion of text function is related to the situational aspect of communication, whereas the notion of genre is related to the structural aspect of the text-in-function. It is like looking at the two sides of a coin: they cannot be separated, but they are not the identical.
As was pointed out above, text can be classified on various levels of generalization. It is therefore not surprising that some authors specify text types as "newspaper reports", "sermons", or "resolutions", while others prefer a more general categorisation into "informative", "expressive", or "operative" texts.
Literariness as a text function
The notion of text function as a particular configuration of situational factors can be illustrated by the special function of literary texts. The senders of a literary text are usually individual authors who are also text producers and who in the literary context are known as "writers". Their intention is not to describe "reality", but to motivate personal insights about reality by describing an (alternative) fictitious world. Literary texts are primarily addressed to receivers who have a specific expectation determined by their literary experience, and a certain command of the literary code. As a rule, literary texts are transmitted in writing (= medium), although sometimes orally transmitted texts (such as fairy tales) are included in literature as well. The situational factors (place, time, motive) may not be of great significance in intracultural literary communication but they do play an important part in literary translation because they convey the culture-specific characteristics of both the source and the target situation.
The importance of ST function for translation
The basic principle of functionalism in translation is the orientation towards the (prospective) function of the target text. Since I have argued that a change of function is the normal case, and the preservation of function the special case in the process of intercultural text transfer.
If a translation is an offer of information about the source text, there can be two fundamental kinds of relationship between source and target text. Here again we find the two translation theories which have split translation scholars into two camps: the supporters of liberty and the adherents to fidelity. The target text can be (a) a document of a past communicative action in which an SC sender made an offer of information to an SC receiver by means of the source text, and (b) an instrument in a new TC communicative action, in which a TC receiver receives an offer of information for which the ST provides the material. Accordingly, we can distinguish between two translation "types": documentary and instrumental translation.
Documentary translations (such as word-for-word translation, literal translation) serve as a document of an SC communication between the author and the ST receiver, whereas the instrumental translation is a communicative instrument in its own right, conveying a message directly from the ST author to the TT receiver. An instrumental translation can have the same or a similar or analogous function as the ST.
In a documentary translation, certain aspects of the ST or the whole ST-in-situation are reproduced for the TT receivers, who is conscious of "observing" a communicative situation of which they are not a part. A documentary translation can focus on any of the features on each rank of the source text, pushing others into the background. In a word-for-word translation, for example, which aims to reproduce the features of the source language system, the focus is on the morphological, lexical, and syntactic structures presented in the source text, whereas textuality is bound to be neglected.
An instrumental translation, on the other hand, serves as an independent message-transmitting instrument in a new communicative action in TC, and is intended to fulfill its communicative purpose without the receiver being aware of reading or hearing a text which, in a different form, was used before in a different communicative action. This translation type comprises three forms. First, if the target text can fulfill the same function(s) as the source text, we speak of an "equi-functional" translation (used, for example, in the case of operating instructions or business correspondence). Second, if the ST functions cannot be realized as such by the TT receiver, they may be adapted by the translator, provided that the TT functions are compatible with the ST functions and do not offend against the sender's intention (e.g. the translation of Swift's Gulliver s Travels
for children). This form is referred to as "heterofunctional translation". The third form is intended to achieve a similar effect by reproducing in the TC literary context the function the ST has in its own SC literary context. This form is often found in the translation of poetry.
How to obtain information about text function
The most important source of information is, again, the text environment, since designations like "operating instructions" or "anecdote" call on the receivers' reading experience of the text type in question and build up a specific expectation as to text function(s). It is obvious that these "labels" can be misleading if they are used inadequately by the author or sender (whether intentionally or unintentionally). On the other hand, it may be assumed that in normal communication such designations are in fact intended as a guideline for the receiver.
If there is no genre designation, the text function or functions have to be inferred from the configuration of the external factors. This is why text function should be analysed last when as much information as possible is available. As was illustrated by the example of literary texts, the intention of the sender and the expectations of the receiver are the crucial dimensions in this respect. However, other factors may also narrow the range of possible functions, such as sender (e.g. a candidate for presidency), medium and place (e.g. a public speech in the market place of a mountain village), time (e.g. shortly before the general elections), and motive (e.g. an election campaign).
The pragmatic relationships between sender, receiver, medium, and motive, provide the translator with a number of pre-signals announcing a particular function, which will be either confirmed or rejected by the subsequent analysis of the intratextual features. If the translator finds his or her expectations confirmed, s/he has reason to believe that s/he has elicited the correct function - if not, there are two possible explanations: either the author has intentionally violated the norms and conventions of the text type, or the translator has interpreted the pre-signals wrongly and therefore has to go through the process of eliciting the text function on the basis of pragmatic pre-signals again.
Checklist
The following questions may help to find out the relevant information about text function:
1. What is the text function intended by the sender? Are there any hints as to the intended function in the text environment, such as text-type designations?
2. What clues as to the function of the text can be inferred from other extratextual dimensions (motive, medium, receiver, intention)?
3.Are there any indications that the receiver may use the text in a function other than that intended by the sender?
4. What conclusions can be drawn from the data and clues obtained about text function as regards
(a)other extratextual dimensions (sender, intention, receiver, medium, time, place, and motive), and
(b)the intratextual features?
The interdependence of extratextual factors
The checklist questions suggested in connection with the extratextual factors illustrate the interdependence of the extratextual factors on the one hand, and of the extratextual and intratextual factors (which have so far not been specified), on the other. Data and clues about a single factor can be derived from the data and clues obtained about the other factors.
The most important principle, however, is that of recursiveness. This type of analysis is no one-way process, but contains any number of loops, in which expectations are built up, confirmed, or rejected, and where knowledge is gained and extended and understanding constantly modified. This applies not only to the analysis of the text as a whole and to the individual text factors but also, if the analysis and translation of microstructures leads incidentally to new discoveries requiring previous transfer decisions to be corrected, to the processing of smaller text units such as chapters or even paragraphs.
The interdependence of the extratextual factors is illustrated by a diagram (Figure 5), in which arrows are used to show the course of the analytical procedure. Those steps which yield reliable data are depicted by a continuous line, while the steps which merely lead to clues are represented by a dotted line.
2. “Intratextual Factors in Translation Text Analysis”
Lecture 1. Basic notions
It is the verbal elements (lexis, sentence structure and the suprasegmental features, i.e. the "tone" of the text) which are most important for conveying the message. In both written and spoken texts suprasegmental features serve to highlight or focus certain parts of the text and to push others into the background. All these elements have not only an informative (i.e. denotative), but also a stylistic (i.e. con-notative) function.
The intratextual features are influenced to a large extent by situational factors (e.g. the geographical origin of the sender, the special requirements of the chosen medium, the conditions of the time and place of text production, etc.), but they can also be determined by genre conventions or by the sender's specific communicative intention, which affects the choice of the intratextual means of communication. We also have to account for the fact that stylistic decisions are frequently interdependent. If, for example, the sender decides on a nominal style in the area of lexis, this will naturally affect the choice of sentence structure.
We distinguish eight intratextual factors: subject matter, content, presuppositions, composition, nonverbal elements, lexis, sentence structure, and suprasegmental features. In practical analysis it has proved effective to deal with the factors in the order in which they appear here. However, there is no real reason why this cannot be changed, since the principle of recursiveness again allows any feedback loops which may be deemed necessary.
In the practical application of the model it may not always be necessary to go through the whole process of intratextual analysis step by step. Some translation briefs will be such that merely a cursory glance at the intratextual features is sufficient (just to find out, for example, whether or not the framing of the text corresponds to genre conventions), whereas others may require a detailed analysis right down to the level of morphemes or phonemes.
Example
If a strongly conventionalized text, such as a weather report, has to be translated in such a form that the target text conforms to the target-culture conventions of the text type, there is no need to analyse all the intratextual details of the source text, once it has been stated that they are "conventional". Since the intratextual framing of the TT has to be adapted to TC conventions anyway, the intratextual framing of the ST may be regarded as irrelevant for translation.
When we analyse the linguistic features of a particular text, we soon realize that they all have to be evaluated in a different way, depending on the function they have in the text. There are features that depend on situational conditions which cannot be controlled or modified by the sender (e.g. pragmatics of time and space, geographical or socio-cultural background of the sender himself) or features that may have been determined by a decision taken prior to text production (e.g. choice of medium or addressee orientation). Then, there are other features which are dictated by social norms (e.g. text-type or genre conventions and so on). During the process of analysis, therefore, the translator constantly has to go back to factors which have already been analysed (= principle of recursiveness). Lastly, there is a type of feature which depends on the sender deciding on one out of several alternative means of expression, a decision determined by the intention to produce a certain effect on the receiver.
General considerations on the concept of style
In order to be able to understand a stylistic signal or sign, the receiver has to be equipped, like the sender, with a knowledge or command of stylistic patterns and of the functions that they are normally used for. This knowledge is part of text competence and will enable the receiver to infer the intentions or attitudes of the sender from the style presented in the text. It is based on the fact that most communicative actions are conventionalized and that text producers almost always proceed according to a given pattern. In ordinary communication an intuitive, unconscious, or "passive" knowledge of stylistic patterns will be more than sufficient to ensure the comprehension of the text. However, the receiver/translator cannot manage without an active command of such patterns of expression both in SL and TL, since it enables them to analyse the function of the stylistic elements used in the source text, and to decide which of these elements may be appropriate for achieving the target function and which have to be changed or adapted.
Subject matter
How to obtain information about the subject matter
As was mentioned above, the conventions of certain text types seem to dictate that the title or heading or the title context (comprising main title, subtitle(s) and the like) represent a kind of thematic programme. An example of this is the following title of a linguistic article: "Understanding what is meant from what is said: a study in conversationally conveyed requests" (Clark & Lucy 1975).
Where the information is not given by a thematic title like this, the subject matter of a text can be formulated in an introductory lead, as is very often the case, for example, in newspaper articles (cf. Liiger 1977: 49ff.) or in the first sentence or paragraph which can then be regarded as a kind of "topic sentence" paraphrasing the thematic essence of the text.
Example
The Soviet Disunion
UNITED IT STANDS ...DIVIDED IT FALLS
While 1989 was the year of eastern Europe, 1990 may be the year of the Soviet Union. Confronted by growing nationalist unrest and economic mayhem, the empire is beginning to come apart at the seams. James Blitz in Moscow reports on the crisis in the Kremlin (...). (The Sunday Times, 1
January 1990, p. A l.)
Example
Title: Ford Is Rebuffed By Mazda Sub-title: No Chance Seen For Larger Stake
TOKYO - Mazda Motor Corp. said Monday that it saw no opportunity for Ford Motor Co. to enlarge its stake in the Japanese company and that Mazda had no plans to raise funds by issuing new shares, warrant bonds or convertibles. (...) (InternationalHerald Tribune,
9 January, 1990, p. 9)
This applies not only to titles which are a shortened paraphrase of the text, but also to descriptive titles, e.g. of literary works.
Example
The original title El sigh de las luces
("The Age of Enlightenment") indicates the subject matter of the novel, while the titles of the English and the German translation (Explosion in A Cathedral Explosion in der Kathedrale)
use the name of a picture that plays a symbolic part in the story. The reader, however, cannot recognize it as such and will probably interpret it as an indication of the subject matter or content. This may lead to a (wrong) classification of the book as a kind of thriller.
If the subject matter is not described in the title or title-context, it can be elicited by reducing the textual macro-structures to certain basic semantic propositions or information units, which constitute a kind of resume or "condensation" of the text. Occasionally, the translator is even asked to produce a short version of the text (i.e. a summary, abstract, or resume) in the target language. In translation teaching, the production of summaries can be used for checking text comprehension.
Condensing and summarizing, however, does not in all texts lead to an elicitation of the real subject matter, since in some cases this is obscured by a "false" subject occupying the foreground of the text. In these cases it is the analysis of other intratextual factors, mainly of lexis, which may lead to success.
The crucial concept in the analysis of the subject matter at the level of lexical items is that of isotopy. Isotopic features are semes shared by various lexical items in a text, thus interconnecting the lexical items and forming a kind of chain or line of isotopies throughout the text. The lexical items linked by isotopy are referred to as the "isotopic level", which may indicate the subject matter(s) of the text. There can be various isotopic levels in a text, either complementing each other or hierarchically subordinate to one another.
Checklist
The following questions may help to find out the relevant information about the subject matter of the text:
1.Is the source text a thematically coherent single text or a text combination?
2.What is the subject matter of the text (or of each component of the combination)? Is there a hierarchy of compatible subjects?
3.Does the subject matter elicited by internal analysis correspond to the expectation built up by external analysis?
4.Is the subject matter verbalized in the text (e.g. in a topic sentence at the beginning of the text) or in the text environment (title, heading, sub-title, introduction, etc.)?
5.Is the subject matter bound to a particular (SL, TL, or other) cultural context?
6.Do the TC conventions dictate that the subject matter of the text should be verbalized somewhere inside or outside the text?
Content
General considerations
Where the translator has a good command of the source language and is fully conversant with the rules and norms governing text production, s/he will usually have little or no difficulty in determining the content of a text. Even so, it would still be useful to have some means of checking this intuitive understanding. It would be even more useful, of course, to have some guidelines available in translator training, where competence in this area is still inadequate.
Paraphrase as a procedure for content analysis
By "content" we usually mean the reference of the text to objects and phenomena in an extralinguistic reality, which could as easily be a fictitious world as the real world. This reference is expressed mainly by the semantic information contained in the lexical and grammatical structures (e.g. words and phrases, sentence patterns, tense, mood, etc.) used in the text. These structures complement each other, reduce each other's ambiguity, and together form a coherent context.
Therefore, the starting point for the analysis of content has to be the information carried by the text elements linked on the surface of the text by the text-linguistic linking devices, such as logical connections, topic-comment relationships, functional sentence perspective, etc.
Since at this stage the external analysis of the communicative situation has been completed, the meaning of the text can be elicited, as it were, "through the filter" of extratextual knowledge.
Analysing the content of syntactically or semantically complicated texts can be made easier by a simplifying paraphrase of the information units, which can be formulated independently of the sentence structure. However, in so far as they are explicitly verbalized in the text, the logical relationships between these units should be noted. This procedure permits the translator to identify (and possibly compensate for) presuppositions, and even defects in coherence, which frequently occur in texts.
These paraphrases have to be treated with great caution, however. The paraphrased information units form a new text which is in no way identical to the original. Paraphrases can only be used in order to simplify text structures, making them more transparent. When paraphrasing lexical items we also have to take account of the connotative content, which has to be preserved, or at least marked, in the paraphrased text.
In any case, it must not be the simplified paraphrase which should be taken as a starting point for translation, but the original source text.
Connotations
The amount of information verbalized in a text includes not only denotative but also connotative (or "secondary") meaning, i.e. the information expressed by a language element by virtue of its affiliation to a certain linguistic code (stylistic levels, registers, functional style, regional and social dialects, etc.). By selecting one specific element in preference to another from a number of possible elements the author assigns a secondary meaning to the text. Since the connotative meaning can only be analysed in detail in connection with the stylistic values of lexis, sentence structure and suprasegmental features, I would recommend at this stage of the analysis provisionally marking those text elements which can be intuitively classified as "probably connotative". The extratextual category of text function often provides a certain expectation here.
Example
Kate Saunders in The Sunday Times,
7 January 1990: Career woman - or just the little woman?
Chic dinner tables are resounding with funereal orations over the twitching corpse of the women's movement - they come to bury it, certainly not to praise it. It was so selfish, so uncaring, so unnatural - surely home-building is nicer and more fulfilling than hacking through the professional jungle? The Eighties' ideal was the woman who ran a business, made breakfast appointments with her own husband, and spent 20 minutes' "quality time" a day with her children. But women are wondering now whether the effort of juggling home and career was worthwhile. All you got for your pains was nervous exhaustion, and kids who spoke Icelandic because they were brought up by the au pair. How much simpler to give up the struggle and devote yourself to stoking the home fires. Part of the problem seems to be that women are discovering the real snag about equality - work is a pain. Any man could have told them this. (...)
Certain connotations are a part of every speaker's communicative knowledge whether they speak the standard language or a particular regional and/or social dialect. They are linked so closely to a lexical item that they would be specified in the dictionary (e.g. kid
is marked "slang" in OALD 1963, and "informal" in OALD 1989, whereas snag
is marked "colloquial" in OALD 1963 and not marked at all in OALD 1989). Connotations such as these, even though they may change in the course of time, must be considered to be part of the "linguistic competence" of sender and receiver. Other connotations, however, are merely valid for certain persons, since they can only "work" if the participants know particular social, political, regional or cultural phenomena, e.g. career woman
vs. the little woman
or the allusion to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
in example 3.2.274. Such connotations belong to the "horizon" of sender and receiver.
In his famous book How to Be an Alien,
George Mikes gives a humorous example.
Example
"You foreigners are so clever," said a lady to me some years ago. First, thinking of the great amount of foreign idiots and half-wits I had had the honour of meeting, I considered this remark exaggerated but complimentary. Since then I learnt that it was far from it. These few words expressed the lady's contempt and slight disgust for foreigners. If you look up the word clever
in any English Dictionary, you will find that the dictionaries are out of date and mislead you on this point. According to the Pocket Oxford Dictionary,
for instance, the word means quick and neat in movement, skilful, talented, ingenious. (...) All nice adjectives, expressing valuable and estimable characteristics. A modern Englishman, however, uses the word clever
in the sense: shrewd, sly, furtive, surreptitious, treacherous, sneaking, crafty, un-English, un-Scottish, un-Welsh (Mikes 1984: 42).
The "internal situation"
The information in the text can be "factual", i.e. based on the facts of what is conventionally regarded as "reality" by sender and receiver, or "fictional", i.e. referring to a different, fictitious world imagined or invented by the author, which is quite separate from the "real world" in which the communicative action takes place. However, this distinction is not of immediate importance for content analysis. Fictionality is a pragmatic property which is assigned to a text by the participants in communicative interaction. Its definition depends on the notion of reality and the norms of textuality prevailing in the society in question. If the notion of reality changes, then a text which was intended to be factual might be read as fictional, or vice versa. If we look at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
or George Orwell's 1984
we might come to the conclusion that a fictional text describing a Utopian situation could even become factual if reality were to change accordingly. However, the question of fictionality or factuality really becomes relevant to translation when we consider presuppositions.
Nevertheless, an analysis of content will have to specify whether or not the internal situation of the text is identical with the external situation. If it is not, the internal situation will have to be analysed separately, using the same set of WH-questions applied in the external analysis. This is very often the case in fictional texts, and in factual texts of the complex text type which contain embedded texts of another category.
In an internal situation there might be an internal sender (speaker, narrator), who may adopt various attitudes or perspectives towards the narration (e.g. "author's perspective", or "camera-eye" perspective), or there might be an implicit reader or listener, and implicit conditions of time and place; there may also be hints as to the medium used, the motive for communication and the function assigned to the particular embedded text. The internal situation may even, like the famous Russian doll, contain further embedded situations.
The situational factors of an embedded text are normally mentioned explicitly in the frame text, whereas the internal situation of a fictional text (i.e. its "setting") can often only be inferred from hidden clues or indirect hints, such as proper names of persons and places, references to culture-specific realities, elements of regional dialect in a dialogue, etc.
However, there are cases where an analysis of the external situation yields information on the internal situation, as shown in the following example.
Example
In one of his short stories written in his French exile in Paris, the Argentinian author Julio Cortazar describes an urban environment which is not named explicitly, but hinted at by the information that from the window of his multistorey apartment block the auctorial narrator sees a sign saying Hotel de Belgique.
The reference to the setting is not crucial to the interpretation of the story, which deals with the problem of daily routine and the hopelessness of life in modern society. The plot might equally well be set in any big city of the Western industrial world. But still, by describing (or pretending to describe) the view from his own window, the author gives a "personal touch" to the story, which makes it more authentic. This may be important for the translator when she has to decide whether to translate the description of a routine breakfast situation (tomamos cafe con leche)
by "we drink our morning coffee" (neutral), "we have our coffee with milk" (non-specific strangeness) or "we have cafe au lait" (specific strangeness, explicitly referring to France as the setting of the story) or even "we have our ham and eggs" (receiver-oriented adaptation).
Checklist
The following questions may help to elicit the relevant information
about the content of the text:
How are the extratextual factors verbalized in the text?
Which are the information units in the text?
Is there a difference between the external and the internal situation?
4.Are there any gaps of cohesion and/or coherence in the text? Can they be filled without using additional information or material?
5.What conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of content with reference to other intratextual factors, such as presuppositions, composition, and the stylistic features?
Presuppositions
What is a presupposition
The notion of presupposition is rather complex because What we mean here is the "pragmatic presupposition". These presuppositions are implicitly assumed by the speaker, who takes it for granted that this will also be the case with the listener. Communication can therefore only be successful if speaker and listener both implicitly assume the same presuppositions in sufficient quantity.
For example, the answer Twelfth Night or What You Will
presupposes the knowledge on the part of the receiver that this is the title of a play, and this presupposition forms the basis on which the joke "works".
In everyday communication it is usually the factors of the communicative situation which are presupposed to be known to the participants and which are therefore not mentioned explicitly. Nevertheless, they have to be taken into consideration when the utterance is made. If, for example, the referent of the information is a person present in the room, the speaker may lower or raise his/her voice or choose simple or complicated or even coded formulations, etc. Of course, it is usually superfluous to mention the things and persons one can point at.
Presuppositions comprise all the information that the sender expects (= presupposes) to be part of the receiver's horizon. Since the sender wants the utterance to be understood, it seems logical that s/he will only presuppose information which the receiver can be expected to be able to "reconstruct".
Presuppositions may refer not only to the factors and conditions of the situation and to the realities of the source culture, but can also imply facts from the author's biography, aesthetic theories, common text types and their characteristics, metric dispositions, details of subject matter, motives, the topoi and iconography of a certain literary period, ideology, religion, philosophy and mythical concepts, cultural and political conditions of the time, media and forms of representation, the educational situation, or the way a text has been handed down.
Since it is one of the social conventions of communication that an utterance must be neither trivial nor incomprehensible, the sender has to judge the situation, the general background knowledge of the addressee, and the relevance of the information that will be transmitted in the text, in order to decide which presuppositions can be made and which cannot. This convention applies not only to the relationship between the ST sender and the ST receiver, but also to that between the TT producer, i.e. the translator, and the TT receiver. The translator has to take account of the fact that a piece of information that might be "trivial" to the ST receivers because of their source-cultural background knowledge (and therefore is not mentioned in the source text) may be unknown to the TT audience because of their target-cultural background knowledge (and therefore has to be mentioned in the target text) - or vice versa.
How to identify presuppositions in the text
Since a presupposition is by definition a piece of information that is not verbalized, it cannot be "spotted" in the text. In their role as ST receivers, translators are familiar with the source culture and - ideally -understand the presupposed information in the same way as a source-culture receiver. This makes it rather difficult to discover the presuppositions which are contained in the text.
In order to identify the presuppositions, the translator has first of all to ascertain which culture or "world" the text refers to (which may have already been established in the content analysis). Here, an important distinction must be made between factual and fictional texts. Factual texts claim to make a proposition about reality (as generally accepted in the culture in question) whereas fictional texts make no such claim - or at least not in the same way as factual texts. The difference lies in the relationship between the text and the (assumed) reality. Fictional texts are, of course, as real as factual texts, and fictitious information can be contained both in fictional and factual texts.
The categorization of a text as factual or fictional does not primarily depend on the structure of the text itself. It is the author and, above all, the reader who classifies the text according to the concept of reality prevailing in their culture - a concept which is, of course, determined by philosophical and sociological conventions. A text intended to be factual by the ST sender can therefore be "understood" as fictional (and vice versa) by a TT receiver who has a different, culture-specific view of what is "real".
If the ST is "anchored" in the world of the source culture, some information on this world will usually be presupposed in the text because of the maxim of relevance, to put it in Gricean terms. If, on the other hand, the ST refers to the world of the TT receiver, which cannot be assumed to be familiar to the ST receiver, it would seem logical for the ST producer to verbalize a certain amount of information for the ST receiver which then would seem irrelevant to the TT receiver. In either case, the translator will normally adjust the level of explicitness to the (assumed) general background knowledge of the intended TT audience using, for example, expansion or reduction procedures.
If the ST refers to a world that is equally "distant" to both the ST and the TT receivers, it is less probable that translation problems will arise from the contrast of ST and TT presuppositions. In these cases the subject matter dealt with in the ST can be regarded as "generally communicable" or, at least, as "transculturally communicable", i.e. between the two cultures involved in the translation process.
The level of explicitness varies according to text type and text function. It is interesting in this context to note that in fictional texts the situation is often made more explicit than in non-fictional texts. While the comprehension of factual texts is based on the fact that sender and receiver share one model of reality, the fictional text has to start building up a model of its own, either referring explicitly to a realistic model or creating a fictitious one in the text, which can then be related in some degree to an existing realistic model. It can even be contrary to the normal truth values of non-fictional utterances (e.g. in fairy tales). A fictional text must, however, also contain some reference or analogy to the receivers' reality because otherwise they would not be able to find access to the world of the text.
If the information on the internal situation is hidden in certain elements of a fictional text, such as in proper names, regional or social dialect (e.g. Shaw's Pygmalion)
etc., it is often extremely difficult to transmit it to the target text, as for instance in the following example, because in a literary text it is often not appropriate to use substitutions, explanatory translations or footnotes.
Example
In Ana Maria Matute's short story Pecado de omision
the characters are socially classified by their names. The main character, a simple village boy who in spite of his talents does not get the chance to train for a profession, is only called by his Christian name Lope,
whereas his class mate, whose father can afford to let him study law, is introduced by Christian name and surname: ManuelEnriquez.
Lope's uncle, the village mayor, has the rather pompous name Emeterio Ruiz Heredia;
the school teacher is referred to
by the respectful combination of don
together with his Christian name (don Lorenzo).
The simple shepherd with whom Lope has to stay in the mountains cannot even boast an individual name: he is called Rogue el Mediano
(i.e. "Roque the middle one").
These hidden clues cannot be explained to the TT receiver without running the risk of losing the literary charm of the text. Fortunately, most authors do not rely exclusively on implicit characterizations, but include some explicit hints, as does Ana Maria Matute in the above-mentioned text.
Presupposition indicators
The probability of presuppositions being present can be calculated from the distance of the ST and TT receiver to the cultural environment of the subject matter, as well as from the level of explicitness and the level of redundancy. Text contains certain "elements of crystallization" which may indicate presuppositions. These elements might be attached to certain syntactic or lexical structures, such as the gerund, infinitive, or passive constructions, modal auxiliary verbs or valences of lexemes, as in the following example.
Example
"John will be picked up at the station. Peter is always in time." Since the verb to pick up
requires two actants, semantically specifiable as agent and patient, the reader will automatically know that Peter
has to refer to the person who is going to pick up John at the station. If the two sentences are to constitute a text, the existence of the agent is presupposed in the first sentence .
Other signals pointing to presuppositions can be provided by the intra-textual dimensions of subject matter, content, sentence structure, and suprasegmental features. The negation left out in an utterance meant to be ironic can, for example, be signalled by a certain intonation: "How very, very clever of you!" Non-verbal elements, such as a photo showing the skyscraper environment of the "immaculate garden flat", can also illustrate presupposed situational conditions.
The analysis of the extratextual dimensions of sender, receiver, time, place, and motive of communication can also reveal presupposed information, as has been pointed out above. With their TC competence, translators will be able to check the comprehensibility of the verbalized information from the TT receiver's point of view. Thus, any possible information gap or surplus in the background knowledge of the intended TT receiver, as described by the translation brief, can be localized and, if necessary, compensated for.
Checklist
The following questions may help to discover the presuppositions made in the source text:
1.Which model of reality does the information refer to?
2.Is the reference to reality verbalized explicitly in the text?
3.Are there any implicit allusions to a certain model of reality?
4.Does the text contain redundancies which might be superfluous for a TT receiver?
5.What information presupposed to be known to the ST receiver has to be verbalized for the TT receiver?
Lecture 2. Text Composition
General considerations
The text has an informational macrostructure (i.e. composition and order of information units) consisting of a number of micro-structures. The text segments forming the macrostructure are marked or delimited primarily by the continuity or discontinuity of tenses.
There are several reasons why both the macro and microstruc-ture of the text are important aspects of a translation-oriented text analysis.
1.If a text is made up of different text segments with different situational conditions, the segments may require different translation strategies according to their different functions.
2.The special part that the beginning and end of a text play in its comprehension and interpretation means that these may have to be analysed in detail in order to find out how they guide the reception process and influence the effect of the whole text.
3.For certain genres, there are culture-specific conventions as to their macro and/or microstructure. The analysis of text composition can therefore yield valuable information about the text type (and, perhaps, the text function).
4.In very complex or incoherent texts, the analysis of informational microstructures may serve to find out the basic information or subject matter of the text.
Text ranks
A source text can be part of a unit of higher rank, which we may call a text combination or hyper-text. Thus, a short story or a scientific article might be included in an anthology or a collection, in which the other texts constitute a frame of reference, and a novel might be intended to form part of a trilogy or tetralogy. The different texts can be related and linked in various ways.
In the practice of professional translating, the parts of a text combination are sometimes translated by different translators, as is shown in the following example.
Example
The German version of the textbook on linguistics edited by Andr6 Martinet (Martinet 1973) was produced by two translators: Chapters 1 to 25 were translated by I. Rehbein, and Chapters 26 to 51 by S. Stelzer. Each of the chapters is an independent text and, at the same time, part of a larger unit, whose characteristics have to be taken into account by both translators.
The inclusion of a text in a unit of higher rank is usually signalled by the title and/or the title context, which can be regarded as a sort of "hyper-sentence" or "metacommunicative utterance".
On the highest rank this hyper-sentence is often replaced by the information about the communicative situation which the receiver infers from extratextual clues. If the extratextual analysis shows, however, that the situation of the TT will differ considerably from that of the ST and that the TT receiver cannot infer sufficient information about the ST situation, the translator may feel obliged to add some kind of hyper-sentence (e.g. in the form of an introductory lead) to the translation.
Example
In German newspapers, comments taken from other papers are usually introduced by hyper-sentences, such as "President Reagan's speech before the UN is commented on by The Times
(London)" (cf. Suddeutsche Zeitung,
Oct. 26/27, 1985; my translation). The form of these hyper-sentences is culture-specific, and they may even be rather elliptic. In the International Herald Tribune,
for example, texts quoted from other papers are printed in a special column under the heading "Other Comments" and signed with the name and place of publication of the reference paper, e.g. "Asiaweek (Hong Kong)".
Macrostructure
Metacommunicative sentences of the type "A says (to B)" can also be signals for the beginning of an embedded text (cf. example 3.1.0./1), these signals separating the different levels of communication. This is particularly important in translation, because, as was pointed out earlier, each level of communication may require a situational analysis of its own. One of the crucial aspects in the analysis of macrostructure is therefore the question of whether there are any sub-texts or in-texts embedded in the ST.
Other forms of in-texts are quotations, footnotes, and examples (e.g. in scientific texts, such as the present study). The main task of the translator is to find out which function the in-text fulfils in the embedding text. Although other extratextual factors (e.g. audience, place, time, medium) may be the same for the embedding text and the in-text, the function must be analysed separately.
Example
Quotations, like other texts, can have an informative, expressive, appellative, and phatic function. The function of a quotation is basically independent of that of the embedding text, although there seems to be a certain correlation between genre and quotation types. For example: In scientific and technical texts we find more informative quotations, whose form is rather conventional (especially where bibliographical references are concerned) than in popularizing texts or (literary) essays, which more often contain expressive quotations stressing the author's own opinion, or quotations appealing to the reader's own experience or which are intended to impress the reader by citing a famous authority, such as Aristotle or Shakespeare.
Footnotes inserted into a target text in order to provide background information or give additional explanations, can also be regarded as in-texts. Since the effect that a text with footnotes has on the reader is different from that of a text without footnotes, the translator has to consider carefully whether other procedures, such as explanatory translations or substitutions, would be more appropriate to the genre and function of the target text than footnotes.
The relationship between the in-text and the embedding text can be compared with that between titles or heading(s) and the text they belong to. A title is a metatext which tells us something about the co-text in question and can equally fulfil various other communicative functions.
Example
The title of Chapter VII of Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers
not only informs the reader about the catchword of the chapter but also recommends the text to the reader: "How Mr. Winkle, instead of shooting at the pigeon and killing the crow, shot at the crow and wounded the pigeon; how the Dingley Dell cricket club played All-Muggleton, and how All-Muggleton dined at the Dingley Dell expense; with other interesting and instructive matters." The metacomrnunicative function of the title is in this case signalled by the form of an indirect question introduced by how.
In the title of Chapter I of Jonathan Swift's A Voyage to Lilliput
it is made even more explicit: "The author gives some account of himself and family (...)".
Inclusions commenting on the text itself (e.g. so to speak
or as I pointed out earlier
or to put it into a nutshell)
can also be regarded as metacommunicative utterances. At the same time they have the (phatic) function of giving a signal to the receiver, thus representing the (extratextual) audience orientation by intratextual means.
Within the text itself, macrostructure is defined from a semantic point of view. Hierarchical delimitations of text sections (chapter, chunk, paragraph, complex sentence, non-complex sentence, etc.) can only provide a rather superficial orientation. Since the days of classical rhetoric, the beginning and the end of a text are considered to be of particular importance in the interpretation of the whole text. This is why they should be analysed separately.
The beginning and end of a text can be marked by certain verbal or non-verbal features, which in some genres will be even conventional, such as the moral at the end of a fable or the expression once upon a time
at the beginning of a fairy tale. The end tends to be less frequently marked than the beginning (the words The End
at the end of a film are probably a remnant from the time when the end of a text was conventionally marked by finis).
The imminent end of a text can also be signalled by the shift to a higher level of communication, e.g. a metacommunicative recapitulation like "in conclusion, let me restate...". Thus, in the fable The Lover and his Lass,
for example, the moral ("Laugh and the world laughs with you, love and you love alone.") establishes a direct communication between sender and receiver.
The example of the fable shows that certain features of text composition are genre specific. Certain text types are characterized by a particular macrostructure and particular structural markers, as well as particular means of conjunction between the text parts. A good example is the text type "letter" with the conventional text segments date, address, salutation, message, and complimentary closing. In an instrumental translation the translator should observe the target-cultural convention for the text type in question.
Microstructure
Both in macro and microstructure we have to distinguish formal and semantic or functional structures. If the highest rank is that of meta-communication and the second rank is constituted by macrostructural units such as chapters and paragraphs (formal structure) or beginning and end (functional structure), the third rank will be that of simple and complex sentences (formal structure). From the semantic or functional point of view we can distinguish information units, utterances, steps of the course of action or plot, or logical relations, such as causality, finality, specification, etc. The fourth rank will then be that of sentence-parts and their relation, such as the theme-rheme structure (TRS).
In written texts, a "sentence" is the unit between two full stops (or question marks, exclamation marks, etc.). In spoken texts it is delimited by intonatory devices, such as pitch or lengthy pauses. In either case, grammatical completeness is not taken into account as a criterion. In spite of all possible reservations regarding this definition, the division into sentences can provide a first approximation to the micro-structure of a text. Moreover, it will lead into the analysis of sentence structures. In a second step, the analyst has to prove whether the formal division into sentences corresponds to the semantic division into information units.
In narrative texts, the information units can coincide with the steps of the course of action. One of the intratextual features of text composition is, in this connection, the order of tenses used in the text.
A composition which follows the course of action represents a structure with an analogy to objects and situations in the real world ("ordo naturalis"), which is not language-specific and therefore does not raise unsolvable problems for the translator - at least where there is no great distance between SC and TC. This applies also to dialogues, which can be regarded as a (chronological) sequence of various monologues.
Composition structures which do not follow the "ordo naturalis" are determined - both on the macro and microstructural level - by culture-specific norms. They are marked by language-specific linking devices (such as renominalization, adversative conjunctions, etc.) or even by means of metre, rhyme, alliteration, and other sonorous figures, which may help to structure the text.
Thematic organization of sentences and clauses
The semantic and functional division of sentences or information units into theme and rheme (TRS, also topic and comment), which belongs to the microstructure of a text, is independent of the syntactic structures, although it is frequently combined with certain syntactical features. Linking the information units by the device of thematic progression the writer at the same time produces a certain macrostructure. Thus, TRS is a feature overlapping micro and macrostructural composition.
For translation-oriented text analysis, we can confine ourselves to the context-bound aspects of TRS. From this point of view, the theme refers to that part of the information presented in a sentence or clause which can be inferred from the (verbal or non-verbal) context (= given information) whereas the rheme is the non-inferrable part of the information (= new information). Irrespective of its grammatical function as subject or predicate or its position at the beginning or the end of the clause, the theme refers to the information stored in what Brown & Yule (1987) call the "presupposition pool" of the participants. This pool contains the information gained from general knowledge, from the situative context of the discourse, and from the completed part of the discourse itself. Each participant has a presupposition pool and this pool is added to as the discourse proceeds.
TRS has to be regarded as a semantic universal which is realized in different ways by different languages.
Markers of text composition
The macrostructure of a text is first and foremost signalled by formal devices used to mark the boundaries of segments of both written and spoken discourse which form large units, such as chapters or paragraphs in written texts and "paratones" in spoken texts. Chapters are marked by chapter headings or numerals, paragraphs by indentations, and paratones by intonation, pauses of more than a second, etc. These non-verbal markers are often combined with lexical markers, e.g. adverbial clauses in initial (first - then -finally)
or focussed position (on the one hand - on the other hand).
In text types with a conventional "ordo naturalis" (e.g. reports) the composition is marked according to subject matter and content.
Microstructures are marked by means of syntax structures (main/subordinate clauses, tenses, inclusions, etc.) or lexical devices (e.g. cataphora) and by suprasegmental features (focus structures, punctuation, etc.).
Checklist
The following questions may help to discover the main characteristics
of text composition:
1.Is the ST an independent text or is it embedded in a larger unit of higher rank?
2.Is the macrostructure of the text marked by optical or other signals?
3.Is there a conventional composition for this type of text?
4.Which form of thematic progression is realized in the text?
Non-verbal elements
General considerations
Signs taken from other, non-linguistic, codes, which are used to supplement, illustrate, disambiguate, or intensify the message of the text, are referred to by the functional concept of "non-verbal elements". The term, comprises the paralinguistic elements of face-to-face communication (e.g. facial expressions, gestures, voice quality, etc.) as well as the non-linguistic elements belonging to a written text (photos, illustrations, logos, special types of print, etc.). However, intonational features, pauses, etc. and the graphical devices that perform analogous functions in written communication (punctuation, capitalisation, itali-cisation, etc.) are classified as "suprasegmental features".
Example
If you're an American living abroad and you need to keep track of your calls, you really ought to get the AT&T Card.
First of all, you get a monthly itemized bill. A new option even lets you bill your AT&T Card
calls to your American Express® Card account. Or, you can choose to be billed to your VISA® or Master Card.
In addition to itemized billing, the AT&T Card
makes it easy to reach family, friends and business associates in the States. And, you can take advantage of AT&T USADirect®
service , which gets you through to an AT&T Operator
in seconds.
For an AT&T Card
application, call us collect at 816-6004 Ext. 60,
or write to AT&T Card Operations, P.O. Box 419395, Kansas City, MO 64141-0434.
So if you want to know who you called, get the AT&T Card.
Non-verbal elements are particularly audience-oriented.
Forms and functions of non-verbal elements
We have to distinguish non-verbal elements accompanying the text (e.g. layout or gestures) from those supplementing the text (e.g. tables or graphs) or those constituting an independent text part (e.g. pictures of a comic strip) or replacing certain text elements (e.g. the * that replaces a taboo word).
In face-to-face communication we tend to use gestures of the face and the body (such as winking or shrugging). We distinguishe between gestures used more or less involuntarily by speakers to express their feelings and those used intentionally with a specific meaning. While involuntary gestures constitute a universal phenomenon, which, apart from differences in temperament and certain culture-specific conventions, are common to all the peoples of the world, intentional gestures are signs belonging to a culture-specific code. In an interpreting situation it may therefore be necessary for the interpreter to verbalize certain gestures made by the speaker, if there is any risk of misinterpretation. The receivers only see the gestures of the ST speaker and do not usually notice the interpreter in the booth "translating" the gestures into a TC code.
The interplay of verbal and non-verbal text elements is particularly important on the stage. Plays in which the word is subordinate to the gestures are less problematic in translation than plays in which there is a carefully balanced tension between words and gestures. This tension should be regarded as an intentional feature of the text, which the translator may have to reproduce in the TT.
In spoken discourse there are situations where the hearer would not perceive any mimical expressions or gestures of the speaker because of the spatial distance between them (e.g. in an electoral speech on a market square). And there are text types or functions where the use of non-verbal signals is conventionally forbidden. In these cases, non-verbal elements are more and more replaced by suprasegmental linguistic signs, such as stress, intonation, slowing down, etc., which can even develop into genre-specific features (e.g. sermon).
In written communication, mimical expressions or gestures cannot be used; but the reduced pragmatic contextuality of written texts must, of course, be compensated for. This is done partly by the selection of particular verbal elements, especially those representing supra-segmental features in writing (e.g. punctuation, dash, bold type), and partly by additional non-verbal means, such as pictures (a photo of the author, a cartoon illustrating the subject, a drawing showing how to hold the handle of a machine). It may happen that the non-verbal elements convey a piece of information that is even more relevant to the reader than the message transmitted by the text. A number in small print on the label of a wine bottle may in itself be of little interest, but it tells the "connoisseur" more about the quality of the wine than the name.
The range of non-verbal elements used in literature extends from the ancient acrostics to the typographical means which are found in the poems of Klopstock or Stefan George, Apollinaire or E. E. Cummings.
Non-verbal elements can belong to the conventional form of certain text types, such as the shorter lines of traditional poetic texts or the "small print" in contracts.
Of course, it is not always the author or sender with their specific communicative intention who is responsible for the layout and format of a text. But no matter who makes the final decision on text organization - the effect that these elements produce on the receiver remains the same. If the translation skopos requires "equivalence of effect", the translator must, therefore, take account of all types of nonverbal elements.
Illustrations, diagrams, drawings of certain operations, etc. are conventional supplements or even form an integral part of operating instructions or manuals. In some cases it may even be convenient for the translator to try and carry out the instructions him or herself in order to check the coherence of verbal and non-verbal elements and the functionality of the text.
The analysis of non-verbal text elements usually yields some information about the aspects of text composition (e.g. paragraph markers), presuppositions (e.g. marks of omission), lexis (e.g. facial expressions which suggest an ironic meaning), and suprasegmental features (e.g. shortened lines in a poem). Of the extratextual factors it is mainly the intention of the sender and the function of the text which may be characterized by non-verbal elements.
The importance of non-verbal elements in translation Non-verbal text elements are, like verbal elements, culture-specific. Within the framework of a translation-relevant ST analysis the translator has to find out which of the non-verbal elements of the ST can be preserved in translation and which have to be adapted to the norms and conventions of the target culture. A particular logo or name which is intended to have a positive connotation in the source culture may be associated with a negative value in the target culture; the TC conventions may not allow the graphic representation of a certain piece of information; the TC genre norms may require non-verbal instead of verbal representation, etc. What is taken for granted as regards linguistic text elements (that they have to be "translated"), is not always accepted for non-verbal elements, because initiators are often unwilling to commit themselves to the extra expense involved in adapting nonverbal material.
It is not difficult to identify the non-verbal elements of the source text, as they are usually fairly obvious and often predictable in certain media or text types. But it is important in each case to analyze the function of these elements. Quotation marks, for example, can point to an ironical meaning (in which case they represent a suprasegmental feature, i.e. a certain intonation) or to a neologism introduced ad hoc and explained in the text or to a reference to somebody else's utterances (in which case the text producer may want to express a mental reservation, which would have been marked by a wink of the eye in spoken discourse).
Checklist
The following questions may lead to a functional interpretation of
non-verbal elements:
1.Which non-verbal elements are included in the text?
2.Which function do they perform with regard to the verbal text parts?
3.Are they conventionally bound to the text type?
4.Are they determined by the medium?
5.Are they specifically linked to the source culture?
Lecture 3. Lexis and Sentence
Lexis
The choice of lexis is determined by both extra and intratexrual factors. Therefore, the characteristics of the lexical items used in a text often yield information not only about the extratextual factors, but also about other intratextual aspects. For example, the semantic and stylistic characteristics of lexis (e.g. connotations, semantic fields, register) may point to the dimensions of content, subject matter, and presuppositions, whereas the formal and grammatical characteristics (e.g. parts of speech, word function, morphology) refer the analyst to predictable syntactic structures and suprasegmental features.
Intratextual determinants of lexis
The selection of lexical items is largely determined by the dimensions of subject matter and content. Depending on the subject matter, certain semantic fields will be represented by more items than others, and the textual connection of key words will constitute isotopic chains throughout the text.
In this context, morphological aspects (suffixes, prefixes, compositions, acronyms, etc.), collocations, idioms, figurative use (metonymy, metaphor), etc. have to be analysed from the point of view of textual semantics. Componential analysis, etymological investigations, and comparative lexicological studies can also be helpful when the meaning of certain words, especially of neologisms, is not clear.
Extratextual determinants of lexis
The field of lexis, on the other hand, illustrates particularly well the interdependence of extratextual and intratextual factors. The extratextual factors not only set the frame of reference for the selection of words, but they are themselves often -directly or indirectly - mentioned in the text. I will therefore deal with the extratextual factors one by one in order to explain the impact these factors can have on the choice of lexical items.
The first question is whether or not the expectations deriving from the external information and clues as to the general character of the sender (time, geographical and social origin, education, status, etc.) or his/her particular position regarding the analysed text (e.g. communicative role) are verified by the text. This also applies to any internal sender who may be mentioned or presupposed in the text, e.g. in the case of quotations or in fictional texts. If the analysis confirms the expectations, such characteristics can be assumed to be non-intentional; if not, it seems likely that by disappointing the receiver's expectations the sender wanted to produce a certain effect. If there is little or no external information on the sender, the analysis of the pragmatic aspects of lexis may provide some clues to the person of the sender.
The second question is whether the author is mentioned in the text as sender. In such a case, the use of the first person, of expressions like in my view
in contrast with other persons' opinions, etc. gives the readers the impression that the sender is addressing them directly. In non-fictional texts we can assume that the first person really does refer to the author. For some text types, there are even conventions as to how authors should refer to themselves, e.g. the use of the first person plural or the third person singular
As far as the impact of the sender's intention on lexis is concerned, we have to ask whether and how the intention is reflected by the selection of words or, if there is no external information, what intention can be inferred from the use of words in the text. It is the pragmatic aspect of intentionality in the sense of "concrete interest" underlying the text production which is being analysed in this context.
This intentionality is reflected by those characteristics of lexis which are not
due to the specific situational conditions or to norms and conventions, as well as by those features which appear to signal an intentional "violation" of any norms and conventions valid both for the genre in question and for the conditions of medium, place, time, and motive of communication characterizing the situation of the text. This means that a feature of lexis can be assumed to be intentional if the translator has to analyse the interest and the purpose which induced the author to use precisely this expression, this figure, this word.
Example
Language can be used, for example, to camouflage the real significance of an event, as is shown in the following paragraph from an article on "doublespeak": "Attentive observers of the English language also learned recently that the multi-billion-dollar stock market crash of 1987 was simply a fourth-quarter equity retreat;
that aircraft don't crash, they have uncontrolled contact •with the ground;
that janitors are environmental technicians;
that it was a diagnostic misadventure of a high magnitude
which caused the death of a patient in a Philadelphia hospital, not malpractice; and that Ronald Reagan wasn't really unconscious while he underwent minor surgery, just in a non-decision-making form." (THE SUNDAY TIMES,
7 January 1990)
In order to elicit the sender's intention it seems advisable to analyse the "degree of originality" of the lexis used in the text. This is common practice with similes and metaphors. But it can also be applied to other figures of speech, such as the adoption of words from other areas of lexis (e.g. language for special purposes in a general text), other registers (e.g. slang words in a formal text), or from regional or social dialects, and to the metonymic use of words (e.g. the Pentagon
for the US Ministry of Defense). In all these cases the translator has to examine whether the choice of words is common or at least standardised for certain text types or whether it can be regarded as original or even extravagant.
The analysis of various lexical items in a text can often show that a particular stylistic feature is characteristic of the whole text. If the translation skopos requires the preservation of such features, individual translation decisions (in the field of lexis as well as content, composition, sentence structure, etc.) have to be subordinated to this purpose. The translator has to plan the translation strategies with this overall purpose in mind, looking for the stylistic means which serve to achieve this purpose in the target language and culture instead of translating metaphor by metaphor or simile by simile.
Similarly, the translator should also assess the stylistic implications of the author's "semantic intentionality". Semantic intentionality refers to the reasons which have induced the author to select one particular piece of information for his or her text from the wide range of all possible information, and to the effect that this choice has on the audience. This can be of particular importance in fictional texts since it may be assumed that the number of informational details which the author may choose from is limited only by the situational conditions. The decision to take one specific detail rather than another constitutes an important clue to the author's (stylistic, literary) intention.
A text may not only contain implicit clues to the sender's intention, but also explicit expressions or (often conventional) cliches by which the sender's intention is announced.
Example
"Our aim is therefore to replace a sporadic approach with a systematic one; to minimise - we can never remove - the intuitive element in criteria of analysis." (From the Introduction
to Crystal & Davy 1969: 14).
The medium mainly influences the level of style of the lexical elements (colloquial, formal), word formation (e.g. abbreviated words or acronyms as used in mobile phone messages) and deictic expressions (e.g. operating instructions, which come to the receiver together with the machine).
Example
Just a few examples of typical newspaper abbreviations and compounds, collected from one page of THE SUNDAY TIMES
(7 January 1990, p. El); Ј215m fraud, pre-tax profits, RAF, ISC, CSF, GEC, GrandMet, Bond Corp, a pubs-for-breweries swap, the UK dairy-produce company, cash-rich institutions, PR group.
The aspect of time is also reflected in deictic elements, in internal time references, and in temporal markings of certain lexical items. This last aspect is particularly relevant both to the translation of old texts and to that of texts whose language is marked as "modern". In old texts we would not expect "modernisms" (and vice versa).
However, the translator has to decide whether the translation skopos requires a "synchronous" or an "actualizing" translation. As it might be difficult for a 21st
century translator to render a text in the language of the 18th
century, s/he should at least take care not to use typically 21st
century lexis (e.g. fashion words).
In Jonathan Swift's A Voyage to Lilliput,
archaic forms like giveth, mathema-ticks, physick, Old Jury
instead of Old Jewry, my self and
words like hosier
(in the 1735 edition, reprinted in Gulliver s Travels,
Everyman's Library, London 1940) mark the text as "old" without being an obstacle to comprehension. The German translation (Swift 1983), however, is written in unmarked modern German.
Certain text types, such as legal documents, are characterized by archaic lexis.
The motive or occasion for communication may influence the choice of lexis by requiring a particular level of style (e.g. in a funeral address) or certain formulas or cliches. This can be an important aspect when the target text is intended to be used on a different occasion from that of the source text.
Text function (in correlation with the text type) is also frequently reflected in the choice of lexical items. For example, some examples of typical lexical features of the language of newspaper reporting: complex pre and postmodification, typical adjective compounds such as more and faster-arriving,
sequences of adjectives; emphatic and colloquial lexis, etc. Language for special purposes and metalanguage are other function-specific fields of word use. Genre conventions point to the fact that the sender is interested in subordinating form to content, thus setting guidelines for a particular effect of the text. If the function changes within the text, the use of text-type conventions or of functional style can signal a particular stylistic interest on the part of the author.
Checklist
The following questions may be helpful in analysing the lexis used in a text.
1. How are the extratextual factors reflected in the use of lexis (regional and social dialects, historical language varieties, choice of register, medium-specific lexis, conventional formulas determined by occasion or function, etc.)?
2. Which features of the lexis used in the text indicate the attitude of the sender and his/her "stylistic interest" (e.g. stylistic markers, connotations, rhetorical figures of speech, such as metaphors and similes, individual word coinages, puns)?
3. Which fields of lexis (terminologies, metalanguage) are represented in the text?
4. Are there any parts of speech (nouns, adjectives) or patterns of word formation (compounds, prefixed words, apocopes) which occur more frequently in the text than would normally be the case?
5. Which level of style can the text be assigned to?
Sentence Structure
General considerations
The formal, functional and stylistic aspects of sentence structure are mentioned as an important factor in almost all approaches to translation-relevant text analysis, although they are not dealt with in any systematic way.
In spite of the transcultural repertoire of syntactic figures of speech, such as parallelisms, chiasms, rhetorical questions, etc., the effect of these figures may vary slightly according to the different language structures. Complex hypotactic sentences are generally regarded as an appropriate means to describe complex facts. However, in German, hypotactic sentences are much more likely to look complicated and intricate (partly because the verb has to be put at the end of subordinate clauses) than, for instance, in Spanish, where the syntax has a principally linear character and where isolated non-finite constructions (gerund, participles, infinitives) are often preferred to subor-i clinate clauses.
The analysis of sentence structure yields information about the characteristics of the subject matter (e.g. simple vs. complex), the text composition ("mise en relief, order of informational details), and the suprasegmental features (stress, speed, tension), and some syntactic figures, such as aposiopesis, may indicate presuppositions. Among the extratextual factors it is primarily the aspects of intention, medium and text function that are characterized by particular sentence structures.
How to find out about sentence structure
The translator gets a first impression of the typical sentence structure of a text by analysing the (average) length and type of the sentences (statements, questions, exclamations, ellipses) and the other constructions which replace sentences (infinitives, past and present participles, gerunds), the distribution of main clauses and subordinate clauses -and inclusions - in the text (paratactical vs. hypotactical sentence structures), and the connection of sentences by connectives, such as conjunctions, temporal adverbs, substitutions, etc.. On the basis of such an analysis, s/he is able to find out how the information given in the text is structured. I wish to stress the point, however, that the analysis of sentence structure is not an aim in itself but must lead to a functional interpretation.
Below the level of sentences and clauses it is the order of the constituents (such as Subject-Predicator-Complement/SPC) or words (e.g. the position of adverbials) that may lead to a further structuring. Depending on their respective norms of word order, intonation, pitch patterns, etc., different languages use different means of focussing certain sentence parts or of giving a "relief to the text. By analysing the different aspects of syntax (e.g. distribution of main and subordinate clauses and non-finite constructions, "mise en relief by tense and aspect) the translator may achieve a solid basis for text interpretation.
In addition to the classical figures of speech it is (mainly, but not only, in literary texts) the deviation from syntactic norms and conventions which is used in order to produce a particular stylistic effect. In these cases, the translator has first to find out what kind of deviation is used and how it works before s/he can decide, whether or how to "translate" it (in the widest sense of the word) in the light of the translation brief.
Example
In his short story Los cachorros
("The Little Dogs"), the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa plays with syntactic structures, boldly mixing narration, direct speech and stream-of-consciousness technique: "Y un dia, toma, su mama, corazon, le regalaba ese pic-up, ipara el solito?, si...". By a syntactic analysis, we can separate the narrative sentence, which conforms to the syntactical norms ("Y un dia su mama le regalaba ese pic-up"), from the inserted elements of direct speech {toma, corazon, si)
and interior monologue Qpara el solito?).
Reversing these steps of analysis, the translation is easy: "And one day, here you are, his mummy, darling, gave him that record-player, just for him?, yes..."
The syntactic features, too, depend on various other intratextual features, especially content and composition (e.g. distribution of informational details both in the text and in the sentences), lexis (e.g. verbal or nominal constructions), and suprasegmental features (especially focus, intonation). Among the extratextual factors it is mainly the aspects of intention, audience, medium (e.g. speech vs. writing), and function (e.g. conventional structures), which affect the syntactic features.
Checklist
The following questions may be helpful in analysing sentence structure:
1.Are the sentences long or short, coordinated or subordinated? How are they linked?
2.Which sentence types occur in the text?
3.Does the order of sentence constituents correspond to the theme-rheme structure? Are there any focussing structures or deviations from normal word order?
4.Is there any text relief?
5.Are there any syntactic figures of speech, such as parallelism, chiasm, rhetorical question, parenthesis, aposiopesis, ellipsis, etc.? What function do they perform in the text?
6. Are there any syntactic features which are determined by audience orientation, text-type conventions, or by the medium? Does the translation skopos require any adaptations?
Suprasegmental features
General considerations
The suprasegmental features of a text are all those features of text organization which overlap the boundaries of any lexical or syntactical segments, sentences, and paragraphs, framing the phonological "gestalt" or specific "tone" of the text.
The particular framing of a text depends, first and foremost, on the medium by which the text is transmitted. In written texts, the suprasegmental features are signalled by optical means, such as italics, spaced or bold type, quotation marks, dashes and parentheses, etc.
In spoken texts, the suprasegmental features are signalled by acoustic means, such as tonicity, modulation, variations in pitch and loudness, etc.. This applies both to spoken texts which are produced spontaneously (e.g. a contributions to a discussion, a statement by the witness of an accident) and to written texts which are presented orally (e.g. lectures, radio and television news, etc.).
It is important to distinguish suprasegmental features, in their function as features of verbal text organization, from the non-verbal or para-verbal elements accompanying the text, such as facial expressions, gestures, etc. On the other hand, habitual psycho-physical and physical features of speech (such as quality of voice or excitement) as well as features resulting from biographical factors (such as origin, age, status, e.g. social or regional dialect) must be distinguished from "controllable" functional features, i.e. features depending on the sender's intention or on other situational factors such as the relationship between sender and receiver etc.
Prosody, intonation, and stress
The concept of intonation refers to "the totality of prosodic qualities of utterances which are not linked to individual sounds". It includes the general features of tonicity and pitch, modulation, rhythmicality, speed, loudness, tension and pauses.
Intonation as a means of text organization (as opposed to intonation indicating psychical states, habitual characteristics of the sender or even psycho-pathological phenomena) serves mainly to mark the information structure and to divide the speech stream into tone units separated by pauses. The tone units usually correspond to information units. Another function of intonation is to mark the semantic nucleus of the sentence.
Moreover, intonation helps to disambiguate the various possible meanings of a sentence (e.g. serious vs. ironic meaning in the sentence "That was very clever of you!"). The "meaning" conveyed by intonation is independent of, i.e. not subordinated but coordinated to, that of lexical and semantic units. Intonation signals the attitude of the speaker towards the message and, in this respect, its function can be compared with that of the stylistic function of lexis and sentence structure. It can be analysed only in connection with the other two factors.
The analysis of prosodic features is of particular relevance to the interpreter. It facilitates the comprehension of content and text composition, since stress markings are a textological instrument for making the relations of coherence between sentences explicit. For example, the stress on the word money
in the sentence "John found some money
today" points to it
in the following sentence: "But he spent it
immediately." In simultaneous interpreting, the analysis of intonation therefore can make it easier for the interpreter to anticipate how the text will continue. The pauses between the informational elements, whether "empty" or "filled" by sounds such as ah, hum,
etc., divide the stream of speech and give a breathing space to the interpreter.
On the other hand, "contrastive" stress may reveal the speaker's intention. In the sentence pair "John found some money
today" and "Peter found happiness",
the stress on money
forms a paradigmatic contrast with the stress on happiness.
Syntagmatic contrast is produced by the two stress points in the sentence "John found some money today"
if the following (or preceding) sentence is "He found happiness yesterday".
In English, contrastive stress is often combined with certain syntactic structures, such as clefting: "It was John who found some money
today, but Peter
was the one who found happiness."
Contrastive stress, too, can be very helpful to the interpreter because it limits the variety of possible "next sentences" and thus makes anticipation easier. Of course, the procedures for source text analysis have to be automatized or internalized in interpreter training, since there is not much time to start thinking about contrastive stress in the process of simultaneous interpreting.
Word stress can serve to differentiate meaning, e.g. in conduct
vs. conduct,
whereas tone-unit stress sets focus points (e.g. "a clever
child" vs. "a stupid
child"), and sentence stress often signals emphasis. Some forms of sentence intonation or "intonation contour" are linked by convention with certain sentence types (e.g. question, inclusion, incomplete sentences, etc.) or rhetorical intentions.
Certain genres, such as a radio commentary of a football match or the arrival of a train being announced by loudspeaker at a railway station, are characterized by a specific intonation which we would be able to identify at once even if we did not understand the information or if we heard the text in another place.
The "phonology" of written texts
The representation of suprasegmental features in writing
The phonological organization of a text is represented in writing by the selection of particular words, word order, onomatopoeia, certain features of typeface such as italics or spaced words, orthographic deviations
In this sense, we can distinguish between "syntactic" or "discoursive" punctuation marks (full stop, comma, question and exclamation marks), which serve to guide comprehension by conventional signals, and "stylistic" punctuation marks which give "elegance and expressivity" to the sentence. Thus, punctuation, whether conventional or stylistic, is used principally as a means of representing intonation and prosody in writing.
The analysis of suprasegmental features often yields information about the content (e.g. irony) and the subject matter (e.g. the "solemn" tone of a funeral address), as well as presuppositions (e.g. an interruption of the intonation contour in allusions) and composition (e.g. pauses, stress on the rhematic parts of the utterance). Of the extratextual factors, it is the aspects of sender, intention, place and motive/occasion and text function which are mainly characterized by suprasegmental features.
e. How to elicit suprasegmental features in a written text Affectivity and expressivity are mainly reflected in the choice of lexis. Certain affirmative words, such as actually
or in fact,
and emphatic evaluations like fantastic
or great
seem to attract sentence stress.
In syntax, it is mainly focusing structures, such as clefting (e.g. It was John who kicked the ball),
inclusions, which are spoken in a lower tone and at a higher speed than the embedding sentence, ellipses, or aposiopeses which seem to suggest special intonation patterns. Asyndetic enumerations, for example, are characterized by a higher speed than polysyndetic enumerations {John, Peter, Mary, Paul were there
vs. John and Peter and Mary and Paul were there).
If not supported by lexical or syntactic means, contrastive stress is usually produced by the context. If the context is not sufficiently clear, the reader has to be guided by graphic features, such as underlining, spaced or bold type or italics, quotation marks, etc.
Finally, the phonological image of a text is also determined by theme-rheme structures. Since the thematic element normally links a sentence to the preceding utterance, it is often put in initial position with the rheme forming the end of the sentence, which is, of course, the appropriate place for the elements which the sender wants to stress. A deviation from this pattern causes surprise or leads to a certain tension between the two sentences, which is also reflected in the intonation contour.
For the translator, these considerations on phonology and intonation are of particular importance because the reader's acoustic imagination is determined by language-specific patterns. Each receiver reads a text against the background of their own native knowledge of intonation and stress patterns. Since in most cases this is an intuitive knowledge, they may not be able to adapt themselves to strange patterns even if they are told that they are reading a translation. After analysing its functions, the translator should therefore adapt the ST intonation to TL patterns.
Checklist
The following questions, referring to prosody and intonation in spoken texts and their graphic representation in written texts, may be helpful in analysing suprasegmental features:
1.Which suprasegmental features are present in the text? How are they represented graphically?
2.Are the suprasegmental features genre specific?
3.Do the suprasegmental features provide any clues to the habitual characteristics or to the emotional or psycho-pathological state of the sender?
4.Can the text be divided into prosodic units? Does the intonation contour indicate the sender's intention to clarify, stress or focus any elements of the utterance?
5.Do the suprasegmental features correspond to the theme-rheme structure of the text?
6.Does the translation skopos require any adaptations of suprasegmental features to TL patterns?
Example of Intratextual Text Analysis
Example
Bertolt Brecht: Measures Against Violence
When Mr. Keuner, the Thinking Man, pronounced himself against violence in front of a large audience, he noticed that his listeners backed away from him and left the room. He turned round and saw behind him - Violence.
"What did you say?" asked Violence.
"I pronounced myself in favour of violence."
After Mr. Keuner had also left, his disciples asked him where his backbone was. Mr. Keuner replied: "I haven't got a backbone. It is me who has to live longer than Violence."
And he told the following story:
One day, in the time of illegality, there came to the house of Mr. Egge, a man who had learned to say no, an agent who presented a document signed by those who held sway over the city, which stated that to him should belong any house in which he set foot; similarly any food should be his for the asking; and any man that he set eyes on should serve him.
The agent sat down, demanded food, washed himself, went to bed, and said, with his face to the wall, "Will you be my servant?"
Mr. Egge covered him with a blanket, shooed away the flies, and watched over him while he slept; and, as he had done on the first day, so did he obey him for seven years. But for all that he did for him, there was one thing he took good care not to do, and that was to say a word. And when the seven years had passed and the agent had grown fat by all the eating, sleeping and giving orders, the agent died. And then Mr. Egge wrapped him in the tattered, old blanket, dragged him out of the house, cleaned the bed, whitewashed the walls, breathed a sigh of relief and replied: "No."
As the title suggests, the subject matter of the text is what can be done against violence. Mr. Keuner is a fictitious person who also appears in some other of Brecht's stories. Therefore he can be introduced by his name as somebody "known" to the reader. It may be assumed that the name Keuner is a distortion of keiner
("nobody"). Mr. Keuner, who is characterized by the epithet the Thinking Man,
exhibits a particular behaviour towards violence: having pronounced himself to be against violence in public, he denies his conviction when personally confronted with violence. By means of the parable of Mr. Egge he tells his disciples, who wonder why he shows so little backbone, that it is more important to outlive violence than to become its victim. Mr. Keuner (and Mr. Egge) apparently submit to violence in order to outlive it.
The content of the story points to the subject matter suggested in the title: measures
(i.e. "non-measures", in an ironic meaning) against violence, and determines the composition of the text. It is a frame text embedding a parable. The frame does not appear again at the end of the story because the readers are supposed to draw their own conclusions. The narration consists of two parts which are formally linked by the cataphoric element following story.
The subject matter and the content have a strong influence on lexis. In the first part the word violence
is mentioned four times, twice as an abstract and twice as an allegory (indicated by the capital letter in the English translation). In the second part the word violence
is not mentioned, but the concept is paraphrased in different forms. The document signed by those who held sway over the city
states that the "agent" is a representative of violence, which is supported by the story (things belong
to him, he demands, gives orders,
and his behaviour in Mr. Egge's house shows his superior position). The isotopy of serving (belong to, serve, servant, obey
and Mr. Egge's activities: covered him, shooed away, watched over him)
characterize the contrasting semantic field.
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