Riassunto esame Inglese II, Prof. Rossi Mario, libro consigliato Introducing translation studies, Jeremy Munday

CHAPTER 6: DISCOURSE AND REGISTER ANALYSIS APPROACHES

6.1 The Hallidayan model of language and discourse

Halliday's model of discourse analysis, based on what he terms systematic functional grammar (SFL), is geared to the study of language as communication. It sees meaning in the writer's linguistic choices and systematically relates these choices to a wider sociocultural framework. It borrows Buhler's tripartite division of language functions (informative, expressive, appellative). In Halliday's model, importantly, there is a strong interrelation between the linguistic choices, the aims of the form of communication and the sociocultural framework.

The direction of influence is top down. Thus, the sociocultural environment in which the text operates is the highest level. This will include the conventions operating at the time and place of text production. As well as social and cultural factors, it will reflect any political, historical or legal conditions.

The sociocultural

The environment therefore in part conditions the genre, understood in SFL as the conventional text type that is associated with a specific communicative function, for example an invoice sent by the accounts department of a company to a customer. Genre itself helps to determine other elements in the systemic framework. The first of these is Register. This should not be confused with the more standard sense of register as formal/informal. In SFL it is a technical term, richer and more complex. It links the variables of social context to language choice and comprises three elements:

1. Field: what is being written about, e.g. the price for a delivery of goods;
2. Tenor: who is communicating and to whom, e.g. sales representative to a customer;
3. Mode: the form of communication, e.g. written or spoken, formal or informal.

Each of the variables of Register is associated with a strand of meaning, or 'discourse semantics', in the text. These three strands, known as 'metafunctions', are:

1. Experiential metafunction: concerned with the content and representation of experience;
2. Interpersonal metafunction: concerned with the social relationships and interactions between participants;
3. Textual metafunction: concerned with the organization and structure of the text.

Ideational: provides a representation of the world or an event;

Interpersonal: enacts social relationships;

Textual: makes a next hang together in a coherent way.

These strands of meaning are formed by the choices of lexis, grammar and syntax ('lexicogrammar') made by the text producer (author, speaker, translator...).

6.2 House's model of translation quality assessment

House herself considers that skopos and other approaches oriented towards the target audience are 'fundamentally misguided' because of their neglect of the ST. Instead, she bases her model or comparative ST-TT analysis leading to the assessment of the quality of the translation, highlighting 'mismatches' or 'errors'. House's original model attracted criticism that she tackles in her later major revision.

In this section, we concentrate on House's later, 'revised' model, which incorporates some of the earlier categories into an openly

The model involves a systematic comparison of the textual 'profile' of the ST and of the TT. This comparative model draws on various and sometimes complex taxonomies, but its central point is a Register analysis of both ST and TT. The model focuses on the lexical, syntactic and textual means used to construct Register. House's concept of Register covers a variety of elements, some of which are additional to those stated by Halliday.

- Field refers to the subject matter and social action, and covers the specificity of lexical items.

- Tenor includes 'the addresser's temporal, geographical and social provenance as well as his [or her] intellectual, emotional or affective stance (his [or her] "personal viewpoint")'. 'Social attitude' refers to formal, consultative or informal style. There is an element of individuality to this, as there is to stance.

- Mode relates to 'channel' (spoken/written,

etc.) and the degree of participation between addresser and addressee. In House’s rather confusing definition, ‘an overt translation is one in which the addressees of the translation text are quite “overtly” not being directly addressed’. In other words, the TT does not pretend to be an original and is clearly not directed at the TT audience. Such is the case with the translation after the event of a Second World War political speech by Winston Churchill. The ST speech was tied to a particular source culture, time and historical context; all these factors are different for the TT. Another example is the translations of literary texts, which are tied to their source culture. A covert translation ‘is a translation which enjoys the status of an original source text in the target culture’. The ST is not linked particularly to the ST culture or audience; both ST and TT address their respective receivers directly. Examples given by House are a tourist

information booklet, a letter from a company chairman to the shareholders and an article in the magazine the UNESCO Courier. The function of a covert translation is 'to recreate, reproduce or represent in the translated text the function the original has in its linguacultural framework and discourse world'. It does this without taking the TT reader into the discourse world of the ST. Instead, equivalence is necessary at the level of genre and the individual text function. To achieve this, what House calls a 'cultural filter' needs to be applied by the translator, modifying cultural elements and thus giving the impression that the TT is an original. This may involve changes at the levels of language and Register. The meaning of cultural filter is discussed by House in the context of German-English comparative pragmatic studies. She gives examples of different practices in the two cultures that need to be reflected in translation. For instance, she finds that German business

communication tends to prefer a more direct content focus, whereas English is more interpersonal. This would need to be reflected in covert translation, the letter from the company chairman being more interpersonal in English, for instance.

6.4 Hatim and Mason: the levels of context and discourse

Basil Hatim and Ian Mason’s: Discourse and the Translator and The Translator as a Communicator. An example of Hatim and Mason’s analysis of functions is their examination of a key passage from Albert Camus’ novel L’Etranger [The Outsider] in which the main character, Meursault, shoots and kills an Arab on a beach near Algiers. Changes in the transitivity structure in the English translation are seen to cause a shift in the ideational function of the text, affecting field.

The translator only shows one real action process; the others have become actions that occur to Meursault and over which it seems he has little control. Hatim and Mason’s conclusion is that the pattern of

shifts in the TT has made Meursault more passive. However, they also make the point that the reason for these shifts may be the translator's overall reading of the novel, in which Meursault's passivity is a key feature of his character.

Hatim and Mason also consider shifts in modality (the interpersonal function) which an example of trainee interpreters' problems with the recognition and translation of a French conditional of allegation or rumour in a European parliament debate. The phrase in question - 'un plan de restructuration qui aurait ètè [would have been] prèparè par les administrateurs judiciairies' - calls for an indication of modality of possibility in English, such as 'a rescue plan which was probably prepared by the receivers' or 'a rescue plan which it is rumoured was prepared by the receivers'. The majority of the trainee interpreters in Hatim and Mason's sample incorrectly rendered

The phrase by a factual statement such as ‘had been prepared’. This altered the truth value of the message in the TT.

Hatim and Mason’s ‘foundations of a model for analysing texts’ incorporates and goes beyond House’s Register analysis and Baker’s pragmatic analysis. They combine the kind of bottom-up analysis discussed in the Camus example with some top-down consideration of the higher levels of discourse. Language and text are considered to be realizations of sociocultural messages and power relations. They thus represent discourse in its wider sense, defined as models of speaking and writing which involve social groups in adopting a particular attitude towards areas of sociocultural activity (e.g. racist discourse, bureaucratese, etc.).

Although Hatim and Mason propose ‘foundations’ for a model of analysing texts, they deal with a large number of concepts. It is not clear that their approach constitutes a model that can be

‘applied’ in the conventional sense of the term. Alternatively, the authors’ proposal can be taken as a list of elements to be considered when examining translation. In particular, they concentrate on identifying ‘dynamic’ and ‘stable’ elements in a text. These are presented as a continuum and linked to translation strategy: more ‘stable’ STs may require a ‘fairly literal approach’, while with more dynamic STs ‘the translator is faced with more interesting challenges and literal translation may no longer be an option’.

More recent work both in SFL and translation theory has begun to examine in much more detail how dynamism operates in relation to the interpersonal function. Specifically, the interpersonal function constructs the subjectivity of the participants in the communication, for example with hedges in academic texts to indicate how strongly, or weakly, the writer holds a particular view. Subjectivity is conveyed

By what is called evaluation or attitude, that is, the choice of evaluative language. For monolingual communication, this is all part of the writer-reader or speaker-hearer relationship. In translation, of course, there is a third participant, the translator, who intervenes in the process.

CHAPTER 7: SYSTEM THEORIES

7.1 Polysystem theory

Polysystem theory was developed in the 1970s by the Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar borrowing ideas from the Russian Formalists of the 1920s and the Czech structuralists of the 1930s and 1940s, who had worked on literary historiography and linguistics. For the Formalists, a literary work was not studied in isolation but as part of a literary system. Literature is thus part of the social, cultural, literary and historical framework and the key concept is that of the system, in which there is an ongoing dynamic of 'mutation' and struggle for the primary position in the literary canon.