Scarica Language to Language by Christopher Taylor e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Traduzione solo su Docsity! Language to language PART ONE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Introduction [3-7] CHAPTER ONE LINGUISTICS AND TRANSLATION Overview [10] Language structure [11] Structuralism [12] Universal structure [14] The Prague School [15] Theme in Halliday [17] Cohesion [19] Lexis and terminology [21] General lexis [22] Componential analysis [23] Collocation [26] Proper names [30] Terminology [33] Languages for special purposes [33] Terms and translators [35] Term formation [37] Lexical density (term density) [38] Lexicography and the use of dictionaries [40] Corpora [44] Translation strategies [47] Equation and Substitution [48] Divergence and Convergence [53] Amplification and Reduction [55] Diffusion and Condensation [56] Reordering [61] CHAPTER TWO TRANSLATING MEANING IN CONTEXT Overview [65] Semantics (Basic concepts) [67] Reference [68] Context [74] M.A.K. Halliday and the context of situation [78] A contextual model ( J. House) [80] Denotation and connotation [83] Political correctness [86] Lexical cohesion/Semantic fields [88] Pragmatics [91] Knowledge of the world [93] Speech acts [95] The interpersonal element [100] Cultural constraints [101] Culture-bound language [103] CHAPTER THREE LANGUAGE VARIETIES: TEXT TYPES AND GENRE Overview [107] Introduction and definition [108] Written and spoken language [110] Sociological varieties [112] Text types [116] Literary texts [117] Technical texts [121] Legal texts [126] Commercial texts [131] Journalistic texts [135] Advertising texts [141] Genre [144] Register [147] PART TWO Practice: The Process of Translating and ‘The Rolling Translation’ Introduction [157] Italian/English translation [158] English/Italian translation [160] Texts for analysis and translation [161] General overview 1. Contrastive lexicogrammar: 2. Specific terminology 3. Specific technical terminology 4. Attention to discourse structure 5. Recognition of phonological features 6. World play 7. Knowledge of the world 8. Sensitivity to pragmatic concent Read before translating: layers of translation methodology (step to step and then all together) 1. Lexicogrammar skeleton: appropriate vocabulary 2. Pragmatic aspect 3. Cultural aspect 4. Stylistic aspect J.R. Firth distinguish between similar “levels”  Interlinear word-for-word : literal transposition  Bit-for-bit : freer translation of larger chunks of a text  Free : a freer approach based on the semantic message of the discourse 2. Cataphoric: the reference is further ahead in the text: This is not good new for all of you: you are all fired!;  Substitution or ellipsis : It might raind but I hope it doesn’t;  Repetition of word : The only think we have to fear is fear itself;  Synonyms : Having lost one opportunity he won’t get a second chance;  Semantically related items : that’s the top and bottom of it. Lexis and terminology Grammar and lexis together. But we can make a distinction: Word can be ambiguous, polysemous, collocation bound, register sensitive. Terms are unambiguous, monosemic, invariable, independent of context. General lexis Translator must pay attention not only to the mere translation of a world but also to the meaning given in the text and the one that is going to be given in the target text. So, it is important to create a complete semantic picture of a lexical item through the technique of componential analysis = break a word down to its components (eg. Man = male + human + adult). Going from Hjelmslev and Coseriu to Katz and Fodor. Fowles also considered the semantic components. Newmark showed how the word Bawdly can be broken down to its component and be ready for translation rather than merely find a synonym in the target language looking at bilingual dictionaries. One must pay attention to the particular context of situation. Another point to pay attention to are the metaphors and its sense. It could be difficult and rare to find an equivalent translation by looking in dictionaries, rather one should think about the sense and reproduce it eve if it necessary to explain it. Pay attention to false friends (false cognates) too. Collocation: how words go together (bind property of lexical item) Some combinations are most predictable that others, this is a problem. Sinclair claimed that “each utterance provides a framework within which the next utterance is places. This is particularly true in written language which is more retrospective than spoken language. The case of idioms and colloquial language is more complicated due to equivalence. While translator must be faithful to the linguistic conventions of each language, they must beware of ascribing the with which they are dealing. Proper names: the only proper names of people that are translated are the royalty ones and title of address. Place and geographical phenomena are translated. More difficult when it comes to translate lesser-know individuals. It is important to explain who they are, what role they play in which circumstance by adding information near the p.n. or making notes or brackets. Sometimes (fairy-tale) translator must carry out the sense, the sound and the meaning of the name. Terminology Languages for special purposes (LSP): a degree of order into the labelling process. All major languages have a series of subsets of interlinking technical disciplines. In these texts there are terms bound together with appropriate words from the general vocabulary stock. Those terms represent lexicon in that particular language, one term represent one concept and it should be unambiguous. Could sometimes happen that that terms also appear in general language, but it is considered to be a separate lexical unity. e.g. windows in general language and/or computer-connected sense. That’s why clues are important to comprehend a message in general text but turn out to be superfluous in specific technical texts. Juan Sager: “Terminology is the study of and the field of activity concerned with the collection, description, processing and presentation of terms, i.e. lexical items belonging to specialised areas of usage of one or more languages.” “In its objectives it is akin to lexicography which combines the double aim of generally collecting data about the lexicon of a language with providing an information, and sometimes even an advisory, service to language users.” The generic and partitive relations subsisting between terms leads to subcategorising. Terms and translator Translators have needed, over the years, the terminological discipline provided by dictionaries, specialised glossaries, and now ever more sophisticated data banks. The formulation of a concept leads to the coining of a term in a particular language, let’s say English. For the term to have an equivalent in another language, let’s say Italian, which is to have the same terminological status, the respective conceptual fields must be the same. What normally happens between two closely-related languages such as English and Italian, is that terms are either translated satisfactorily, calqued, or borrowed intact. In other cases, the term is either not translated because the foreign term is preferred, or the translation does not take hold and loses ground over time to the loan or to a crude calque. Term formation Each noun determines the one following, whereas the typical Italian prepositional phrase construction, occasionally varied by adjective use, works the other way with each term being determined by the following unit. Lexical density (term density) Lexical density refers to the proportion of lexical words (words with recognisable concrete or abstract referents, be they nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs, e.g. table, elephant, intelligence, go, beautiful, quickly) in a text compared to the number of function words (prepositions, conjunctions, copular verbs, etc.). Written language, for example, is lexically more dense than spoken language, as the writer has time to compose a more concentrated discourse. Lexicography and the use of dictionaries Words are presented in their base form, but all affixes are considered as well as other forms of that word making up a vocabular block (e.g. passion, passionate, impassioned, passion-killer, passion fruit, etc.). The problem of ambiguity caused through homonymy, polysemy and homography is also faced. In the dictionaries, homonymous items usually form separate headwords and polysemous items are labelled in some way, e.g. (1), (2), (3), according to their different meanings. Such sources of ambiguity are more common in English, also due to the lack of morphological variation between grammatical categories (e.g. round can be noun, verb, adjective, adverb or preposition). Morphology sometimes intervenes in cases of homonymy: the lexical item wave, apart from its salutational meaning, can be used both congruently and metaphorically (the waves washed up on the shore, a wave of sympathy swept the hall), but in translation Italian would distinguish between ondaI and ondata. Cf: walk (verb & noun) – camminare, camminata. Translators will have to meet the bilingual dictionary halfway by taking what they can from the various entries and applying them to the context of situation. Regarding idioms, the latest monolingual editions, however, are able to fill many a gap. Idioms are generally listed now under the headword(s), even at the risk of repetition. Therefore, it is now possible to track down slippery idiomatic expressions. Il progetto si presentava irto di difficoltà. The bilingual dictionary can provide a series of options (bristly, thick, filled), none of which are remotely suitable, but also fraught with difficulties as an example sentence, though the latter may be a little melodramatic in some contexts. Checking back through the monolingual dictionaries and exploring the pieno di, afflitto di direction in Italian and then how difficulties collocates in English, translators can compare competing items (full of, assailed by, chocker-block with) as they see them in context, possibly opting finally for: The project was beset by difficulties. Corpora Baker (1995:223) points out that: “Within translation studies, Lindquist (1984) has advocated the use of corpora for training translators, and Baker (1993) has argued that theoretical research into the nature of translation will receive a powerful impetus from corpus-based studies.” A corpus is a large body or recorded text material, written and/or spoken, stored on computer and available to the user at the push of a button, available not only in the fora of terms dribblare and crossare, derived from the English verbs to dribble and to cross, are now well-entrenched in Italian. Another example is the shout of approval Bravo! In English. But Equation refers also, and more widely, to the default position whereby if no other pressing reason exists, a term should be translated by its clear one-to-one equivalent : man = uomo. That is, if all other options have been discarded because there is no semantic, pragmatic, culturally-motivated or stylistic reason for translating man in any other way: e.g: Man = l’umanità Hey man! = Eh, capo! You’ve already moved your man = Hai già spostato il tuo pezzo (draughts match) It’s a man’s game = E’un gioco da maschi then the Equation mechanism comes naturally into force. In a translation such as the following: Lorenzo fermò la macchina e si voltò verso il giovane: ‘Allora tu vieni su o vuoi restare qui?’ Lorenzo stopped the car and turned towards the youth: ‘Well then, are you coming up or d’you want to stay here?’ (Moravia, trans. Davidson 1965:134) there are no compelling reasons not to translate the first sentence in the easiest way the target language provides. It is a faithful translation in every way, not least in its effortless syntax. One of the most well-known traps associated with the word-for-word equation is that of false cognates (‘false friends’), where the meanings of deceptively similar terms do not match across languages. The classic examples are well known to all language students: actual/attuale, simpatico/ sympathetic, editor/editore, etc. There are also partial cognates where the transparent translation is valid in some situations but not in others. For example: direttore/director Rivolgersi al direttore (in a company) (newspaper office) (school) (orchestra) Ask the Director (cf: Manager, Managing Director) Ask the Editor Ask the Headmaster Ask the Conductor Word-for-word translation is justified precisely in those cases of the matching of true cognates where meanings actually coincide. The Holy Bible is La Sacra Bibbia and not *La Santa Bibbia or *The Sacred Bible. The United Nations Organisation is the Organizzazione delle Nazioni Unite and so on. These terms have absolute authority, though there are many others whose ubiquity suggests a certain standardisation, for example, prohibitions like No smoking/Vietato fumare, and universal metaphors such as the Third World/Terzo Mondo. Literal translation is a default mechanism and that in most translations of more than two or three words! Some other strategy has to be brought into play. Substitution, in which a translation is used that may bear little or no morpho syntactic or semantic relation to the source text. Much liberty is taken in translation, though the source-language semantic field is untouched. The reasons for the change are not merely linguistic (there are questions of rhyme, of scanning and of cultural relocation), but it can be seen that from the very beginning linguistic fidelity had to be rejected in the interest of a greater good – in the final analysis, the entertainment of the audience. Divergence and Convergence p. Divergence is that of choosing a suitable term from a potential range of alternatives. There may be a limited number of alternatives to diverge towards (cream = panna or crema) or a bewildering selection (girare = to turn, to switch on, to pass on, to twist, to go round, to avoid, to tour, to travel, to endorse, to invest, to shoot, to spin, to circle, to wind, etc .). Bilingual dictionaries give an idea of the extent of the Divergence phenomenon, and it is not restricted to lexical words such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. Convergence is the opposite of Divergence. The three Italian terms commercialista, ragioniere and contabile would converge in a commercial context to provide the single translation equivalent accountant in most circumstances when translating into English, without causing any embarrassment. Amplification and Reduction Amplification requires that the translator add some element to the source text for reasons of greater comprehensibility. The most obvious form of Amplification is the translator’s note which may be purely structural. It may be necessary in the case of a collocation gap, that is, where a single lexical item in one language needs a collocational partner in the other. Amplification is also required where the source language ‘takes for granted’ certain components, which may be cultural, semantic or linguistic or a mixture thereof. Reduction consists of omitting elements in a target text because they are redundant or even misleading. The Italian carta geografica is merely a map in English, and the English three-toed sloth translates as bradipo in Italian, and these are examples of ‘built-in’ forms of Reduction. But translators should always be ready to make decisions on when to reduce. Diffusion and Condensation Diffusion and Condensation are concerned with the phenomenon of linguistically slackening or tightening source text expressions for the target text version, that is, providing more or less elaboration. The Italian exclamation Magari! Requires diffusing into a locution of the type: If only I could! Would that it were! I wish that were the case! Italian subjunctive and conditional usage can express a wide range of meanings, often requiring Diffusion in English translation. The perfect conditional in sentences like La banda avrebbe rapinato :mpor tre banche, requires the use of a conventional passive voice expression of the type The gang is alleged/said/reported to have robbed three other banks. Condensation: the target text expression is more linguistically economic. English is generally reputed to be more succinct than Italian, though often this is more a question of stylistics than linguistics. Certain common adjectives and verbal expressions, however, can be condensed: a buon prezzo, a buon mercato/cheap far vedere/show In the other direction, prepositional verbs and phrasal verbs are typical of this phenomenon: fo look at/guardare to make up/inventare to make up for/compensare Categories such as newspaper headlines and noun groups in technical writing provide endless examples of strings what are known as multivariate or univariate strings. In the case of multivariate strings, the elements comprising a noun group each have distinct function: those two beautiful film stars The above noun group consists of a demonstrative those, a numeral two, an; adjective beautiful, and two nouns film and stars. The adjective is an example of an epithet and its function is to indicate some quality of what is represented by the head noun, which in this case is stars. The noun film is an example of a classifier whose purpose is to indicate a subclass of the head noun object (cf: TV stars, pop stars). To return to the beginning of the group, the demonstrative those is a deictic term which serves to show that a specific subset is being referred to. Each element thus has a distinct function in relation to the entity represented by the head noun. Reordering p. We enter very definitely into the field of comparative syntax. At its simplest, it requires the translator to operate basic inversion procedures with, for example, adjective-noun sequences (white horse/cavallo bianco), and verb-object positioning ((io) ti amo/I love you). It is, however, equally important for the translator to know when not to activate these mechanisms, whether for linguistic or rhetorical reasons. Set collocations of two or more items exist in both languages and indicate how such pairings: 1 vita e morte/life and death: match perfectly; Grice’s cooperative maxims controlling the way conversation develops and the associated implicatures are discussed as a key to understanding how successful communication works. Knowledge of the world For translators, a general knowledge of the world surrounding them needs to be supplemented by an understanding of the universe of discourse and the context of culture. This enables meaning to be interpreted in relation to the personal set of beliefs held by the speaker/writer and the cultural beliefs and mores of both the source and target culture. Speech acts With particular reference to the scholars Austin and Searle, the idea of ‘speaker meaning’ and the interpersonal element in communication is examined through an explanation of locutionary and illocutionary (speech) acts, perlocutionary effect and felicity conditions. 4 Culture The final section of Chapter Two concludes the analysis of cultural factors and problems related to culture-boundness. 1 Semantics (Basic concepts) The fact that it is possible to translate any sentence of one language (at least roughly) into any other language (however clumsily) also reinforces the conclusion that the basic facts about meaning in all languages are, by and large, parallel. (Hurford & Heasley 1983:10) Individual items in a text are of essentially two types: function words (grammatical items): such as articles prepositions, conjunctions, etc. (the, of, however, although), are those item that merely perform grammatical functions. Content words (lexical items): refer to some thing, general or specific, that exists in the world, either concrete (« elephant, London, Margaret’s boyfriend) or abstract (mathematics, love Margaret’s boyfriend’s idea). The words or expressions used to refer to ‘things’, are known as referring expressions, referring to a referent, which is the ‘thing its Semantics therefore links language to the cognitive world’. Halliday: “text is a semantic unit, though made up of grammatical units: morphemes, words, groups, clauses, sentences”. Morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units in a language, may take these forms: 1 a recognisable word: boy 2 a purely grammatical feature: -ly (for forming adverbs) Nominal and verbal groups can range in complexity: 1 a single word: dog, go 2 a complex word formation: (nominal group) Members of Parliament who need a swing of at least ten per cent in the run-up to the poll in order to be re-elected (verbal group) (they) were to have come Sentences can be of three basic types: 1 simple: The cat sat on the mat. 2 more elaborate in terms of coordination (parataxis): He huffed, and he puffed, and he blew the house down. 3 more elaborate in terms of subordination (hypotaxis): He huffed, after having puffed, till he blew the house down. But, the meaning of an individual unit may alter as it shifts from being, say, an isolated word to being part of a group, e.g. heavy/a heavy smoker, or from being a group to forming part of a clause, e.g. a long wayI he’s a long way from solving the problem, and so on. In fact, the various elements in a text combine in a number of ways to create chunks of meaning which, when bound together within the confines of the text, ‘mean’ something which is more (or less) than the sum of its parts. As a further complication, different language communities belong to different cultures and within those cultures life is lived, and the world is seen, in slightly different ways. Words do not exist before the things they are used to describe, but things can exist in one culture and not in another, and therefore be named in one language only (briscola – a card game, cricket). However, Roman Jakobson in his famous 1959 paper ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, explained that the meaning of any lexical item can be found in its ‘translation’ into some other item. He then distinguished three kinds or levels of translation: 1 Intralingual translation: translation within the same language 2 Interlingual translation: translation between two different languages 3 Intersemiotic translation: translation from the verbal to the non-verbal Level 1 he pointed out that: “No one can understand the word ‘cheese’ unless he has an acquaintance with the meaning assigned to this word in the lexical code of English.” Level 2, which is what interests us as translators, there may not always be full equivalence, but adequate interpretations practically always exist. For example, the relationship of bread to pane, brot, pain, etc. is one of equivalence in difference, the difference being clear to anyone who has breakfasted around Europe and noticed the different textures, colours, sizes and flavours of the various products that can generally be labelled in English as bread. 2 Context p. “The context of an idea or event is the general situation that relates to it, and which helps it to be understood.” (Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, 1995) Human beings are able to activate ‘contexts’ in order to filter out extraneous material and work within acceptable limits. They are therefore able to process text from an analysis of the situation (top-down processing) and not simply from the sequence of clauses and sentences they build up (bottom-up processing). The most important factor explaining top- down processing is that the context of discourse creates the necessary expectations for understanding the content of discourse. The basic idea is that a scenario is activated representing the stereotypical components of a definable situation. In the case of any person going about their daily business, their ‘context’ will be built up through a mental picture of the ‘situation’ in which they find themselves (buying a newspaper, taking the train, arguing with the boss) and their language ‘content’ will be fed by various strands of intertextuality. Consequently, the context and its linguistic content are to a certain extent circumscribed; hence the surprise that is registered by participants in speech acts if someone says something considered to be ‘out of place’, ‘unexpected’, even ‘incomprehensible’. Johnson-Laird (1980) speaks of ‘mental models’, Sanford and Garrod (1981) actually use the term ‘scenario’ and van Dijk and Kintsch (1983:11-12) speak of ‘schemata’ and a ‘situation model’ for text which they describe as: “the cognitive representation of events, actions, and persons ... which integrates the comprehender’s existing world knowledge with information derived from the text.” The most convenient way of describing a context is to list its components. For example, Firth (1950) outlined the following elements: The participants, including their roles and status; The verbal and non-verbal action of the participants; The relevant objects and events; The effects of the verbal action. Hymes (1972) provided another componential breakdown of the elements that comprise any given situational context, including the following: participants (speaker and audience) message form message content setting medium of communication intent of communication effect of communication the key the genre the norms of interaction Michael Halliday, as we shall see below, describes context in terms of field, tenor and mode. Lyons (1977), Leech (1981) and others have described the same phenomena using their own terminology, but essentially context can be identified in terms of ‘someone addressing someone else about something, somewhere, for some reason and in some way’. House devised a series of parameters designed precisely to compare source and target texts in translation and termed them ‘dimensions’. These dimensions, based on a set of parameters first devised by Crystal and Davy (1969), are used in an attempt to analyse a text according to its various facets, but in this case House’s model is aimed directly at translation in an attempt to ensure that a target version can be made to match a source previously-mentioned Juliane House’s translation assessment model, consisting of a series of parameters or ‘dimensions’ which effectively represent the components of the context of situation in question. The translator’s indispensable objective is still to make every attempt to recreate the context surrounding the text to be translated, within the cultural confines of both source and target languages. 3 Pragmatics p. Its essential feature of examining ‘speaker meaning’ as opposed to ‘sense’ or ‘sentence meaning’. Longman’s Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (1992) defines pragmatics as: “the study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used. Pragmatics includes the study of: a) how the interpretation and use of utterances depends on knowledge of the real world b) how speakers use and understand speech acts c) how the structure of sentences is influenced by the relationship between the speaker and the hearer.” Pragmatics is that branch of semantics that attempts to go beyond the surface and to test what actual meaning lies behind them. It examines speech acts from the point of view of the intentions of the participants, and analyses how successful communication can be achieved, given the enormous potential of language to create ambiguity, polysemy, obscurity, generality and specificity, irony and emotivity, and the powerful resources it contains to produce word play of every kind. Grice (1975) formulated his ‘Cooperative Principle’ in which he suggested that efficient communication depended on the recognition of a number of maxims: 1 Do not say too little or too much (quantity maxim) 2 Tell the truth or what you know (quality maxim) 3 Only say what is relevant (relevance maxim) 4 Be perspicuous, brief and orderly (manner maxim) Grice uses the term ‘implicature’ to refer to what speakers actually mean by what they say. For example, consider the following dialogue: A: Are you coming to the match? B: Ah, I went last week. There is no immediately logical connection between the two utterances. Certainly, B knows which match is being referred to through A and B’s shared knowledge, but he replies obliquely. Where pragmatic function can create difficulty, we will take the case of the attitudinal disjuncts in fact and infatti, and see how they function as discourse markers: Bruti (1996) distinguishes the pragmatic and discursive functions of the two items, pointing out how in fact is used to reformulate, to correct, to anticipate further clarification and generally to aid progression of the discourse, while the purpose of infatti is to express acquiescence, compliance and agreement and occasionally to attract attention, and is not primarily involved in discourse progression. I don’t remember much about it In fact I can’t remember anything about it might be Non ricordo molto in proposito. Anzi, non ne ricordo niente. Meaningful communication: refers basically to the fact that people need to identify with the same sets of parameters regarding the world they live in. As Hurford and Heasley (1983:59) put it: “the universe of discourse for any utterance is the particular world, real or imaginary that the speaker assumes he is talking about at the time.” Different peoples’ cultural values can put them in a particular universe of discourse, at least some of the time. But for the purposes of translation, the same universe of discourse must reign between the source and target writer. English. Malinowski stressed the idea that in order to understand the meaning of a foreign language, it was necessary to have a sound knowledge of the immediate environment of a speech act allied to a sound knowledge of the wider cultural environment. The ideas of Edward Sapir (1929) and his pupil Benjamin Whorf (1956) followed this anthropological line, and further emphasised the role of culture in interpreting language (and languages). The so-called ‘strong’ Sapir-Whorf hypothesis rather stretches this idea to the limit by suggesting that language controls our way of thinking, and that people from different cultures have different views of the world, imposed on them by language. That is important because by the same token, these little matters can also falsify or trivialise a translation. Speech acts: Austin (1962) referred first of all to an utterance of any kind as a locutionary act. The act that is performed, representing the intention of the person formulating that utterance, and known as the illocutionary act may or may not be immediately apparent from the words that are spoken or written. For example, the student who says ‘May / have a handout, please?’ at the beginning of a lecture is clearly making a request, but the student who simply says I haven’t got a handout’ is not just providing information for whoever wants to listen, but also expressing a desire to the lecturer that he or she would like a handout in order to follow proceedings. The resultant effect of a speech act is known as the perlocutionary effect. Searle categorise speech acts by dividing them according to their performative function: 1 a single lexical item; 2 an individual speech act; 3 an exchange; 4 a concatenation of speech acts; 5 an entire text. 4 Culture p. The interpersonal element: Pragmatics is concerned with the use of language in social interaction, and thus the interpersonal component in communication is very important in determining lexicogrammatical choice. Questions of register come into play depending on the social status, personality, age, sex and education level of the participants in a discourse. Many languages have a built-in politeness mechanism in the use of pronouns (tu and Lei in Italian) whereas English has to use other devices, such as a widespread use of the adverbial please, or the use of the tentative may and might or conditional forms. Posso farti una domanda?/Can I ask you something? Posso farLe una domanda?/May I ask you a question? Vieni!/Come on! Venga/Please come this way; Would you step this way? In conversation, the invitation Puoi darmi del tu, sai has often been translated by some variation of Please call me George/Bill/Mary. Conversely, the instruction Devi dare del lei al Signor X might become Remember to be polite to Mr X. On the other hand, the ubiquitous phatic ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’ that are so common in English speech are not always necessary in equivalent Italian situations. Cultural constraints: the influence of cultural factors on language, and consequently on translation, especially those more distant in terms of both distance and way of life, human Longman’s Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics refers to a particular class of speech events which are considered by the speech community as being of the same type. Examples of genres are: prayers, sermons, conversations, letters, novels.... They have particular and distinctive characteristics. Texts can be categorised as to their function, their style or their ‘register’. The classifying of texts according to their function, on the other hand, is connected to whether they are designed to narrate, to describe, to explain, to entertain, to threaten, etc. For example, many characteristics of narrative text can be observed and identified: - the use of first- and third-person pronouns as referring expressions the use of the agentive subject; - the concentration on the specific rather than the generic; - the use of the past tense; - the use of chronological linking devices. Simpson discusses narrative structure in terms of Labov’s various phases of narrative: abstract beginning, orientation complicating, action resolution, evaluation, coda. The reader’s attention is drawn to the fact that a story is beginning, and a course of action is described involving various characters, in a certain setting, etc. (orientation). The key action takes place affecting the situation (complicating action). A problem is solved, or an event is finalised (resolution) and an explanation is given (evaluation). The story is rounded off, often referring back to the beginning (coda). The linguistic features often connected to the various phases are listed: - the past progressive verb form for orientation; - the simple past in the middle phases; - explicatory modals for the evaluation; - a general timeless statement for the coda. 1 Written and spoken language p. The translator is most usually concerned with the written variety of language. The interpreter deals with the spoken genre, although more often it is the ‘written to be spoken’ type that emerges in conference situations. Halliday explains the genesis and subsequent development of written language as follows: “Writing evolved for a range of distinct social functions; it was not primarily a new way of doing old things with language. In other words it came into being precisely so that new registers could be created: so that there could be a ‘written language’ that was not the same as the spoken. Again, this is not to imply that there will be one clearly defined ‘written’ variety; what emerges is a new range of functional variation, which leads to the emergence of configurations of semantic and lexicogrammatical patterns that then come to be recognised as characteristic of writing.” The written language, compared to the spoken, contains more low-frequency items. The spoken variety makes easy recourse to the device of intonation in order to frame meaning, whereas the written language relies more on word order and logical information presentation achieved through theme/rheme and given/new information patterns. There is much use of the passive voice and impersonal constructions of the It is said that... /Si dice che... type. Texts can be read and re-read and consequently valued and re-valued many times, distancing themselves often quite radically from their original contexts of situation. And in a very obvious sense, most spoken language is produced ‘to be spoken’ and therefore consists of all the hesitations, repetitions, reformulations, and general ungrammaticalities that are missing from the written mode. 2 Sociolinguistic varieties “Sociolinguistics studies the ways in which language interacts with society.” (Crystal 1981:252) Translators must be aware of the national linguistic group they are translating from and, more importantly, writing for. As well as the above-mentioned lexicogrammatical areas, stylistic differences can also be recognised. The generation gap, rightly or wrongly often blamed for lack of understanding between parents and children, has a linguistic component. The translators of popular songs, for example, should pay heed to this phenomenon. This defining of the fundamental motives behind ‘genderlect’ helps us to understand why men often seem overbearing to women, and often downright boring in their insistence on imparting information to uninterested ears, and why men at times find women’s conversation trivial or unnecessarily personal. On the strength of this divide, it might be thought that men’s and women’s language differ only in terms of content or style, but the two varieties can also be distinguished by certain lexicogrammatical choices. 3 Text types p.116 Based on the contexts in which texts occur and (which) results in institutionalised labels such as ‘journal article’, ‘science textbook’, ‘newspaper editorial’ or ‘travel brochure’. Buhler’s 1934 distinction between three basic functions of language: the referential or informative function: providing information about the facts and events of the real world; the vocative or persuasive function: persuading or influencing others. Literary texts: comes very close to the top end of the ‘expressive function of language. Apart from all manner of word play, metaphorisation and use of figures of speech, the source text author may also resort to linguistic idiosyncrasy in the form of symbolism, rhetoric or bizarre description. While most other text types can be described by recourse to a considerable amount of intertextuality (features that recur frequently in texts of the same type), it is the lack of intertextuality in its most creative parts that distinguishes literature from those other forms, and that provides the greatest challenge to translators. Technical texts: include the scientific disciplines (medicine, physics, astronomy, chemistry, etc.), fields of applied technology (computers, engineering, etc.) and even less obviously ‘scientific’ subjects such as geography, economics, architecture and the like. The grammar of scientific language may intuitively be considered complex by the layman, influenced by the technical nature of the content. Yet the language of everyday communication and non-technical texts is often more grammatically intricate. It is also true that at first sight it is the obscure, specialised and, more importantly, unfamiliar vocabulary that makes the technical text seem so complex. But it is the nominalisation itself that particularly distinguishes technical grammar from the grammar of the spoken language, often on the basis of what Halliday calls grammatical metaphor. Technical texts conform to certain conventionalised patterns has been demonstrated by various authors (Trimble, Widdowson) Indeed, the presence of pre-existing schemes makes the author’s (and the reader’s) work much easier. All doctors are familiar with the typical structure of a medical trials paper: Introduction, Objectives, Materials and Methods, Discussion and Results Conclusion. Legal texts: it be flawless and therefore not betray the fundamental rights of any person or group. The consequent scrupulous attention paid to making sure that legal text is hermetic and unambiguous is one of the main reasons for its at times seemingly impenetrable, syntactically complex nature, full of apparent redundancy. For translators this is both a blessing and a curse in that they cannot make mistakes, but the guidelines are rigid. Commercial texts: much effort has gone into presenting commercial language as a separate entity in the field of language teaching. Essentially, the commercial English that differs from other categories is to be found in the stylised ‘sub-types’ that permit communication in the business world, namely commercial letters, faxes, memos, reports and the like: the practical language of buying and selling. If it is a reply it will begin with Thank you for your letter of... and any correspondence will probably end with I look forward to hearing from you or Please acknowledge receipt. The overt politeness is reinforced, particularly in English which lacks the polite Lei or Voi form, by a more than casual use of the conditional tense and set expressions such as I should be very grateful, I look forward to hearing from you, etc. The Dear Sir/Madam, Yours Sincerely, Distinti saluti set of conventions are obligatory elements, examples of what the individual cultures have ritualised. What is required in this field is a sensitivity to the norms so as to be able, as a translator, to know that I acknowledge receipt is Accuso ricevuta and I look forward to hearing from you is best served by In attesa di una Sua gentile risposta. These equivalents admit of little variation or deviation. More than in many other fields, the translator can simply look at the original and then rewrite it according to the target language commercial norms, at times overriding more apparently equivalent lexical choices and grammatical structures. The obligatory features that allow us to identify a genre, though the optional elements are by no means necessarily random and form an important part of the generic structure. Hasan (1989) isolated a number of (sub) genres within the area of spoken language. An example can be the case of a typical exchange at a greengrocer’s shop: a number of obligatory features common to the superordinate genre, such as the Sale Request, and a number of obligatory features more specific to the sub-genre in question (fruit and vegetable terminology) together map out the genre ‘service encounter/greengrocers. The field of journalism can also be represented in terms of a system network: Thus, this sub-genre must contain some of the features of journalistic language before it can ‘enter’ the system labelled ‘tabloids’; it must then take on some of the features of tabloids before progressing to ‘tabloid news’, and thence to ‘sensational scoop’ and so on. Macro and micro genres may also be based on parameters such as function, style or ‘register’, as well as subject matter. However, the term ‘register’ now also requires a more refined definition. Several writers, in particular Halliday, have in fact equated register with genre. Register: is one of the most important components of Halliday’s functional grammar theory, and he describes it as the functional variation of language. The three variables of that make up the context of situation determine the register: Field: ‘what is happening’; Tenor: ‘who is participating’; Mode: ‘what role the language is playing’. In other words, register refers to what a person is doing with language at any given moment and it can be deduced that, at least theoretically, there are as many registers as there are distinct activities. The various contexts of situation contain the semantic potential to specify registers, and it is here that the similarity with Hasan’s genre formulation is apparent. Again, in order to qualify for genre status, we have seen that a text must include a minimum number of obligatory elements which distinguish it as a recipe. Consider the following extracts from an Italian magazine for teenage girls: E adesso a parlare è lei, gerì, la più discussa, la più desiderata (dai maschietti) la più osé delle Spice. Trova il tuo look – trucco da giorno Questa settimana la protagonista dei nostro ‘prima e dopo’ è Stefania, una Mag-girl di 15 anni. LA POSTA DI SUSY E PATTY Hi, sfolgoranti girls, eccoci di nuovo tutte insieme! Racconta gli attimi ‘happy’ vissuti con il pop che non dimenticherai mai! Firstly, the subject matter of the magazine is predictable (pop personalities, clothes, boyfriends, etc.) but so also are questions of style. The syntactic equivalence in la più …, la più …» la più … is dynamic. The cataphoric introduction lei is sufficient to grab the attention of an audience who have no difficulty in identifying Geri or the Spice (Girls). The use of the intimate second person singular pronoun and first names is in line with teenage talk and the nostro shows that the magazine is very much a part of their world. Bex explains how the writer manages to maintain this genre style: In the construction of a given text my linguistic choices are constrained by the genre with which I want it to be associated. In order to be in a position to translate such material, it is important to have knowledge of equivalent target language publications. This requires a greater degree of specialised background research than simply considering the characteristics of journalistic text. It requires a sensitivity to what is known as the discourse community: it is possible to recognise sequences of language within the speech patterns of well-defined groups that transcend chance occurrence. Swales (1990) referred to such groups as ‘discourse communities’, that is, the people involved in a common task or event and the language they use in accomplishing that task or acting out that event. If the translator can move from genre to genre, and within those genres from genrelet to genrelet at ever increasing levels of delicacy, even within the same extended text, then the lexicogrammatical, semantic and pragmatic considerations that were the focus of Chapters One and Two should fit into place. Human language has evolved to deal with the manifold areas of human endeavour and exchange, and it is the translator’s job to provide the fine tuning that is needed to transfer a genre-based text in the source language as accurately and sensitively as possible into an equivalent text in the target language. If all the elements, obligatory or otherwise, of the genre are respected, translators will do their job well and provide a true rendering of meaning across a linguistic and cultural divide. PART II It is now clear that any language act must be considered in all its linguistic and extralinguistic aspects before being translated. The translator is encouraged to create a ‘pre-translation picture’ of the text, a ‘traduzione interna’ (Arcaini 1986), by judiciously analysing its various features and by blending the relevant elements into one another to create a target text. Translators were encouraged in experiments to speak out loud the ideas that came into their heads while translating. One of the major exponents of this methodology, Hans Krings, published an article in 1987, The Use of Introspective Data in Translation, outlining the rationale, design and analysis of such ‘thinking-aloud techniques. From the didactic point of view, the value to students and teachers springs from the following observation: “Many processes automated in highly proficient professional translators still take place on a conscious level in learners.” His interested areas are: 1: Decision-making processes: the evaluation of competing potential translation equivalents ('equivalent retrieval strategies’) and the rationale behind the final decision; 2: Assessing the relative importance of morphosyntactic, lexicosemantic and pragmatic considerations; 3: The role of intuition. A first reading, a pre-translation examination and a stage by stage transposing (or rolling) of the text from LI to L2, whether from second to native language or vice-versa. Another of Krings’ finding was that the kind of problems encountered (though not necessarily the number) did not differ appreciably with regard to translation direction. Italian/English translation The steps in the process will be presented mechanically in the form of a 'rolling translation’ as translators gradually mould their native language into the required shape, by sifting through the layers of meaning in the foreign language source text. From a largely literal, first draft version, the text will be analysed from the point of view of its lexicogrammar and the necessary modifications to be made in line with contrastive linguistic, lexical and terminological considerations. The text thus rolls onwards before being subjected to a deeper analysis of its more semantic, pragmatic, stylistic and cultural features, where appropriate. And so, the target text takes shape as it rolls towards completion, that is to the complete satisfaction of the translator after having thoroughly analysed the source text from the point of view of the various parameters available. About trainers, when they are not written down on paper or computer screen they are often ‘written’ mentally or voiced silently or aloud. Indeed, the above-mentioned Thinking