regard to such a letter were thought to be unwarranted since they were stereotypical and not substantiated by facts. But such evidence has now come to light. A number
of cross-cultural German–English studies have since been carried out suggesting that communicative preferences exist and that these differ along five basic
dimensions:directness, self-reference, content-focus, explicitness and reliance on communicative routines.
Task C10.7
➤ Having appreciated the commercial text for what it is, try now either to retrieve
the letter from House 1997:169–73 or collect examples of similar letters originating in English.
➤ Attempt an analysis and translation into languages which you know to be more
‘direct’ and ‘forceful’. Researching TL preferences is obviously crucial, but, as translators working to dead-
lines under pressure, rarely if ever can we afford such luxuries. We must therefore opt for a heuristics of some kind, a practical way of assessing likely target reader
response. Text type and textual practices related to such macro-structures as genre are important parameters for making this heuristics less subjective.
CONCLUSION
In this unit, we have explored variables such as the use and user of language from the perspective of both register analysis and translation quality assessment. The
latter is an important application of register theory and one which has provided translation analysts and practitioners with useful tools for judging the adequacy
of a given translation strategy for a particular kind of text. But the choice of a translation strategy is not just a ST issue, nor is it exclusively a context of situation
matter. Rather, it is bound up with the entire context of culture within which texts and their translation are produced. It is these issues that will occupy us in the
next unit.
PROJECTS
1. Find a translation with a dialect problem e.g. George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, 1916 and examine two or three versions translating the same text.
Analyse and assess the strategy adopted. 2. Investigate a language which varies little in time or space e.g. Arabic, and
examine how the language can cope with subtle dialect and register variations in STs belonging to variation-sensitive languages e.g. English.
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3. Investigate a language with abundant terminology in a certain area e.g. falconry in Arabic, information technology in English or with formality markers such
as honorifics in Japanese and study how languages with deficits in their repertoires cope.
4. Rhetorical purpose and text function can be and often are similar, if not identical. However, there are situations where purpose and function may be
at variance:what we want the translation to ‘function’ as as detailed in the ‘commission’ for example may not be the same as the purpose intended for
the ST by the text producer.
Examine the work of a translation agency or a satellite TV station and inves- tigate in detail the changes undergone by texts imported from other perhaps
more neutral translation agencies.
5. Several cross-cultural studies e.g. German–English have been carried out, suggesting that communicative preferences exist and that these differ along five
basic dimensions:directness, self-reference, content-focus, explicitness and reliance on communicative routines. Apply this model to the analysis of how
your language and culture prefer to handle a sample of texts of a similar kind to the commercial letter analysed by House.
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Unit C11 Text, genre and discourse shifts
in translation
EXPLORING TEXT SHIFTS IN TRANSLATION
Task C11.1
➤ Examine the following two texts one of which you have already seen in
Example C9.1 and try to determine:
1. the field or subject matter 2. tenor of level of formality
3. the writer’s intention to monitor or manage a situation 4. the text-type orientation as reflected by the contextual focus on exposition
or argumentation.
Example C11.1a English ST
Summary The present report . . . has been prepared in response to General Assembly Resolution
51186. In accordance with resolution 5493, the report comprises a review of the implementation and results of the World Declaration and Plan of Action . . . It draws
upon a wide range of sources . . . It also draws upon earlier reports . . .
From the Report to the General Assembly by the UN Secretary-General
4 May 2001
Example C11.1b Back-translation of Arabic translation, italics added
Summary It is the
present report . . . which has been prepared by the Preparatory Committee in response to the General Assembly Resolution 51186. In accordance with resolution
5493, what the report comprises is a review of the implementation and results of the World Declaration and Plan of Action . . . It draws upon a wide range of sources as
well as earlier reports . . .
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International affairs as field and a formal style as tenor, are aspects of register optimally preserved by Example C11.1b. These contextual specifications certainly
tell us a great deal about the level of technicality or terminology and formality or authority shared as important features by the ST and TT in question, but can hardly
identify precisely where the TT has gone wrong. To establish real differences or similarities, we must therefore invoke another set of criteria to do with inten-
tionality
. The pragmatic orientation of Example C11.1a is to monitor a situation
impartially by producing a fairly detached summary, while that of Example C11.1b is to manage a situation by arguing for the merits or demerits of a particular scheme.
Monitoring and managing lead us to another basic distinction:Examples ‘a’ and ‘b’
above are likely to be found in the summary section and the evaluation section of a UN document respectively. The fact that a text is a summary or a commentary
has to do with intertextuality, which establishes how texts and utterances within texts can conjure up images of other texts, much in the same way as signs point us
in the direction of what they refer to. This level of context is ultimately responsible for creating texts and for the evolution of text types.
Task C11.2
Due to a shortage of translators in particular language pairs, a practice not uncommon in organizations such as the UN is to translate from already
translated texts and not from originals.
➤ If you were to use the above TT Example C11.1b as a ST to translate into your
own language, what would your translation strategy be:to preserve this level of emotiveness, to neutralize it partially or to jettison it completely? What is
your rationale?
GENRE SHIFTS For the various interrelationships register-related and pragmatic to make sense
in the wider context of communication, then, we need to see a given sequence of sentences in terms of a dominant contextual focus which points to the overall
rhetorical purpose of the writer or the function of the text. But there are other
vantage points from which to approach a text.
Task C11.3
➤ Consider this piece of narration Example C11.2a. By focusing on the elements
in added italics, what strikes you as somewhat unusual in this kind of narration?
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Example C11.2a
There was another soft rustling, then silence. Gabrielle’s ears strained against it as she
tried to hear Doyle’s breathing, just to reassure herself that he was still there, but the harder she listened, the more strange sounds she could hear – sounds that she couldn’t
identify but which her mind went spinning off to make sense.
Was that soft, slithering sound a snake moving across the ground towards her? And
that light insistent tapping – could it be . . .?
Jennifer Taylor, Jungle Fever, Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills Boon, 1995: 45–6
A salient feature of this narrative and of the entire novel from which it is drawn is the predominantly inanimate agency Gabrielle’s ears strained which threads its
way throughout. For the rationale behind the choice of inanimate themes in subject position in this text, we need to see the narrative at another level of text organization.
This would focus not so much on narration a rhetorical purpose taken care of on the text level as on the narrative as a communicative event. We would here focus
on the participants in the event, their goals, and the style and conventions governing writing in this particular mode. The above text is drawn from a Mills Boon novel,
a genre which, to enhance the entertainment value, does a number of things with language, including the hijacking of other genres e.g. the Gothic and straight
Horror in the above example. Like these other genres, although probably for different reasons, Mills Boon tends to be heavy on the suppression of human
agency
, deliberately letting actors other than the human take over. There is also
a clear tendency to use what Carter and Nash 1990 call ‘core’ verbs, strikingly colourful adjectives, and so on.
It is perhaps helpful at this juncture to comment on the translation of this and similar chunks of narrative in one particular Mills Boon novel examined in Arabic
translation. Quite a number of the inanimate subjects were turned into animate ones, and many of the ‘core’ verbs lost their ‘coreness’, probably because inanimate
agency
and a proliferation of ‘core’ verbs are stylistic features favoured by the
fictional register in the TL. Inanimate agency or core verbs are not unknown in this language, but in the absence of a clear rationale for why this defamiliarizing
style is used, the decision is likely to be for the default option of resorting to animate agency
and core verbs. Example C11.2b is a back-translation from Arabic of part
of the above passage:
Example C11.2b
She started to hear another kind of rustling, then silence. So she strained her ears as
she tried to hear Doyle’s breathing, just to reassure herself that he was still there . . .
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Task C11.4
➤ Examine this kind of popular fiction writing translated into a language with
which you are familiar. Are features we associate with the popular fiction genre as developed in English preserved, or are they explained away in an attempt to
remove any traces that make the story-telling ‘vulgar’ and ‘popular’?
DISCOURSE SHIFTS IN TRANSLATION
What could the Mills Boon text producer intend by deliberately suppressing human agency and resorting to the impersonal mode of narration noted in Example
C11.2a above an effect which was lost in the translation C11.2b? To answer this question, we will find it helpful to invoke the communicative requirements of the
genre
in question:‘In the domain of popular fiction, there is an implicit supposition that men like their stories to be “action-packed”, whereas women prefer a “heart-
warming” tale’ Carter and Nash 1990:100. But behind the ‘heart-warming’ lurks a paradox:women make up the majority of
those who avidly ‘consume’ this essentially sexist discourse. Carter and Nash 1990 explain this very well:‘[Sentences with inanimate or impersonal agents as subjects]
occur again and again in contexts presenting the character as a victim-object of uncontrollable forces . . . When soldier Sam is in a spot, his stomach tightens; when
nurse Nancy is alone in the fog-bound clinic, fear grips her with an icy claw . . .’
p. 106
Example C11.3a Italics added
She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places. She was working on a piece of needlepoint when we first met them and she worked
on this and saw to the food and drink and talked to my wife. I cannot remember whether she was walking her dog or not.
And she always gave me the natural eau-de-vie. She talked, mostly, and she told me about modern pictures and about painters – more
about them as people than as painters – and she talked about what she had written and what her companion typed each day.
E. Hemingway A Moveable Feast 19641994 Arrow: London
Task C11.5
Staying with the interface between genre and discourse, and with the concept of shifts which, if unjustified, constitute an important source of translation
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problems, consider the excerpt above, culled from what has legitimately become a genre in its own right – the Hemingway novella.
➤ What kind of narrative do we have here? Does anything strike you as ‘unusual’
or marked about it? Why do you think this kind of narrative has been used and what effect does it have?
Hemingway’s intention in this or similar texts is certainly to tell a story. However, a pattern emerges in the work of this particular writer, which reveals a tendency
to treat men and women differently Fowler 1986. While men are seen always as ‘active’ doing things, picking up bags, etc., women are relegated to a ‘passive’
existence i.e. always at the receiving end, sitting, smiling, etc..
Cumulatively, this shift in attitude turns a narrative into a forum for ideological statement, and an act of monitoring into an act of managing. This kind of language
use, together with such general stylistic features as short, pithy sentences, have become the trademark of Hemingway, the hallmark of a genre. Ultimately, however,
what we have is the expression of an attitude towards the sexes, specifically a sexist ideology
which is a discourse matter:how the American Dream is essentially the
work of the white American male. To see this from a translation perspective, a relevant question is whether
Hemingway’s translators are aware of the implications of such innocent-sounding manifestations such as fairly passive verbs for women and dynamic, active verbs for
men. Do translators notice these peculiarities and attitude shifts, or seek to preserve them in their translations?
Task C11.6
➤
Examine a Hemingway story, analyse the style, and evaluate a translation made into a language with which you are familiar.
We have performed this kind of analysis on Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. This novel has seen two major translations into Arabic. One translation shows a remark-
able sensitivity to the stylistic features identified above. In the other translation, the translator does not only gloss over these features by indifferently doing nothing,
but seems to go out of the way to convey the opposite effect to what is intended. Consider Example C11.3b these back-translations in bold of how the translator
of the second version approached the issues involved, and our own glosses [in brackets] of the level of ‘activity’ assigned to the various actions.
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Example C11.3b
She talked all the time [actively, as in holding the floor] and begins by talking about people and places . . .
She was [actively] preoccupied with [immersed in] embroidering a piece of cloth when we first met them, she was embroidering this and [actively] taking care of the
food and drink and [actively] talked to my wife.
It was she who always talked [actively], and thus talked to me about modern pictures
and about painters – more about them as people than as painters – and she talked and showed me
[actively] the many volumes of a manuscript she was working on and which her companion was typing
.
It is safe to assume that this strategy was influenced by TL linguistic and stylistic norms
and conventions which prefer indeed encourage such features as longer and more complex sentences closely linked to each other within the text, as well as
predominantly ‘active’ verbs across the board.
ANARCHIST DISCOURSE Phenomena such as text and genre shifts in Hemingway or Mills Boon texts,
then, inevitably involve discourse as ‘statement of attitude’. To illustrate discursive practices, in Section B, Unit 11 we included an extract by Donald Bruce Text B11.2,
who looked into the reasons for the state of critical neglect suffered by the French writer Jules Vallès’s trilogy L’Enfant, Le Bachelier and L’Insurgé.
To understand the nature of this specific problem, we need to inquire into the anarchist counter-discourse which the work of Vallès represents. Let us explore an
important set of discursive features which revolve around what Bruce labels ‘radical decentralization’. This manifests itself in a general fragmentation of the narrative,
for example. Milan Kundera discussed in Section A, Unit 11 provides us with an excellent example of this device at work.
Task C11.7
To research fragmented narration and similar defamiliarizing uses of language:
➤ Find a translation of Kundera done into your own language or a language with
which you are familiar and assess the translation. ➤
Does the language seem to have been ‘normalized’ in the TT and the sense of fragmentation lost?
➤
Modify the TT and attempt to increase the defamiliarization.
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➤ Extend your sample to include works you know have suffered the same kind of
imposition of western narrative order at the hands of their translators. Vallès’s novels exhibit another set of discursive features representative of the
discourse
of the Commune. This involves tense shifts which cumulatively prop up the fragmentation motif, this time through the ‘sense of spontaneity and immediacy
which the shifts relay’. As Bruce 1994:66 explains, the French text is often written in the present historic and verb tense shifts can be quite abrupt to cater for the
different narrative ‘voices’.
Third, we have the ‘binary dialectic’ in the area of the lexicon. As Bruce observes, oppositional terms in any text generally ‘function to sustain narrative and ideo-
logical tension without attaining any level of resolution’ 1992:66. This binary dialectic is compatible with anarchistic vision. What is involved, however, could
cover structures beyond the lexical item:oppositional key semantic fields, juxta- posed discourses or competing enunciative positions.
Next, Bruce discusses word play as another important characteristic ‘which metaphorizes the inherent notions of dynamism in the discourse of the Commune’
1992:67. It is here also that what Bruce terms ‘ideologems’ emerge in abundance. Although these are often phrase-length expressions usually embedded in larger
syntactic
structures, the way they discursively function is pervasive: discourse can be made to confront discourse in a syntagmatically restricted space governed
by ambiguity. Finally, ‘interdiscursive mixing’ provides us with another area of textual activity
where anarchist discourse optimizes its effect. Mixing is an ideological weapon which draws heavily on the way signs signify. Subsumed under this category are
most of the features discussed so far:the ambiguity of competing discourses in the ideologem, discursive juxtaposition and conflict, the hijacking of other discourses
and the subversion of the currently unfolding discourse.
Task C11.8
➤
Consider examples of tense shifts, word play, interdiscursive mixing, etc. in works by Vallès, Kundera or writers in your own language and culture who serve
similar ideologies.
➤ Assess translations of such works.
➤ How far do you find that the strategy seems to be one of tidying these anom-
alies?
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Task C11.9
To show that the discourse model outlined above is not exclusively applicable to literature, you may want to focus on one of the variables commonly taken
to be characteristic of a range of styles – interdiscursive mixing.
To illustrate this from a currently topical issue, let us consider translated extracts from speeches by Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Both speakers systematically
employ religious discourse to harness the political discourse. These speeches are available on the internet.
➤ Examine the examples below and assess the effectiveness of the translations
provided in dealing with the way the two discourses compete and ultimately merge.
➤ Examine this phenomenon in these examples, then in extensive samples of
interdiscursive mixing in speeches by political leaders such as Bush and Blair. Full texts of such speeches are also available on the Internet.
Example C11.4
Allah willing, the day of liberation and victory will come, for us, for the nation, and for Islam above all else. This time, as always when right triumphs, the days to come will be
better. From a Letter by Saddam Hussein, trans. MEMRI
The Middle East Media Research Institute, 1 May 2003
Example C11.5
A small group of young Islamic [fighters] managed . . . to provide people with [concrete] proof of the fact that it is possible to wage war upon and fight against a so-called great
power. They managed to protect their religion and effectively to serve the objectives of their nation better than the governments and peoples of the fifty-odd countries of the
Muslim world, because they used Jihad as a means to defend their faith.
From a speech by Bin Laden, trans. MEMRI, 14 March 2003
CONCLUSION
This unit has supplemented the previous units in showing that the status enjoyed by text type in the translation process may best be appreciated when text is seen
in terms of register and as part of the socio-textual practices which make up the context of culture
. This is the semiotic dimension of context which caters for
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