Pragmatic components of text in teaching written translation

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PRAGMATIC COMPONENTS OF TEXT IN TEACHING WRITTEN TRANSLATION

Андреева О.В.

Teaching written translation has existed for thousand years. In spite of this fact the methodology of teaching translating is still in its infancy. Teaching translation by translating is the longest and less effective way to get the necessary skills. The approach which deals with translation mainly as a search for lexical and grammatical equivalents in two languages may explain why learners are often unable to understand and reproduce the discourse as a whole despite the wealth of grammatical and lexical equivalents they have accumulated. The meaning of a sentence or a text is not composed of the sum of the meanings of the individual lexical items.

The key to successful language learning lies not in accumulating language items but in understanding how information is processed to convey a particular message. The various communicative purposes that language serves determine different types of discourse. The translation method must make the learner aware that certain communicative purposes obey underlying rules of universal nature and that the way these are marked varies from one language to another.

The view that underlines our work is of translation as communicative process which takes place within a social context. This process involves the negotiation of meaning between producers and receivers of text. This is based on a new approach to translation studies which means shifting away from the incidental incompatibilities among languages toward the communicative factors represented in three dimensions of context: communicative, pragmatic and semiotic. These three dimensions are expressed through text structure. In order to reconstruct them the translator has to analyze the source text.

То reconstruct pragmatic aspects of the text it is necessary to define two notions: pragmatic dimension and functional determination. Pragmatic dimension reflects its denotative content related to different life spheres through style, genre and register. Identifying functional determination of source text and its correct reconstruction in translated text is of vital importance as linguistic research shows the direct connection between functional determination and lexica-grammatical organization of text.

Genres are conventionalized forms of texts which reflect the functions and goals involved in particular social occasions as well as the purposes of the participants in them. From the socio-semiotic point of view, this particular use of language is best viewed in terms of norms which are internationalized as part of the ability to communicate. Genre and generic membership play an important role in the process of transfer between semiotic systems. Martin points out that the conventions of genres are indices of particular cultures which exert a strong influence over the way the genres are to be encoded in text.

Identifying register membership of a text is an essential part of discourse processing; it involves the reader in a reconstruction of what has taken place (field), who has participated (tenor), and medium has been selected for relaying the message (mode). Together the three variables set up communicative transaction in the sentence that they provide the basic conditions for communication to take place. I the words of Halliday the category of register is postulated to account for what people do with their language. When we observe language activity in the various contexts in which it takes place, we find differences in the type of language selected as appropriate to different type of situation. That is to say, registers are defined in terms of differences in grammar, vocabulary, etc, between two samples of language activity. grammatical language translation sentence

The second pragmatic aspect of text is functional determination which is concerned with the ability of text to fulfill actions. It is defined through rhetorical purpose (the overall intention of a text producer, as instantiated by the function of a text), implications, presuppositions, and pragmatic affect. Rhetorical structure of a text serves to a particular rhetorical purpose. Rhetorical structure of a text is a complex network of relationships and the way the underlying ideas are organized within text. It is built with the rhetorical acts (functional values: explaining, describing, defining, etc) performed by the sentence in the text: not the words and grammar, but the way the sentences are used. To understand more clearly what is meant by rhetorical structure, we need to think about the topic of the text, the writer's purpose in writing it and the audience he has in mind. Once we know the topic, purpose and the target reader, we can go on to ask how the writer approaches his objective. Answering this question involves tracing the rhetorical development of the text, how the text is organized. Readers need to be able to recognize how a text is organized, since this helps them to reach an interpretation.

Tracing the rhetorical development of the text means perceiving how, given the raw material, the writer has selected from it, organized it and given it coherence, until it suits his purpose. Recognizing the organization of a paragraph means identify the topic, the main point, and the minor or supporting points and so on. Certainly this builds on other skills, particularly the skill of recognizing functional value. In fact the two are interdependent: you need to identify the value of each sentence in order to plot the structure of the paragraph. Equally, if you recognize the paragraph structure, this will help you to assign the value of each sentence. Readers have to recognize value in two distinct circumstances: a) when it is signaled by a discourse marker or other means: b) when there is no explicit signal and the value therefore has to be inferred. Readers have to work out for themselves whether the writer intended the sentence to be a hypothesis, an example, a definition, etc.

We identify text as the structural unit which informs translation's decisions about lexical, syntactical and other choices. It is crucial that rhetorical purpose (and the lower-level rhetorical functions which contribute to it) be identified. The whole mater of structural modifications and the degree to which they are permitted needs to be considered with the text producer's purpose in mind. In particular, degrees of evaluative-ness in the source text are of overriding importance when it comes to deciding what structure to preserve and how.

It is the perception of pragmatic values such as these which enables translators to transfer the entity of the message into their translated language version.

Presupposition is one more important component of text pragmatics. The idea that past experience gives rise to knowledge organized into schemata makes it easy to see that many connections between facts can be left unstated in texts. It is equally easy to see that there may be problems for readers who do not share the relevant schema. The writer will not waste time spelling out facts and relationships that he assumes are already in the reader's mind. So the reader may be left with too little information to make sense of the text. Either he does not have the schema at all, or his schema is significantly different from the writer's.

Because presuppositions are unstated, readers are often unaware of them. These make them difficult to deal with; perhaps the reader has an uneasy impression that he does not fully understand the text but he cannot locate the cause. Readers who are aware of the potential problem are halfway to solving it; they scrutinize the text for unstated assumptions and try to identify the mismatch that has produced their difficulty.

The components of text pragmatics described earlier define special skills necessary for text analysis. We define the following skills: recognizing functional value, recognizing text organization, recognizing the presuppositions underlying the text, recognizing implications and making inferences, recognizing register and genre.

The above mentioned skills should be included into the set of special translation skills that can be learnt. The learner - translator can learn only when he understands the learning tasks and when these tasks are integrated in a reliable and generalized-discourse framework.

References

1. Halliday, M.A.K. (1967) Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English. Journal of Linguistics, 3,199-244.

2. Kress, G. (1985) Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice. Victoria: Deakin University Press.

3. Martin, J. R. (1980) Factual Writing: Exploring and Challenging Social Reality. Victoria: Deakin University Press.

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