43016 (Text analysis in translation), страница 9

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 contents 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.