Unit09TEXTTYPEINTRANSLATION.docVIP

Unit 09 Text type in translation As part of the ‘form vs function’ debate or whether we should be concerned with how something is said as opposed to what is intended by it, relevance research (e.g. Gutt 1991) took a ‘cognitive’ turn essentially to critique the ‘textual’ turn that was gaining momentum throughout the 1970s (e.g. Beaugrande 1978, Koller 1979). In the analysis of STs or the composition of TTs, the relevance model has drawn on mental resources such as ‘inference’ as a more viable alternative to taxonomic classifications such as text typologies. Yet, most theorizing by proponents of ‘relevance’ on translation strategy (descriptive vs interpretive, direct vs indirect), could not completely ignore macro-structures such as text type or genres. By the end of the 1990s, there was a clear admission that inference can only be enriched by awareness of the conventions governing the communicative event within which texts or genres occur (Gutt 1998). In Unit 7, we introduced the ‘textual’ dimension to the model of pragmatic equivalence and presented the main claims of the textual model. The present unit re-examines these claims and properly assesses the status of text type in the translation process. STANDARDS OF TEXTUALITY Translation theories informed by textual pragmatics (e.g. Thomas 1995) see ‘equivalence’ in relative and hierarchical terms (Koller 1995) and specifically view a ‘translation’ as a valid representative of ST communicative acts (Beaugrande 1978). Concepts such as ‘valid representative’ or ‘communicative act’, however, are problematical in that they can cover quite a range of translation phenomena, from producing a literal replica to a free paraphrase of sentences or entire texts. From its very inception in the early 1970s, text linguistics has rejected the form-meaning split and the popular but counter-intuitive assumption that communicative contexts are simply too diffuse to yield meaningful generalizations regarding language use. From a textual