Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

Register in relation to culture

As it has been mentioned, the contextual features, field, tenor and mode serve to interpret and study the meaning of texts. However, according to Halliday, this is not enough; a further aspect of context is required, namely, the context of culture:
Any actual context of situation, the particular configuration of field, tenor and mode that has brought a text into being, is not just a random jumble of features but a totality - a package, so to speak, of things that typically go together in the culture. People do these things on these occasions and attach these meanings and values to them; this is what culture is. (Halliday 1989: 46)
This important insight into the role played by the context of culture in interpreting and studying texts is further corroborated and elaborated on by
R. Hasan:
The specific contextual configurations themselves derive their significance ultimately from their relation to the culture to which they belong. (Halliday & Hasan 1989: 99)
She further adds that
Culture is itself more specifically describable as an integrated body of the total set of meanings available to a community; its semiotic potential. (Ibid: 99)
This semiotic potential, according to R. Hasan, “includes ways of doing, ways of being and ways of saying”. To sum up, R. Hasan, concludes that “the semiotic potential IS culture” (Ibid: 99-100).
The above insights immediately conjure up various sorts of cases of translation obstacles with which translators very often have to grapple. For example, the different forms of address in languages such as French, Arabic and English, the predominance of fatalistic expressions in Arabic, the pragmatic principle of politeness on which the degree of emphasis varies from one language to another, the special meanings which different languages attach to certain words such as “honour”, “land”, “blood relations”, etc.

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