Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

The application of textlinguistics in the field of translation

The tremendous impact of textlinguistics on translation studies, along with other developments in sociolinguistics, discourse studies, pragmatics, semiotics, artificial intelligence, and conversation analysis, has been widely recognized by translation scholars such as Hatim & Mason (1990: 35), Neubert (1981), Heliel (1994) and Chesterman (1989), to mention but a few. According to Hatim and Mason (1990: 35), textlinguistics has
provided a new direction for translation studies. It is one which restores to the translation the central role in a process of cross-cultural communication and ceases to regard equivalence as a matter of entities within texts.
With this regard, Chesterman (1989: 141) also states that
textlinguistics is of obvious significance to translation theory, both in specifying the relevant textual features of the source text and in deciding the appropriate text-production strategies when composing the target text.

Similarly, Heliel (1994: 61) stresses the important role of textlinguistics in translation studies in general and translation training in particular:

It is our belief that one of the new trends in linguistics which could give the learners insight and help them adopt an efficient strategy in translation is discourse analysis. Discourse analysis offers a wide range of textual knowledge and structure to the translator whether in the SL or the TL. Within discourse analysis some notions are quite useful to the translator, particularly, the notion of macro-structure in text types, cohesion, coherence, thematic structure, fronting and focus.
As for Jabr (2001), textlinguistics as “an evolution in mainstream linguistics” has had a great impact on translation firstly because it has shifted the focus from the sentence to the text as a unit of translation and secondly because it has redefined the concept of “types of translation”.
Concerning the first point, he argues that
the sentence-based approach to translation which has gained currency and is still in use, has given way to the discourse-based approach. However, despite the fact that the sentence continues to be a more manageable unit of translation (Newmark 1988), it has to be tackled in view of its relations with the neighbouring sentences in the entire paragraph (or text) rather than as an independent entity. In other words, the sentence should be viewed as one brick that contributes to building the entire text. (Jabr 2001: 305)
As far as the types of translation are concerned, and while not totally discarding the age-old dichotomy between literal and free translation, Jabr maintains that
the type of translation is tightly tied up with the emphasis of the given task. That is, translation can be word-for-word, literal, faithful, semantic if more emphasis is laid on the SL; or adaptation, free, idiomatic or communicative if the emphasis is on the TL (Newmark 1988). Furthermore, this is partly motivated by the purpose of the translation. (Ibid)
In addition to seeing the traditional types of translation (literal vs. free) in the light of the degree of emphasis and the purpose of the task, texlinguistics, according to Jabr, following Bühler (1965) and Hatim and Mason (1990), has also unveiled other influential factors which “dictate the appropriate type of translation”, namely, language function (expressive, informative or vocative) and text type (expository, argumentative and instructional). Thus, literal or semantic translation would be appropriate

for an expressive text, whereas free or communicative translation would be most appropriate for informative or vocative texts. Moreover, the source text type as a macro entity has to be taken into account in the act of translating. However, Jabr makes the point that the “translator may vary his translation method at any point in the text” given the fact that a text may exhibit various language functions (Ibid: 306).

To see the application of textlinguistics to translation studies, three important contributions will be looked at, namely, Neubert’s concept of parallel texts, House’s text analysis model (1977) (1997) and Hatim and Mason’s contrastive discourse model (1990) (1997).