Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

The communicative dimension:

As previously mentioned, language users “operate within constraints imposed by the particular use to which they put their language: field, mode, tenor” (Hatim & Mason 1997: 25). These situational features characterize a text in relation to its context. When confronting a text, language users construct in their minds a model of the text’s context. At first, they observe what is taking place and assign to the text a certain field. Secondly, they note the personal relationships involved and assign a certain tenor. Finally, they note the role that is being played by the language and assign to it a mode. In other words, they seek to identify the register membership of that text, which constitutes an important stage in the processing of discourse.
The most important of these situational features, according to Hatim and Mason (1997: 25-26), is tenor which deals with the degree of formality of the relation between interlocutors:
The level of formality overlaps in a number of significant ways with field of discourse, on the one hand, and with mode, on the other hand, giving rise to technicality/formality (overlap with field) and functional tenor (overlap with mode).
The concept of functional tenor is defined as:
the category used to describe what language is being used for in the situation. Is the speaker trying to persuade, to exhort? (Gregory and Caroll 1978: 53 in Hatim and Mason 1997: 26).
In other words, following Hatim & Mason (1997: 27),

functional tenor (e.g. persuader, discipliner, and informer) thus builds into the analysis a set of role relationships obtaining in a given situation (e.g. politician vs. the electorate, reporter vs. particular readers).

Kussmaul (1995), making use of House’s situational model (1977), does not use the concept of tenor as such; instead, he employs two concepts which are subsumed by tenor, namely, the concept of social role relationship and the concept of social attitude. The first covers three types of social role relationships:

1. 
   equal-to-equal
   
2. 
   lower-to-higher
   
3. 
   higher-to-lower
   

The second concept refers to the various degrees of social distance or proximity; i.e., either very little social distance or a higher degree of social distance.
For the translator, identifying the register membership of a source text and then relaying it in a target text thus constitutes a crucial stage in the translating operation.

2.