Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

Discourse

1. 
   Overview and Definitions
   

The translator has to render the original text as faithfully as possible into the target language by choosing the right words and linguistic structures and by taking into account different types of equivalence such as lexical equivalence, syntactic equivalence, functional equivalence and cultural equivalence. However, there is another type of equivalence which is no less important, namely, discoursal equivalence (Shunnaq 1994: 103). In fact, relaying referential meaning between ST and TT items, as Mason (1994: 29) states, is sometimes less important than “relaying discoursal indices” which contribute to an overall discourse of a certain kind.
Before proceeding any further, a few words concerning the definition of the concept of discourse seem necessary. According to Mason (Ibid: 25), the term discourse has two meanings; the first, which is “standard and unproblematic” refers to “any undifferentiated stretch of language performance, spoken or written.” This meaning could also be applied to the notion of “text” (3). The second meaning of discourse which is attributed to Kress (1985), following Foucault refers to
systematically organized sets of statements which give expression to the meanings and values of an institution.
In another definition by Hatim and Mason, which is rather similar to the one just cited, discourse is characterized as follows:
It is a mode of speaking and writing which involves the participants in adopting a particular stance/ attitude on certain areas of socio-cultural activity. (Hatim & Mason 1990: 240)
Thus, one obtains racist discourse, scientific discourse, feminist discourse, political discourse, sensational discourse… What is really important here in connection with this definition is that discourses, being modes of speaking and writing, are dependent on language; i.e. certain syntactic and semantic features correlate with certain discourses.
To illustrate further the meaning of the notion discourse, it might be useful to cite one of Hatim and Mason’s examples of racist discourse. This example shows the systematic (non-accidental) use of a particular kind of vocabulary in a political speech by a British politician, Enoch Powell, concerning immigrants in Britain. The vocabulary chosen in this speech has a “dehumanizing effect” and is clearly “discriminatory”. Some of the word choices opted for are: offspring, coloured immigrants, the current rate of intake… instead of more neutral words such as children, overseas workers, new comers… An extract of this speech is given below:

By 1985 there would be in this country 3½ million coloured immigrants and their offspring. In other words, the present number would increase between two and three-fold in the next seventeen years on two assumptions, current rate of intake and current birthrate. (Hatim and Mason 1990: 141)

Shunnaq (1994: 104) uses the textlinguistic notions of monitoring and managing in the description and translation of the discourses of news broadcasting and newspapers. Monitoring and managing are defined by Beaugrande and Dressler (1981: 163) as follows:
If the dominant function of a text is to provide a reasonably unmediated account of the situation model, situation monitoring is being performed. If the dominant function is to guide the situation in a manner favourable to the text producer’s goals, situation management is being carried out.
In other words, a ST can be a case in which a situation is being monitored, i.e. presented neutrally, or a case in which a situation is being managed, i.e. manipulated by the text producer to achieve a certain goal (4). It is this situation management which is reminiscent of the definitions of discourse proposed by Hatim and Mason (1990) and Mason (1994), quoted above and in which it is argued that in their way of speaking and writing, language users adopt a particular kind of attitude towards “certain areas of socio-cultural activity”.
The notion of discourse meaning is obviously significant for the translator because of two reasons: first, the translator has to be aware of the managing strategies in the ST; secondly, being a target text producer, he or she has to guard against interfering with these managing strategies by incorporating his or her own to serve his specific goals.
Relevant to this discussion is Hatim and Mason’s account of text typology in its relation with the notions of monitoring and managing (1990: 155). Thus, although all texts combine a certain measure of monitoring and managing, Hatim and Mason (Ibid) maintain that there is a predominance of monitoring in expository texts and a predominance of managing in argumentative and instrumental texts. These issues will be dealt with in greater detail later under text as a practice.

2. 
   Discourse and ideology
   

According to Mason, the expression of ideology takes place within the semiotic categories of genre, discourse and text. In this regard he argues:
Above all, it is our contention that these - genre, discourse, and text - are the semiotic systems within which the expression of ideology occurs and

that the investigation of ideology is best handled within such a framework. (Mason 1994: 26)

In this section, the focus will be on the relationship between ideology and discourse, or, to be more specific, the realization of ideology within discourse. However, before addressing this matter, it is important to define the concept of ideology and then compare it with that of discourse.
Ideology can be defined with reference to two perspectives: a Marxist and a non-Marxist. From a Marxist perspective, ideology can be defined as:
The system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group (Althusser 1971: 149 cited in Williams 1992: 76)
This system of ideas and representations which, according to Marxists presents reality in a distorted way, is deployed by the ruling class in order to maintain the subordinate role of other classes. The way this is carried out is explained by Williams (Ibid):
The ruling class uses state power to initially create, and then to maintain control over the Ideological State Apparatuses, which Althusser lists as “religion, education, family, the legal system, the trade union system, communication and culture.
From a non-Marxist perspective, ideology can be defined following Fowler (1986: 17) as:
a set of propositions (or assumptions) that we hold (consciously or unconsciously) about the basic make up of the world.
Within the same perspective, Wimber (1985: 75) argues that ideology
is
a lens which colours, clarifies, classifies, wraps or excludes the world.
In the same vein, Mason defines ideology as:
The set of beliefs and values which inform an individual’s or institution’s view of the world and assist their interpretation of events, facts, etc. (Mason 1994: 25)
Now having defined the concepts of ideology and the concept of
discourse, the question that arises is: how is ideology related to discourse? According to Mason (Ibid), discourse as “the systematically organized sets of statements which give expression to the meanings and values of an

institution” is “closely bound up” with ideology as “the set of beliefs and values which inform an individual’s or institution’s view of the world and assist their interpretation of events, facts, etc.” In other words, while the individual’s perception or interpretation of the world is mediated through ideology, his perception of discoursal features is also influenced by “his previous experience of discourse or discursive history”.

Pecheux (1982), cited by Macdonell (Macdonell 1986: 45 in Williams 1992: 82), argues that “discourse is one of ideology’s specific forms” and that “discourses are set up in what are ultimately antagonistic relations” within the ideological state apparatuses. In other words, it is the institutions and the positions occupied by people within these institutions which determine the meanings of a particular discourse. Elaborating further on this point, Macdonell maintains that
discourse is not the individual’s way of inhabiting language, a kind of set expression. The language takes on meaning and discourses are constructed through struggles. Pecheux’s arguments, as already stated, stress that the “material character” of meaning does not lie in its being determined by linguistic elements (“signifiers”). Nor does the meaning of a word exist “in itself”. Instead, meaning exists antagonistically: it comes from positions in struggle so that “words… change their meaning according to the positions” from which they are used… The positions are ideological [and are] inscribed in the practices of class or other struggles between and within apparatuses (Ibid: 47- 48).

3. 
   Discourse and genre:
   

Genres have been defined in section 3. 2. 2. 4. 3. 3. 1 above as “a set of features which we perceive as being appropriate to a given social occasion” (Hatim and Mason 1990: 140) or, alternatively, as “conventional forms of texts” which reflect particular social occasions (Ibid: 241). Since a social occasion involves participants who are engaged in achieving their purposes through language, these participants, according to Hatim and Mason (Ibid), “are bound to be involved in attitudinally determined expression characteristic of these events”. In other words, different genres (such as an editorial, a book-review, a political speech, a scientific article...) call for particular types of discourse or attitude. In a scientific article, for instance, the attitude is typically neutral, objective, or to borrow Hatim and Mason’s words, non-evaluative, as it is apparent in the choice of words (non-emotive words) and structures (a predominance of passive structures).
In short, a particular kind of discourse is influenced by the particular genre in which it occurs. Language users learn to associate a given discourse with a particular genre as part of their language learning.

Discourses are consequently “modes of talking and thinking which, like genres, can become ritualized” (Hatim and Mason 1990: 71). Hatim and Mason represent the interrelationship between discourse and genre in the following manner:

Figure 2: The interrelationship between social occasion, genre and discourse

4. 
   Discourse and texture:
   

Recalling that the “meaning [of a given discourse] exists antagonistically” and that it is the result of “positions in struggle”, we can then safely assume that words acquire different meanings depending on “the positions from which they are used”, or to put it differently, words change their meanings according to the position a person adopts within a particular institutional area, be it religious, educational, familial...
This idea will obviously have far reaching implications. First, it will determine what should or should not be said within a particular genre such as a political speech, a sermon, an editorial, a report, a news broadcast, etc. Concerning news broadcasts, for example, and depending on the general policy of a particular radio station, certain news items will be covered and others disregarded; general or vague descriptions will be opted for in order to lessen the impact of the news item or, on the contrary, more specific and concrete words will be selected in order to intensify the impact of this news item (Shunnaq 1994: 112). Secondly, the idea that words acquire different meanings depending on “the positions from which they are used”, will also dictate a particular kind of sequencing of words and expressions in discourse (Pecheux 1982 in Macdonell 1986: 45-48). This sequencing is the domain of texture (see section 2.2.2.4.3.2 below). In this connection, Mason (1994: 31) states that
the textual devices of the source text combine in the expression of a discourse which relays an ideology.

Making a similar point, Macdonell argues that

what is at stake in discursive struggles may well be this ordering and combining of words. (Macdonell 1986: 47-48)
Thus, for example, the recurrence or repetition of a lexical item is a textual device which is dictated by the particular stance that is adopted by a speaker/writer; i.e. it has a discourse value as it is used “to assert and reaffirm one’s viewpoint” (BeauGrande & Dressler 1981: 55). Similarly, texture for Hatim and Mason is taken to be influenced by discourse along with text structure and genre; it is therefore considered as “motivated choice”:
When texts are seen as social events, the links between text producer, text expression and meaning have to be considered not as random but as motivated… Text producers make their choices in such a way as best to serve their own communicative ends and within an institutional setting which exerts its own influence on linguistic expression. (1990: 193)
The textual (or cohesive) devices, following Hasan’s model, in Halliday and Hasan (1989), are divided into three main categories:

x Grammatical cohesive devices which are themselves further classified into two subclasses:

• 
  Reference: pronominals, demonstratives, the definite article and comparatives
  
• 
  Substitution and ellipsis: nominal, verbal and clausal
  

x Lexical cohesive devices which are subdivided into two subclasses:

• 
  General: repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, co-
  

hyponymy…

• 
  Instantial: equivalence, naming, semblance
  

x Structural cohesive devices which involve:

• 
  Parallelism
  
• 
  Theme-rheme development
  
• 
  Given-new organization
  

(Williams 1992: 86)

5. 
   Ideology, discourse and the translator:
   

As has been shown above, ideology is realized in texture. Therefore, the translator, being a text receiver and producer, has the enormous task of “perceiving the meaning potential of particular choices within the cultural and linguistic community of the source text and relaying that same potential by linguistic means to a target readership” (Mason 1994: 23)

without bringing in his own ideology. However, it is a fact, according to Mason, that there exist translations which involve “systematic ideological shifts” (Ibid). The example often cited to corroborate this claim concerns the English translation of Freud’s works; this translation, according to Bruno Bettelheim (1983) cited by Mason (Ibid),

distorted the language and hence the meaning of [the] source text, principally through systematic lexical selections that had the effect of rendering their target more clinical, more scientific, and less subjective than Freud’s original.
Thus, this translation caused Freud to be perceived in a way that was different from how he had been perceived by the source text readers. This is due to the fact that both the source text and target text are controlled by two different ideologies, namely behaviourism and humanism (Mason 1994: 24).
The divergences between ST and TT according to Mason (Ibid: 28) affect the level of “individual lexical choice” and that of structural cohesion. Concerning the first level, some changes in the TT can be merely ascribed to carelessness and are usually harmless. However, there are those changes in which word values are deliberately manipulated by flattening, slanting or sharpening them. The second level, structural cohesion, is, according to Mason, the site of more systematic divergences affecting not only the thematic structure (theme/rheme arrangement), but also other cohesive networks such as given-new organization (Ibid: 29).
Shunnaq, for his part, puts forward the view that a translator should not change the discursive values of the ST. Taking news broadcasting as an example where newscasters do resort to managing strategies, Shunnaq states that
in such contexts, being “neutral” and “objective” by no means consists in a suppression of human emotions but in a conscientious attempt to take sides and display emotions to the same degree that the producers of the source text had done. (Shunnaq 1994: 112-113)
Therefore, a translator
has to manage by deciding the inferred intention of the original news editor. (Ibid: 108)
Similarly, Williams relates the discussion of the role of the translator to the discussion of the differences in the writer’s and reader’s world view:

When we come to the question of world view, we come to the heart of the translator’s task. The translator himself needs to see the world through two lenses at once, and to render the SL text in a way that is accessible to the TL reader while at the same time remaining as faithful as possible to the world view of the SL text. (Williams 1992: 93)

However, Williams hastens to add that the purpose of the target text may be a determining factor in deciding whether to stay within the realm of the source text world view or whether to alter this to achieve a certain goal:
In these circumstances, the translator has to pay particular attention to the purpose of the target language text, and the nature of the audience it is geared to. Is he translating the text with the aim of persuading his readers to change their world views or is he writing to give his readership information about the source language culture (Ibid).

2.