Учебное пособие: Text analysis in translation

For a Spanish receiver, the heading "Nuestra integration en Europa" above a commentary published in the Spanish paper El Pais in February 1984 is not a thematic title which informs about the content of the text, but refers to the then current discussion on special agricultural problems connected with the negotiations on the Spanish entry into the European Community. For German ' ''' or French newspaper readers the issue was not of topical interest at that time; under the heading "Spain's entry into the EC" (or "Our integration into Europe", for that matter) they would have expected an article on the issue of Spanish (or German/French!?) integration into the European Community.

Like the author, who has a specific intention in transmitting the text, the receiver, too, has a specific intention when reading the text. The receivers' intention must not be confused either with their expectations towards the text, which is part of their communicative background, or with their reaction or response to the text, which takes place after text reception and is thus part of the text effect.

The information obtained about the addressee may throw some light on the sender's intention, on the time and place of communication (in relation to the receiver's age and geographic origin), on text function (in relation to the receiver's intention), and on the intratextual features (e.g. the presuppositions).

As was pointed out in connection with the sender, a fictitious receiver is part of the "internal" communicative situation and not of the external communicative situation. But even externally a text can be directed at different possible receivers.

Example

Whilst imprisoned for being a member of the Resistance movement against the Nazi regime, the German writer G. Weisenborn (1902-1962) wrote some letters to his wife, Joy Weisenborn, which were published after the war. In the original situation, these letters had one precisely defined and addressed receiver. Published later in a book together with some answering letters from his wife and some songs and poems, they address a group of receivers that is much larger and not so clearly defined, i.e. anyone interested in the documents and personal testimonies of Resistance in the Third Reich. If a young man gives this book, which contains many tender love-letters, to his girlfriend many years later, the conditions of reception will be different again, not to mention those of a translation of the book into English, Dutch, or Spanish.

Therefore, the translator must analyse not only the characteristics of the ST addressees (or receivers) and their relationship to the source text, but also those of the TT receiver, whose expectations, knowledge and communicative role will influence the stylistic organization of the target text.

The stronger the orientation of the ST towards a particular SL addressee or audience, the higher the probability that the ST has to be translated in a documentary way, which means that the target text can only give information about the source text in its situation but not fulfil an analogous function.

How to obtain information about the addressed audience

As in case of the sender, information about the addressees can first of all be inferred from the text environment (e.g. dedications, notes), including the title (e.g. Bad Child s Pop-Up Book of Beasts). It can also be elicited from the information obtained about the sender and his/her intention or from the situational factors, such as medium, place, time, and motive. Standardized genres often raise equally standardized expectations in the receivers.

Example

A housewife normally expects a recipe to contain instructions for the preparation of a certain dish, and, indeed, that is why she reads it. Her attention is directed at the content of the text (e.g. what ingredients will she need, what has she got to do?). Recipes usually have a rather conventionalized form, not only with regard to their composition (first a list of ingredients, then the instructions in chronological order) but also with regard to syntactical structures (e.g. imperatives, parataxis) and lexical features (e.g. terminology and formulaic expressions, such as "bring to the boil", "stirring constantly", etc.). The reader will only become aware of the text form if it is not as expected: if, for example, the recipe is written as a poem or if the list of ingredients is missing.

The expectation of the receiver can sometimes lead to a certain tolerance. For example, when reading a menu, whose text function can clearly be inferred from the situation, but which is translated badly into their own language, tourists in a foreign country may not feel annoyed, as they normally would, but rather amused by the orthographic mistakes or unidiomatic collocations as long as they get some information about what to eat or drink.

Normally, of course, the text producer will try as far as possible to meet the expectations of the addressed audience. There are cases, however, where an author disregards or even deliberately ignores the addressees' expectations in order to make them sit up and take notice or to make them aware of certain patterns of thinking, etc.

Checklist

The following questions may help to find out the relevant information

about the addressed audience and their expectations:

1.What information about the addressed audience can be inferred from the text environment?

2.What can be learned about the addressees from the available information about the sender and his/her intention?

3.What clues to the ST addressee's expectations, background knowledge etc. can be inferred from other situational factors (medium, place, time, motive, and function)?

4.Is there any information about the reactions of the ST receiver(s) which may influence translation strategies?

5.What conclusions can be drawn from the data and clues obtained about the addressee regarding

(a)other extratextual dimensions (intention, place, time, and function), and

(b)the intratextual features?

Medium

Speech vs. writing

The concept of medium or channel has to be interpreted rather broadly. We refer to "medium" as the means or vehicle which conveys the text to the reader (in communication theory, "channel" stands for sound waves or print on paper). The translator is, however, interested less in the technical distinctions and more in the aspects of perceptibility, storage of information and the presuppositions of communicative interaction.

First of all we have to ask whether the text is being transmitted in a face-to-face communication or in writing. The means of transmission affects not only the conditions of reception, but more particularly also those of production. It determines how the information should be presented in respect of level of explicitness, arrangement of arguments, choice of sentence types, features of cohesion, use of non-verbal elements such as facial expressions and gestures, etc. The effect of the chosen medium on the intratextual factors can be illustrated by looking at the deictic aspect: situational references, which in face-to-face communication do not have to be verbalized explicitly because the participants are a part of the situation, must be expressed much more clearly in written communication.

Example