Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 27, Issue 3, 2015

Discourse analysis has grown in applied linguistics since the 1970s and its application in translation studies became prominent in the 1990s (Munday 2012, 137). One of the topics in discourse analysis that has been given particular attention by translation scholars is the translation of choices within the textual metafunction, with particular focus on the role of Theme and its impact on thematic development in text. A number of studies have generated new insights into the translation of textual choices, for example concerning failures to recreate patterns of thematic progression. The growth of this area of research is a highly encouraging development since it had previously been largely neglected in translation studies (House 1997, 31). While these studies have focused on separate micro-issues in specific language pairs, the present article attempts to conduct a comprehensive review of existing studies on this topic in order to (i) highlight major topics addressed so far and (ii) make suggestions for further studies into this important area of translation from a systemic functional linguistic perspective.

This article starts from the claim that knowledge about contrastive systems of cohesion and textual instantiations of these systems between English and German is important for translation, but that this knowledge is still fragmentary and insufficiently supported by empirical studies. This claim will be followed by three generalizing assumptions about contrastive differences in English-German cohesion which relate to (1) different degrees of local encoding of ambiguity in texts in terms of co-reference, (2) different degrees of registerial distinctions along the written-spoken and formal-informal distinctions, and (3) different orientations of discourses along the explicitness and information-density dimensions. These assumptions are being tested in corpus-based work in our group, and the currently available results will be summarized. The summary will be followed by a discussion and exemplification of implications for translation in both directions between English and German. As will be seen, an awareness of the main differences between English and German cohesion, between registers within these two languages and between written and spoken modes in particular are an important background for guiding translation strategies.

This paper first briefly discusses the relationship between comparative discourse analyses of original and translated texts as the basis for revealing the behavior of a particular linguistic phenomenon in context and use. Concretely, the paper examines how global English impacts on translations from English into German with regard to so-called ‘linking constructions,’ a hitherto rather neglected area of connectivity in discourse. The analysis focusses on the forms, functions, distribution, and the translation equivalents in parallel and comparable corpora. Results indicate that the use of linking constructions differs substantially in English and German discourse, and these differences may well block English influence on German discourse norms via translation.

This article takes a critical approach to the study of the SARS notices and their translations from the perspective of discourse analysis. Drawing upon the insights of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study explores how language is used by different governmental institutions in shaping their social power and hierarchy. By conducting a comparative study of the SARS notices and their translations, focusing on speech roles, speech functions, modality types and modality orientation, the authors argue that choices made in producing the texts reflect the institutions’ social roles and their relationship with each other and with the audience. They also argue that the application of concepts from SFL in detailed text analysis and from CDA in the overall discussion may better reveal how different models of discourse analysis can supplement each other and be applied to translation studies.

This article examines the application of appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005) to the analysis of translation. It develops the findings in Munday (2012), which focused on attitudinal meanings, and explores the potential for the use of engagement resources and graduation as a means of determining translator/interpreter positioning. Using a range of examples from texts of international organizations, it discusses the translation of reporting verbs and intensification as a signal of the translator’s/interpreter’s degree of ‘investment’ in a proposition and control over the text receiver’s response. This is framed within the concept of ‘discourse space theory’ (Chilton 2004) to provide a reference for future work in this field.

This article investigates potential effects which (the recontextualisation of) interpreted discourse can have on the positioning of participants. The discursive event which forms the basis of the analysis are international press conferences which bring politicians and journalists together. The dominant question addressed is: (How) do interpreter-mediated encounters influence the positioning of participants and thus the construction of interactional and social roles? The article illustrates that methods of (critical) discourse analysis can be used to identify positioning strategies which are employed by participants in such triadic exchanges. The data come from press conferences which involve English, German, and French as source and target languages.

This article discusses the distinction stable versus unstable sources, which Hernández Guerrero has suggested in her book on news translation. It starts with a short overview of news translation as a subfield within the discipline of translation studies, emphasizing the role of translation in news production since the emergence of the journalistic profession. The next section discusses the concepts of ‘stable’ and ‘unstable’ sources, and moves on to introduce framing, a key concept in communication studies, defined as the central organizing idea that allows news consumers to make sense of events. The term will be related to the mechanisms that journalists resort to in order to produce source texts, which, in turn, can also affect the selection and de-selection processes undertaken by news producers when relying on articles published in other languages. The final sections will consider the translated economic columns of Paul Krugman, originally published in the New York Times and in Spanish by the daily El País, to reflect on the usefulness of the binary opposition stable versus unstable sources, and will show that, in some media, certain unstable texts can turn stable.

This article explores the ways in which translation assessment is discursively constructed by readers participating in an online translation debate. Focusing on a controversy over the Korean translation of Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Steve Jobs, it examines how readers participating in a translation debate in Daum Agora, the largest online discussion forum in South Korea, enact the ‘assessor’ role in evaluating the translation. Drawing on the concepts of ‘social role,’ ‘activity role,’ and ‘discourse role,’ I argue that online translation assessors perform the discourse roles of ‘expert-judge,’ ‘activist,’ and ‘assessment evaluator.’ The findings suggest that translation assessment in cyberspace is a subjective, contextualizing process where value, meaning, and function are often a matter of uptake. Furthermore, discourse-based approaches may play critical roles in examining translation assessment in cyberspace as a socially situated act that involves an intricate negotiation of meaning, complex workings of power, and a reconstitution of local social positioning within global cultural flows.