Text analysis in translation

The information in the text can be "factual", i.e. based on the facts of what is conventionally regarded as "reality" by sender and receiver, or "fictional", i.e. referring to a different, fictitious world imagined or invented by the author, which is quite separate from the "real world" in which the communicative action takes place. However, this distinction is not of immediate importance for content analysis. Fictionality is a pragmatic property which is assigned to a text by the participants in communicative interaction. Its definition depends on the notion of reality and the norms of textuality prevailing in the society in question. If the notion of reality changes, then a text which was intended to be factual might be read as fictional, or vice versa. If we look at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or George Orwell's 1984 we might come to the conclusion that a fictional text describing a Utopian situation could even become factual if reality were to change accordingly. However, the question of fictionality or factuality really becomes relevant to translation when we consider presuppositions.

Nevertheless, an analysis of content will have to specify whether or not the internal situation of the text is identical with the external situation. If it is not, the internal situation will have to be analysed separately, using the same set of WH-questions applied in the external analysis. This is very often the case in fictional texts, and in factual texts of the complex text type which contain embedded texts of another category.

In an internal situation there might be an internal sender (speaker, narrator), who may adopt various attitudes or perspectives towards the narration (e.g. "author's perspective", or "camera-eye" perspective), or there might be an implicit reader or listener, and implicit conditions of time and place; there may also be hints as to the medium used, the motive for communication and the function assigned to the particular embedded text. The internal situation may even, like the famous Russian doll, contain further embedded situations.

The situational factors of an embedded text are normally mentioned explicitly in the frame text, whereas the internal situation of a fictional text (i.e. its "setting") can often only be inferred from hidden clues or indirect hints, such as proper names of persons and places, references to culture-specific realities, elements of regional dialect in a dialogue, etc.

However, there are cases where an analysis of the external situation yields information on the internal situation, as shown in the following example.

Example

In one of his short stories written in his French exile in Paris, the Argentinian author Julio Cortazar describes an urban environment which is not named explicitly, but hinted at by the information that from the window of his multistorey apartment block the auctorial narrator sees a sign saying Hotel de Belgique. The reference to the setting is not crucial to the interpretation of the story, which deals with the problem of daily routine and the hopelessness of life in modern society. The plot might equally well be set in any big city of the Western industrial world. But still, by describing (or pretending to describe) the view from his own window, the author gives a "personal touch" to the story, which makes it more authentic. This may be important for the translator when she has to decide whether to translate the description of a routine breakfast situation (tomamos cafe con leche) by "we drink our morning coffee" (neutral), "we have our coffee with milk" (non-specific strangeness) or "we have cafe au lait" (specific strangeness, explicitly referring to France as the setting of the story) or even "we have our ham and eggs" (receiver-oriented adaptation).

Checklist

The following questions may help to elicit the relevant information

about the content of the text:

How are the extratextual factors verbalized in the text?

Which are the information units in the text?

Is there a difference between the external and the internal situation?

Are there any gaps of cohesion and/or coherence in the text? Can they be filled without using additional information or material?

What conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of content with reference to other intratextual factors, such as presuppositions, composition, and the stylistic features?

Presuppositions

What is a presupposition

The notion of presupposition is rather complex because What we mean here is the "pragmatic presupposition". These presuppositions are implicitly assumed by the speaker, who takes it for granted that this will also be the case with the listener. Communication can therefore only be successful if speaker and listener both implicitly assume the same presuppositions in sufficient quantity.

For example, the answer Twelfth Night or What You Will presupposes the knowledge on the part of the receiver that this is the title of a play, and this presupposition forms the basis on which the joke "works".

In everyday communication it is usually the factors of the communicative situation which are presupposed to be known to the participants and which are therefore not mentioned explicitly. Nevertheless, they have to be taken into consideration when the utterance is made. If, for example, the referent of the information is a person present in the room, the speaker may lower or raise his/her voice or choose simple or complicated or even coded formulations, etc. Of course, it is usually superfluous to mention the things and persons one can point at.

Presuppositions comprise all the information that the sender expects (= presupposes) to be part of the receiver's horizon. Since the sender wants the utterance to be understood, it seems logical that s/he will only presuppose information which the receiver can be expected to be able to "reconstruct".

Presuppositions may refer not only to the factors and conditions of the situation and to the realities of the source culture, but can also imply facts from the author's biography, aesthetic theories, common text types and their characteristics, metric dispositions, details of subject matter, motives, the topoi and iconography of a certain literary period, ideology, religion, philosophy and mythical concepts, cultural and political conditions of the time, media and forms of representation, the educational situation, or the way a text has been handed down.

Since it is one of the social conventions of communication that an utterance must be neither trivial nor incomprehensible, the sender has to judge the situation, the general background knowledge of the addressee, and the relevance of the information that will be transmitted in the text, in order to decide which presuppositions can be made and which cannot. This convention applies not only to the relationship between the ST sender and the ST receiver, but also to that between the TT producer, i.e. the translator, and the TT receiver. The translator has to take account of the fact that a piece of information that might be "trivial" to the ST receivers because of their source-cultural background knowledge (and therefore is not mentioned in the source text) may be unknown to the TT audience because of their target-cultural background knowledge (and therefore has to be mentioned in the target text) - or vice versa.

How to identify presuppositions in the text

Since a presupposition is by definition a piece of information that is not verbalized, it cannot be "spotted" in the text. In their role as ST receivers, translators are familiar with the source culture and - ideally -understand the presupposed information in the same way as a source-culture receiver. This makes it rather difficult to discover the presuppositions which are contained in the text.

In order to identify the presuppositions, the translator has first of all to ascertain which culture or "world" the text refers to (which may have already been established in the content analysis). Here, an important distinction must be made between factual and fictional texts. Factual texts claim to make a proposition about reality (as generally accepted in the culture in question) whereas fictional texts make no such claim - or at least not in the same way as factual texts. The difference lies in the relationship between the text and the (assumed) reality. Fictional texts are, of course, as real as factual texts, and fictitious information can be contained both in fictional and factual texts.

The categorization of a text as factual or fictional does not primarily depend on the structure of the text itself. It is the author and, above all, the reader who classifies the text according to the concept of reality prevailing in their culture - a concept which is, of course, determined by philosophical and sociological conventions. A text intended to be factual by the ST sender can therefore be "understood" as fictional (and vice versa) by a TT receiver who has a different, culture-specific view of what is "real".

If the ST is "anchored" in the world of the source culture, some information on this world will usually be presupposed in the text because of the maxim of relevance, to put it in Gricean terms. If, on the other hand, the ST refers to the world of the TT receiver, which cannot be assumed to be familiar to the ST receiver, it would seem logical for the ST producer to verbalize a certain amount of information for the ST receiver which then would seem irrelevant to the TT receiver. In either case, the translator will normally adjust the level of explicitness to the (assumed) general background knowledge of the intended TT audience using, for example, expansion or reduction procedures.

If the ST refers to a world that is equally "distant" to both the ST and the TT receivers, it is less probable that translation problems will arise from the contrast of ST and TT presuppositions. In these cases the subject matter dealt with in the ST can be regarded as "generally communicable" or, at least, as "transculturally communicable", i.e. between the two cultures involved in the translation process.

The level of explicitness varies according to text type and text function. It is interesting in this context to note that in fictional texts the situation is often made more explicit than in non-fictional texts. While the comprehension of factual texts is based on the fact that sender and receiver share one model of reality, the fictional text has to start building up a model of its own, either referring explicitly to a realistic model or creating a fictitious one in the text, which can then be related in some degree to an existing realistic model. It can even be contrary to the normal truth values of non-fictional utterances (e.g. in fairy tales). A fictional text must, however, also contain some reference or analogy to the receivers' reality because otherwise they would not be able to find access to the world of the text.

If the information on the internal situation is hidden in certain elements of a fictional text, such as in proper names, regional or social dialect (e.g. Shaw's Pygmalion) etc., it is often extremely difficult to transmit it to the target text, as for instance in the following example, because in a literary text it is often not appropriate to use substitutions, explanatory translations or footnotes.

Example

In Ana Maria Matute's short story Pecado de omision the characters are socially classified by their names. The main character, a simple village boy who in spite of his talents does not get the chance to train for a profession, is only called by his Christian name Lope, whereas his class mate, whose father can afford to let him study law, is introduced by Christian name and surname: ManuelEnriquez. Lope's uncle, the village mayor, has the rather pompous name Emeterio Ruiz Heredia; the school teacher is referred to
by the respectful combination of don together with his Christian name (don Lorenzo). The simple shepherd with whom Lope has to stay in the mountains cannot even boast an individual name: he is called Rogue el Mediano (i.e. "Roque the middle one").

These hidden clues cannot be explained to the TT receiver without running the risk of losing the literary charm of the text. Fortunately, most authors do not rely exclusively on implicit characterizations, but include some explicit hints, as does Ana Maria Matute in the above-mentioned text.

Presupposition indicators

The probability of presuppositions being present can be calculated from the distance of the ST and TT receiver to the cultural environment of the subject matter, as well as from the level of explicitness and the level of redundancy. Text contains certain "elements of crystallization" which may indicate presuppositions. These elements might be attached to certain syntactic or lexical structures, such as the gerund, infinitive, or passive constructions, modal auxiliary verbs or valences of lexemes, as in the following example.

Example

"John will be picked up at the station. Peter is always in time." Since the verb to pick up requires two actants, semantically specifiable as agent and patient, the reader will automatically know that Peter has to refer to the person who is going to pick up John at the station. If the two sentences are to constitute a text, the existence of the agent is presupposed in the first sentence .

Other signals pointing to presuppositions can be provided by the intra-textual dimensions of subject matter, content, sentence structure, and suprasegmental features. The negation left out in an utterance meant to be ironic can, for example, be signalled by a certain intonation: "How very, very clever of you!" Non-verbal elements, such as a photo showing the skyscraper environment of the "immaculate garden flat", can also illustrate presupposed situational conditions.

The analysis of the extratextual dimensions of sender, receiver, time, place, and motive of communication can also reveal presupposed information, as has been pointed out above. With their TC competence, translators will be able to check the comprehensibility of the verbalized information from the TT receiver's point of view. Thus, any possible information gap or surplus in the background knowledge of the intended TT receiver, as described by the translation brief, can be localized and, if necessary, compensated for.

Checklist

The following questions may help to discover the presuppositions made in the source text:

Which model of reality does the information refer to?

Is the reference to reality verbalized explicitly in the text?

Are there any implicit allusions to a certain model of reality?

Does the text contain redundancies which might be superfluous for a TT receiver?

What information presupposed to be known to the ST receiver has to be verbalized for the TT receiver?

Lecture 2. Text Composition

General considerations

The text has an informational macrostructure (i.e. composition and order of information units) consisting of a number of micro-structures. The text segments forming the macrostructure are marked or delimited primarily by the continuity or discontinuity of tenses.

There are several reasons why both the macro and microstruc-ture of the text are important aspects of a translation-oriented text analysis.

If a text is made up of different text segments with different situational conditions, the segments may require different translation strategies according to their different functions.

The special part that the beginning and end of a text play in its comprehension and interpretation means that these may have to be analysed in detail in order to find out how they guide the reception process and influence the effect of the whole text.

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