Contrastive Linguistic Decisions: The Need for Textual Competence

One useful way of seeing contrastive linguistics at work is through translation, and an interesting way of looking into the translation process is perhaps through an examination of the kind of decisions which translators make in handling texts. This should enhance our understanding not only of what actually happens when text confronts text, but also, and perhaps more important for our purpose here, of what it means to be textually competent. Our ultimate objective is to shed some light on the way forward, whether our concern lies in human translation, machine translation, the wider field of artificial intelligence, applied linguistics and foreign language teaching or indeed contrastive linguistics.

In this chapter, to preview some of the issues involved in the contrastive-discourse model to be proposed, I will analyze the following text sample from a Newsweek article on the subject of European unity and, at the risk of sounding too prescriptive, record the various decisions to which a disciplined reading of the text would ideally lead and which should normally be made in the specific case of translating the text into Arabic. As it turned out, these decisions were not all made initially by the group of translator trainees with whom I was working on the translation of the text. This highlights the value in areas like testing or translation assessment of such a prospective approach to analyzing the process of translation, intuitive as this might initially seem.

Sample A

Welcome to 1993
Forget the struggles over Maastricht
Europe's Single Market will change the world

Europe is dying, Europe is dying, Europe is practically dead. Its vaunted exchange-rate mechanism lies in tatters. The pound sterling, the lira and the peseta have dropped like stones. Britain wallows in its longest postwar recession. French economic growth is slowing, and France's president has cancer. Italy faces the worst labor disturbance in decades. Even mighty Germany is hard up for cash. The Maastricht Treaty on European political and monetary union looks like a goner. Not for years has the European scene looked so bleak. And yet, the Old Continent is on the verge of accomplishing its most spectacular feat ever—the creation of a vast "frontierless" economic space with 360 million consumers and a combined GNP of 6.5 trillion.

On January 1, 1993, the Single Market—or most of it—will come into effect. Henceforward, travelers within the 12-nation European Community and the seven- nation European Free Trade Association will travel without passports or visas throughout a vast European Space. Internal customs duties will disappear. Trucks will carry no special documents. Physiotherapists, architects and students will be able to practice or study anywhere in the Single Market on the basis of degrees they earned at home. Builders and telephone suppliers will bid for public contracts on equal terms in all 9 countries. Insurance companies and banks can establish branches anywhere in the area.

Newsweek 19 October 1992

Pre-reading

Before embarking on the translation, indeed the reading, of any text, there is a crucial pre-reading process to go through, and one cannot but wonder here how mechanical procedures such as those commonly used by machine translation will cope. In tackling a text such as the one cited above, for example, the human translator exploits a variety of clues ranging from the political leanings of the magazine and the ideology of the contributor, to the actual title and subtitles of the piece in question. No less significant is the knowledge of what is happening in the world outside which can and often does have a bearing on the way the text is handled by reader and writer alike. These and similar situational factors are all subsumed under the text analytic model of register membership to be dealt with in some detail in Chapter 3.

Text Processing

But text processing proper begins when we encounter the first element (word, phrase, etc.) in the actual text and try to make sense by fitting it into some scheme of textual activity. To put this more specifically from the perspective of translation, the translator assesses initial elements in terms of their relevance to the progression of an unfolding text and the requirements of context. Let us consider the initial sentence of sample A to see what is meant by 'text relevance' in the way the term is specifically used here:

Europe is dying, Europe is dying, Europe is practically dead

Among a number of important assumptions which the reader makes, this opening statement would be deemed somehow inappropriate (lacking in credibility, persuasiveness, etc.) if it were produced to initiate an argument for the likelihood of Europe's demise. Within the socio-textual practices of English, the producer of such a text would be 'ticked off by an entire community of competent text users for 'going over the top' or 'sounding off, for being 'too dramatic', 'unsubtle' and 'sensational'. These intuitions about the way a text is put together, which have serious implications for the efficiency and effectiveness of text production and reception in general and of translating in particular, will all be dealt with under the general heading of semiotics (see specially Chapters 3, 4 and 13).

Hypothesis Testing

The establishment of relevance is essentially a heuristic or a hypothesis-testing exercise. Nevertheless, this 'feeling one's way' into the text is not entirely open-ended. To return to our example of the initial element of sample A, there are all kinds of constraints both linguistic and contextual which, in English at any rate, can render the mode of 'arguing a claim through' both inappropriate and uninteresting. It is my task in this book to explain some of these constraining factors. Suffice it here to say that translators (like all text users) generally benefit from being armed with this critical sense of anticipation when approaching a text and, as translator trainers, we should therefore endeavour to raise awareness in this area of language use.

The Unit 'Text'

Text or the set of mutually relevant intentions that serve an overall rhetorical purpose (e.g. to counter-argue) is the ultimate linguistic unit in any activity to do with communicating in language. In all such activities, and particularly in translation, there is hardly a decision taken regarding any element of language in use at whatever level of linguistic organization, without constant reference being made to the text in which that element is embedded. Translation equivalence, therefore, can be adequately established only in terms of criteria related to text type membership, and in the light of how these criteria inform the kind of compositional plan (structure) and the way a text is made internally cohesive (texture). At this level of global patterning, translators also refer to two other basic socio-textual units: genre (e.g. the editorial) and discourse (e.g. that of the committed Christian). The three units (text, discourse and genre) relay vital signals which, through some form of intertextuality, link a given utterance with what it basically reminds us of, be this some social occasion conventionally enshrined in language (a genre structure), some attitudinal statement (a discoursal element) or some rhetorical purpose (a textual matter). The context surrounding the initial sentence of sample A,

Europe is dying, Europe is dying, Europe is practically dead,

may thus be seen globally in terms of:

(a) the genre of the 'polemic',

(b) the discourse of exhortation, and

(c) the text entity 'counter-argument' (thesis cited to be opposed opposition – substantiation – conclusion).

As presented here, this picture of semiotic activity is obviously much too simplified. In reality, the negotiation taking place would most probably take the form of open sets of options which, by a process of swift and disciplined elimination, gradually become single choices with which the translator ultimately works.

It may be helpful to pause here and look in more detail at the basic triad in our model—that of 'genre', 'discourse' and 'text'. In examining these categories, about which we will have a great deal more to say, it is always of paramount importance to look at the kind of constraints which regulate their use and within which the language user normally operates. With this in mind, let us consider sample B1 and sample B2 which occurred in the context of the following textual encounter. In a press release announcing a new initiative linking two UK universities, a high-ranking official's statement on the prospects for the joint venture was quoted verbatim to include the following:

Sample B1

The University of X and Y University have a proven track record ... which this collaborative venture can only enhance.

The segment which I have italicized lingered in my mind only because I saw it, on the following day, replaced by something particularly noteworthy in the university bulletin's report of the centre's inauguration. Here, the quote was now used indirectly to read:

Sample B2

The University of X and Y University have a proven track record ... which this collaborative venture is intended to enhance.

We may initially wish to reprimand the reporter for taking such liberties with other people's quotes. But, I am sure we will reconsider our position when we discover that he was the same man who, as part of his PR brief, originally composed the entire press release and, for the benefit of the press, invented what the high-ranking official purportedly said. Operating within the constraints of:

(a) an address at a reception (genre),

(b) hortatory evaluativeness (discourse),

(c) through-argument (text).

A speaker is entitled, in fact expected, to make the kind of emphatic statement carried through by a structure such as can only. However, a reporter for a university bulletin would be speaking out of turn if he or she were to operate within anything other than:

(a) the news report as genre,

(b) cautious detachment as discourse,

(c) exposition as text.

These reporting requirements are adequately met by the use of structures such as the impersonal passive and the kind of non-committal lexis exemplified by intended (see Chapter 13 on text politeness).

From Global to Local

As the focus gradually narrows and the attention becomes more concentrated on a given item, readers tend to work more closely with a set of more localized patterns while remaining within the parameters set by the kind of global structures illustrated above. But 'local' patterning and 'global' organization are not two separate activities. There is a constant interaction between the two levels, and local semantic, syntactic and textual decisions are constantly informed by the intertextual potential of genres, discourses and texts. This intertextuality is a function of some actual or virtual experience with texts we as language users will have had somehow, sometime, somewhere. Let us once again consider the initial sentence in sample A:

Europe is dying, Europe is dying, Europe is practically dead.

At the local level of textual analysis, more meaningful socio-cultural insights are generated and brought to bear on the reader's appreciation of the way the text is constructed. Thus, what we have in the above sentence is a set of features which may be characterized as follows:

(a) generic: the auctioneer's 'falling gavel' (going, going, gone), the excitable sports commentator reporting on the last few seconds before someone crosses the finishing line;

(b) discoursal: a contentious premise (evaluative situation-managing with an axe to grind); and

(c) textual: thesis set up as a 'strawman gambit' to initiate a line of argumentation which involves opposition to the thesis cited.

Text Structure

At this stage in the process, a structure format of some kind begins slowly to emerge. In the above text sample, for instance, a thesis cited to be opposed will pragmatically determine what kind of textual elements should follow. Pragmatic factors regulating aspects of text in context, such as intentionality or the purposes for which utterances are used, are crucial here, and these will feature most prominently in the analysis of the way texts are put together (Chapters 6 and 7), and are made operational (Chapters 8 and 9).

Text structure awareness enhances anticipation and thus acts as an effective sign-posting system which guides the reader in navigating textual terrains. Building on the status of the 'thesis cited to be opposed', we expect a counter- claim (opposition) followed by a substantiation and some form of conclusion. Schematically, this counter-argumentative structure may be represented as in Figure 1.1:

[FIGURE OMITTED]

Context is thus seen to underlie our awareness of text type which, in turn, almost causally determines the compositional plan of a given text (i.e. its structure). Internalized as part of language users' textual competence are a set of structural configurations corresponding to a set of text typological foci. In effect, these serve a number of rhetorical purposes which, thankfully, are by no means infinite. Work on such schemata-, script- or scenario-like structures carried out within Artificial Intelligence, discourse linguistics, etc. is highly relevant.

Texture

The analysis of structure becomes more relevant when we embark on the next phase in the process of reworking a text—that of negotiating texture or the various devices (semantic, syntactic and textual) which together lend the text its basic quality of 'hanging together', of being both cohesive and coherent. It is in this domain of textuality that translators entertain the further assumption that texture realizes given structure formats which, as we have just seen, are more or less causally determined by higher-level contextual factors (text type and so on). It is also here that, at the realization end of the context-text chain of interaction, languages differ and decisions have to be taken as to how cross-cultural as well as translinguistic differences are best reconciled.

To illustrate the process of negotiating texture, let us consider some of the English-Arabic points of contrast which are likely to emerge in working with sample A above:

(1) The first decision which the translator has to take relates to source text repetition in sentence 1 (dying, dying, dead). This can either be preserved or variation opted for and, in this context, Arabic chooses variation. This is primarily motivated by generic considerations (the auctioneer's falling gavel), and is not incompatible with the nature of persuasive-polemical discourse and the lip-service, almost ironical/ sarcastic, function of the textual element in question (thesis cited to be opposed).

Compared with English, repetition in Arabic responds to a different set of contextual requirements. Had one opted for repetition in Arabic, the genre would have been shifted to that of the 'ideological manifesto', the discourse to that of the 'passionate appeal' and the text to that of perhaps a through-argument where emphasis serves to uphold a conviction. These communicative values obviously distort source text meaning and run counter to the perceived intentions of the writer.

(2) While the 'disjunction' in evidence between the three sub-elements in

Europe is dying, Europe is dying, Europe is practically dead

is preservable in the Arabic target text, this is a deviation from normal usage in this language and is permitted only if it is rhetorically-motivated. In Arabic, such elements would typically be conjoined with 'and'. However, given the generic, discoursal and textual constraints referred to above, disjunction seems happily to accommodate the rhetorical function involved (to sound unconvinced). An adjustment will thus have to be introduced into the system of target-language norms with which the translator usually works. But no sooner is such a readjustment in place than a case of reverting back to the norm is encountered. An important decision has to be taken regarding the connectivity between sentences 1 and 2:

1 Europe is dying, Europe is dying, Europe is practically dead

2 Its vaunted exchange-rate mechanism lies in tatters.