Text and Context

Text and Context celebrates Ian Mason's scholarship by bringing together fourteen innovative and original pieces of research by both young and established scholars, who examine different forms of translation and interpreting in a variety of cultural and geographical settings.

Auteur

Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan, Maria Pérez Calzada

Résumé
Ian Mason has been a towering presence in the now flourishing discipline of translation studies since its inception, and has produced some of the most influential and detailed analyses of translated text and interpreted interaction to date. The sophistication, dynamism and inclusiveness that have characterized his approach to all forms of mediation are the hallmarks of his legacy.Text and Context celebrates Ian Mason's scholarship by bringing together fourteen innovative and original pieces of research by both young and established scholars, who examine different forms of translation and interpreting in a variety of cultural and geographical settings. In line with his own inclusive approach to the field, these contributions combine close textual analysis with keen attention to issues of power, modes of socialization, institutional culture, individual agency and ethical accountability. While paying tribute to one of the most innovative and influential scholars in the field, the volume offers novel insights into a variety of genres and practices and charts important new directions for the discipline.

Contenu

Introduction

Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan and María Calzada Pérez

Part I: Language Matters

1. Expanded and Minimal Answers to Yes/No Questions in Interpreter-mediated Trials Cecilia Wadensjö, Sweden

This article offers a comparative analysis of sequences drawn from two interpreter-mediated (Swedish-Russian) court trials, documented in Sweden. In single-language trials, defendants' ability to gain conversational space to expand a minimal answer heavily depends on the immediate sanction of the legal questioners. In interpreter-mediated court proceedings, however, the analysis suggests that the ability of foreign-language speaking defendants to expand a narrative is relatively independent of the direct sanctions of the questioners. Overall, the analysis indicates that, similarly to the strategies used by defendants to produce answers, questioning strategies used by legal questioners tend to function somewhat differently in face-to-face interpreter-mediated court trials, compared to single-language trials. This, it is assumed, must be explained by a range of linguistic and pragmatic factors. Those explored in this paper include the potentially increased multifunctionality of conversational units in interpreter-mediated encounters, the various means by which foreign-language defendants attempt to project further talk, the restricted immediate access of the legal questioners to these means, and the various ways in which interpreters may deal with the ambiguity of spontaneous spoken discourse.

2. Information Structure Management and Textual Competence in Translation and Interpreting Stuart Campbell, Ali Aldahesh, Alya' Al-Rubai'i, Raymond Chakhachiro & Berta Wakim, Australia & Iraq

Information structure management is a key aspect of textual competence in translation and interpreting; a high degree of competence is marked by the ability to sequence elements in such a way that the target text looks stylistically authentic while maintaining the integrity of the information structure of the source text. The difficulty is accentuated when working into a second language, and where the source and target languages are structurally disparate. This study focuses on one aspect of information structure management, namely how Arabic speakers tackle sentence openings in translating and interpreting into English. Three student and three professional translators/interpreters were asked to generate output in three different production modes: fast translation, consecutive interpreting, and scaffolded speech, the latter providing baseline interlanguage output. Types of sentence openings were found to be markedly different in fast translation and consecutive interpreting, and to an extent between novices and experts. The findings are consistent with the predictions of the Translation-Interpreting Continuum (Campbell and Wakim 2007), a processing model which predicts that various translation and interpreting production modes rely on different kinds of mental representation, and that competence levels are distinguished by degree of automatization. Implications for curriculum design and assessment are discussed.

II: Forms of Mediation

3. The Translator as Evaluator Theo Hermans, UK

This essay explores approaches and concepts that enable us to capture the translator's presence in translated texts. One approach consists in contextualizing the individual form each translation assumes, as translators position themselves through the display of a particular mode of representation seen against the possibility of alternative modes . Other approaches are designed to tease out translators' attitudes as conveyed in actual translations or their paratexts. If, following relevance theory, we construe translation as echoic discourse, we can identify the translator's attitude by gauging the difference between what is said and what is implied in the translated discourse. Modality, too, is concerned with the speaker's attitude towards and appraisal of what is being said. A focus on modality allows investigation, not just of the translator's value judgements about the discourse being rendered, but also of the rapport with the audience which is established in the process.

4. Evaluation and Intervention in Translation Jeremy Munday, UK

This paper focuses on the translator's mediation, or intervention, from the perspective of Halliday's (1984, 1995) interpersonal function and drawing on Hatim and Mason's (1997) notions of 'mediation' and the 'static-dynamic' cline of language use. Recent work from systemic functional linguistics on authorial evaluation and appraisal is examined, notably Martin and White's (2005) study of appraisal in English. In doing so, the aim is to investigate the relevance for translation studies of such a model drawn from monolingual English work. It is argued that, for a translator, evaluation - and mediation or intervention - is to be found at 'critical points' that may not coincide with prominent evaluation in appraisal theory. Examples analyzed from tourist texts and the translation of a Borges short story and Barack Obama's political manifestos suggest that such critical points may be those that require a high degree of interpretation from the translator because of the use of 'invoked' (less explicit) attitudinal markers, because of ST ambiguity or fuzziness, or because of a lack of an obvious target language equivalent. The paper concludes by advancing a possible explanation through Martin and White's notion of 'reaction', evaluative interpretations being dependent on the different readings to which a text may be subjected.

5. Translating What Might Have Been Written Brian Mossop, Canada

Starting from Mason's idea of a dialogue interpreter making various 'moves', such as 'repairing miscommunication', the article looks at the production of written translations in terms of switching among various ways of producing language. Translators may report all and only what they see as the meaning of the source text, or they may report what they think the source writer should have written (they correct errors) or might have written (they add or subtract material). In the latter case, they become the 'motivator' behind the ideas expressed in the translation, but they may be either 'loyal' motivators (adding or subtracting in the spirit of the source as they see it) or 'disloyal' motivators (engaging in their own writing project). A reworking of the traditional distinction betwee…