Translating Texts: Theory and Practice

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Translating TextsTheory and Practice

• Maristella Gatto
• 7 novembre 2007

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Structures ?Levels

• e.g. th (?) gt these gt these old books
• gt My grandfather gave me these old books
• gt My grandfather gave me these old books/ but I
  never read them

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Levels

• Phonology (sound)
• Graphology (sign)
• Morphology (morpheme)
• Syntax (phrase/clause)

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Structure ? Use

• SHE LOVES YOU

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Structures

• ? gt phonology
• SH gt graphology
• SHE - LOVE gt lexis
• -S gt morphology
• YOU direct object gt syntax

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and use!

• SHE LOVES YOU
• Who? When? Why?

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Use ?Variation

• Spatial
• Temporal
• Personal
• Social
• Cultural
• Contextual

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MEANING
FORM
FUNCTION
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Form ? Meaning

• Dove vuoi che vada?
• Where do you want me to go?
• Where should I go?
• Where do you think Im going?

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• Widdowson (2001 41-68) refers to form and
  meaning as complementary areas of linguistic
  enquiry
• form gt grammar (morphology syntax)
• meaning gt in languagegt semantics
• meaning gt in context gt pragmatics

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FORM ? FUNCTION

• Ho freddo!

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GRAMMARSEMANTICSPRAGMATICS?TEXT
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What is a text?

• CONTEXT
• ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESSEE
• CODE CONTACT

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What is a text? from M.A.K.Halliday-R.Hasan,
Cohesion in English, 1976

• The word text is used in linguistics to refer to
  any passage, spoken or written, of whatever
  length, that does form a unified whole.
• A text is a unit of language in use
• it is NOT a grammatical unit, like a clause or a
  sentence
• it is NOT defined by its size.

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• A text is sometimes envisaged to be some kind of
  super-sentence, a grammatical unit that is larger
  than a sentence but is related to a sentence in
  the same way that a sentence is related to a
  clause, a clause to a group and so on by
  CONSTITUENCY, the composition of larger units out
  of smaller ones. But this is misleading. A text
  is NOT something like a sentence, only bigger it
  is something that differs from the sentence in
  kind.
• A text is best regarded as a SEMANTIC unit a
  unit not of form but of meaning.

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