Transcript Skopos, audience design and relevance

Interpersonal and Intertextual Design in
Translating
Ian Mason
Heriot Watt University
Minimal mediation in translation

Ayatollah Khomeini (Iran),
translated in The Guardian (U.K.)
 Internal
policy speech about Islam
and Iran’s war against Iraq (1989)
Genre
 The
political speech
 The religious sermon
 Legal deontology
Discourse
 Cohesion
– repetition
– metaphor
 Over-lexicalisation
 Style-shifting
Text type
 Conventions
of argumentation
– The counter-argument:
‘Of course… But…’
– ‘Of course this does not mean that we
should defend all clergymen’.
Minimal mediation
 Being
literal?
 Trying to give the TL reader access
to the ST voice (‘foreignisation’)?
 Trying to show Khomeini as violent
and fundamentalist?
Functionalist theories
 Human
activity generally goaldirected.
 Translating is a human, social
activity.
 Overriding consideration is the
purpose (skopos) of the task.
 ST as an “offer of information”.
 ‘Intra-textual coherence’ (TT) comes
before ‘inter-textual coherence’
(ST/TT).
(Vermeer, Nord, etc.)
ST/TT relationship
 Nord:
“loyalty”
 Toury:
moral principle inappropriate
in a descriptive model
 the
Co-operative Principle (Grice)
The Co-operative Principle
 “Make
your contribution such as is
required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or
direction of the talk exchange in
which you are engaged”
Grice (1975)
Skopos
 action
in relation to end-user
 action in relation to end-use
 action in relation to all other
participants
 action in relation to socio-textual
practices (genre, discourse, text
type)
 all governed by co-operative
principle
Problem
 ‘intra-textual
coherence’ (making
sense) does NOT seem to be the
main priority in the case of the
Khomeini translation.
Audience Design (Bell 1984)
 Addressees
(whose presence is
known, who are ratified participants
in the event and are directly
addressed)
 Auditors (known, ratified but not
directly addressed)
 Overhearers (known but not ratified
participants and not addressed)
 Eavesdroppers (presence not known)
 Initiative
 Referee
group)
and Responsive Design
groups (in-group/out-
“This is an extract from a message addressed
by the Ayatollah Khomeini to the instructors and
students of religious seminaries. It has been
abbreviated and edited from a text broadcast on
Tehran Radio and transcribed and translated by
the BBC Monitoring Service”.
Khomeini’s Design
 Addressees
= Instructors in
seminary
 Auditors
= Students
 Overhearers = Listeners to Tehran
Radio
 Eavesdroppers = BBC Monitoring
Service
Translator’s Design
 Addressee
= Employer (BBC
Monitoring Service)
 Auditors = In-house users,
government, etc.
 Eavesdroppers
= Guardian readers
Maximal mediation in translation
 English
translation of Montaillou by
E. Le Roy Ladurie
 Social
village
 The
history of French medieval
deleted discourse
Competing discourses in ST
 Academic/intellectual
discourse
– ‘Quid’ (Latin); ‘catholicity’; ‘catharometempsychotic’; ‘slay’…
 Informal
tenor, colloquialisms
– ‘grass’; ‘squeal’
 Jokes
– ‘His Holiness the Wholesaler’; ‘feathered
friend’…
Deleted discourse in translation
 Detached,
matter-of-fact style
– ‘Unfortunately, no Catholic records were
kept at that time’;
– ‘the names of those who had informed
against him’;
– Etc.
ST audience design
 Addressees:
– French intellectual readers in general.
 Auditors:
– Other French readers; critics; reviewers.
 Referee
in-group:
– Historians in the Annales school of
historical writing
TT audience design
 Addressees:
– General English readers, interested in
French social history (paperback
edition).
 Auditors
+ referee out-group:
– Specialist readers: English-language
historians, critics, reviewers.
Audience Design in Translating
 Khomeini
text: different audiences;
different purposes.
 Interpersonal and intertextual
design.
 Multiple sets of end-users.
 Intertextual impact on end-users.
 Inter-cultural factor.
The translator’s priorities
 To
be revisited in Session 4.
 cf. the Co-operative Principle
(Session3).
 cf. the full range of participants in a
translating/interpreting event
(Session 1).
 All these points are relevant to
translator training (Sessions 5-7).