Skopos, audience design and relevance
Download
Report
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).