Translatology II: 4th Mid-Term Exam

Mark Newmark

• Functional sentence perspective
• Lower units of discourse
• Idioms

Functional sentence perspective

Functional sentence perspective studies the arrangement of the elements of a sentence in terms of its linguistic, situational and cultural context, and thus determines their function within the paragraph and the text. This approach is mainly focused on the theme/rheme interplay, described whilst taking into account the communicative dynamism, which is, by the way, what pushes the communication forward.

The theme is the starting-point of a communication and it is already known by the addressee. The rheme, on the other hand, is the set of elements which convey the new information, and therefore carries a greater amount of communicative dynamism because it helps the communication to keep continuing. Theme in English is often signaled by a definite article, a determiner, or a generic term; rheme by an indefinite article, a determiner, or a specific term. Elements that are neither theme or rheme are transitional.

Since one normally moves from the known to the unknown, the latest elements of a sentence are the ones with the higher degree of communicative dynamism. However, for some reason sometimes the word order is altered by putting a rhematic word at the head of a sentence, especially for the purpose of emphasizing. This procedure needs to be correctly preserved in translation, so the translator has to establish his priorities by considering the text as a whole.

The Lower Units of Translation

Mark Newmark points out that, in fact, all lengths of language can be considered as units in the course of translation. The units of translation described by this author are the text itself (no matter if it consists of one word or one sentence), the chapter or section, the paragraph, the sentence, the clause, the group, the collocation, the word and the morpheme. Each of them plays a different functional role within the text; thus, words and collocations (including the idiom and the compound) have a lexical function, clauses and groups have a grammatical function, and paragraphs, sentences and the text contribute a notional value. 

However, the natural unit of translation as well as  of comprehension tends to be the sentence. Within a sentence, transpositions and clause rearrangements are common if the FSP is not infringed, and there is a good reason for them. Additionally, unless a sentence is too long, it is unusual to divide it; if it is unusually short, it is likely to be for a special effect. Needless to say, if long sentences are a part of a writer's style in an expressive text, they have to be preserved.

In the translation of these units, one has to be consciously aware of the grammatical and lexical aspects, while making sure that the FSP is preserved where important. However, operatively, most translation is done at the level of the smaller units (word and clause), leaving the larger units to work automatically, until a difficulty occurs or the revision starts.

Idioms

An idiom is a semantic expressions that consists of a group a words whose meaning cannot be deduced from their individual components, but from the unit as a whole. They are frozen patters of language because they allow little or no variation in form.

Idioms are particularly problematic in translation because, in one hand, they challenge the translator's ability to recognize and interpret them correctly. And, on the other hand, they pose difficulties involved in the rendering of their various layers of meaning that idioms convey into the target language.

The first difficulty that a translator comes across is being able to recognize that he is dealing with an idiomatic expression. Some idioms are more easily recognizable than others, and this is so because they include expressions which violate truth conditions, such as get under someone's skin or It's raining dogs and cats, or because they seem ill-formed as they do not follow grammatical rules, for example trip the light fantastic, by and large, etc. Generally speaking, the more difficult an expression is to understand and the less sense it makes in a given context, the more likely a translator will recognize it as an idiom

Furthermore, there are two cases in which an idiom can be misinterpreted if one is not familiar with it. First, when it seems transparent because it offers a reasonable literal interpretation, but it is actually the idiomatic meaning the one which plays a role in a certain context. A translator who is unfamiliar with the idiom in question may easily accept the literal interpretation and miss the play on idiom. Secondly, when an idiom in the source language has a very close counterpart in the target language, which looks similar on the surface but has a totally or partially different meaning.