CLAS 4/532
February 10, 2025
Discourse & Register Analysis, Systems Theories


Exercise #1 is due in 2 weeks (2/24): 30-40 lines, passage from epic or tragedy, to be translated “grammatically” with the aid of standard philological tools (grammars, lexica, commentaries; provide a bibliography of such works consulted with your translation), in preparation for Exercise #2

1. Discourse analysis (Munday, ch. 6): how language & texts convey meaning with respect to social/power relationships (translation's communication within broader sociocultural/political/historical frames – cf. “cultural turn” in Translation Studies, next week); Vergil's Aeneid as discourse/discursive text – shield of Aeneas? (Hallidayan top-down model: Augustan sociocultural environment > discourse > genre)

Register: elements of language that communicate meaning in sociocultural discourse

• field: ideational content of text's subject matter, its representation of its world & events > realized in micro-elements as verbal voice, grammatical subject, nominalization of verbs (how these elements define subject & shape content/message)
• tenor: interpersonal relationship(s) between participants in discourse (author/text & reader) > personal pronouns used, verbal mode (mood/modality), evaluative terms (Vergil's “subjective style”, focalization)
• mode: textual form/channel of communication between participants (spoken, written, narrative, dialogue, monologue, etc.) > textual cohesion (repetitions, themes, pronouns, word order, collocations, conjunctions)

[Pragmatics (branch of linguistics): study of meanings conveyed by participants in communication, “study of language in use” (cf. OLS); communicative features include coherence (shared experiences, expectations), presuppositions (shared inferences), implicature (shared communicative implications, i.e. what is implied in communication), e.g. Grice’s maxims for successful & cooperative communication = quantity, quality, relevance, manner, politeness]

2. Systems Theories (Munday, ch. 7): literary translation not isolated system, interacts with other forms of literature within literary & historical polysystem/macrosystem of target culture; measure effects of larger systems on translation (quasi-scientific – risks hyper-generalization, creation of dubious “universal laws”, fuzzy & oversimplifying levels of abstraction)

• Descriptive Translation Studies: establish theoretical frameworks for translations as social behavior & cultural-historical products (ambitious descriptive study to locate translation within cultural framework, comparisons of translations within TL; generalizations & identification of probable patterns, e.g. Toury's “law of growing standardization” & “law of interference”?
  
  
• translations: primary in central literary system (e.g. young/weak literature or literary vacuum; translation closer to ST, innovation) or secondary (= peripheral; translation according to existing models in TL, conservatism) – Roman/Latin translation project? contemporary American translations of Greek and Latin texts?  
  

• norms: sociocultural constraints specific to culture, place, and time (norms on continuum of rules, conventions, idiosyncrasies) that influence translations (approval/disapproval – ST adequacy vs. TT acceptance?) > studying translations themselves & paratextual and/or extratextual sources (blurbs, translators’ prefaces, reviews, professional association statements, etc.) to determine translation values (target culture)
  
  Braund (“Mind the Gap”) on extreme (non-normative) foreignizing translations of Aeneid: Russian, French, American Frederick Ahl's “defamiliarizing a text that has perhaps been too easily annexed into English literature” > formal correspondances (sound & word-play, alliteration, assonance, meter, word order) – audience for such translations?
  
  Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky's defamiliarization (ostranenie) as dynamic aesthetic goal (“Art as Technique”, 1917):
  
  “Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.”