Variations in English Discourse

All forms of communication, whether intralingual, interlingual or intersemiotic, involve using language for a purpose within a particular context and a specific culture. Successful communication takes place when the purpose of the message is encoded effectively and decoded appropriately both within a culture and across cultures. The rationale underlying Variations in English Discourse is that any communication event entails an act of translation and mediation. The interrelation between translation and communication may be said to underlie all approaches to discourse be they linguistic, semiotic, cultural, social or literary. The main aim of Variations in English Discourse is to sensitize readers to the way information is handled in discourse across languages and language varieties. Each chapter deals with a specific aspect of mediation from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. Chapter 1 and 2 introduce the pragmatic aspects of mediation and investigate how language forms and functions interact within and across language boundaries. The focus is on the appropriateness of the linguistic form to the function of the utterance in relation to the addresser's intentions and underlying communicative motivations. The importance of pragmatics to translation and communciation is further explored in Chapters 3 and 4, which stress the need to interpret the source text as an integral part of its socio-cultural context in terms of both the context of situation and the context of culture. Such variants of communication as participants, their shared background knowledge, and the relationship of meaning to the extralinguistic environment and its appropriateness to the speech situation are discussed in detail. Chapter 5 explores the role of figurative language in relation to stylistic effects and text-types while Chapter 6 delves into the intersemiotic variations of discourse with particular reference to film translation. The volume closes with two appendices which aim to show the relevance of genre to the rewriting of texts. The first explores the notion that translated texts constitute a genre of their own and that they are characterized by certain types of linguistic behaviour that is either unique or prevalent to mediated texts as compared to monolingual text production. The second investigates forms of rewriting with specific regard to the drafting of EU documents. A further reading section and a comprehensive list of references is given at the end of the book.