Text register in translation Text, genre, discourse shift in translation
The myth of the single register
Semiotic translation: ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions
Functional tenor
Use and user of language
Institutional-communicative context
The first has to do with who the speaker/writer is. Such user-related varieties are called ‘dialects’
The second dimension of variation relates not so much to the user as to the use of language. Essentially, use-related varieties (registers) have to do with such factors as the occupation of the speaker (e.g. lawyer, journalist) and whether the occasion of use is formal or informal
The use–user dimensions essentially indicate who is communicating with whom, what is being communicated, and how this is communicated, hence the institutional–communicative focus.
Together with intentionality (covering such pragmatic factors as the force of an utterance) and intertextuality (or how texts as ‘signs’ conjure up images of other virtual or actual texts), register mediates between language and situation (i.e. we use language registers to access situations)
There was a stage in the development of register theory when the first three text examples would all have been glossed as ‘legalese’, leaving us with ‘journalese’ as the single register label of the last two. But, a closer look at these texts reveals that these texts differ from each other in a number of significant ways. What is involved may certainly cater for one subject matter or one level of formality, but other systems of language variation are also clearly at work and must be heeded by the translator.
The reason why tenor is a particularly privileged category in register analysis is to do with the overlap between formality and field, on the one hand, and between formality and mode, on the other
the informality of direct face-to-face encounters vs the formality of indirect writer-audience interaction;
the semi-formality of the persuader vs the slightly more formal tenor of the informer (or the ultra-formality of the lawmaker).
So far, our investigation of both personal tenor (e.g. casual, deferential) and functional tenor (detached reporting, involved persuasion), with technicality and role relationships (e.g. informer, arguer) forming the two basic aspects of functional tenor, has highlighted some basic differences in how language varies. This is an institutional issue and may thus be usefully viewed in terms of the use and user of language
Rather, they perceive field, tenor and mode respectively in terms of:
attitudes and assessment by speakers of what is happening around and through them (interpersonal resources);
how ideational and interpersonal expression acquires cohesion and coherence in a given textual environment (textual resources).
what is going on in and around the text (ideational resources);
Genre shift
Discourse shift
Text shift
Like other macro-structures such as schemata or scripts, texts are seen as vehicles for the expression of a range of socio-cultural meanings. These have to do with:
Intertextuality
the conventional requirements of a set of ‘communicative events’ or genres,
ideology (or other kinds of ‘attitude’) implied by adopting a particular discourse.
‘rhetorical purpose’ in the case of what we can now technically call the unit text,
In its most basic form, communicative interaction involves the exchange of meanings as signs between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader). For an optimally effective expression of these meanings, however, text users tend to engage in higher-level interaction of utterances or texts with other utterances or texts.
As we have indicated on a number of occasions so far, ‘genre’ is a conventionalized form of speaking or writing that we associate with particular ‘communicative events’ (e.g. the academic abstract).
As a unit of communication and translation, the text is a vehicle for the expression of conventionalized goals and functions. These are tied, not to communicative events as in genre, but rather to a set of specific rhetorical modes such as arguing and narrating. Rhetorical purposes of this kind impose their own constraints on how a sequence of sentences becomes a ‘text’, i.e. intended and accepted as a coherent and cohesive whole, and as such capable of realizing a set of mutually relevant communicative intentions appropriate to a given rhetorical purpose.
Pursuing a given rhetorical goal in a text thus requires that the process be conducted within the confines of a particular genre structure. But to be a viable unit of communication, a text must also strike an ideological note of some kind