The Three-stage Process
Reiss observes that the translator will have to identify the function of the SL text before deciding on the course of translation. She advises a three-stage process for this, starting from the largest textual unit to the smallest. There are times when these stages will overlap.
The first stage is to read the text as a whole and decide the basic communicative form of the text. If it communicates content, it is the informative type, if it contains artistic content it is the expressive type and if it is of persuasive nature it is the operative type (Venuti, 163). The contexts we have discussed above, viz. notices and technical matter, are of the informative type. We cannot also preclude the possibility of a single text being a mixture of all the types. For example, a newspaper report that is analysing a social problem can be a combination of the informative and persuasive types. It is up to the translator to decide which should be given predominance.
Roman Jakobson has talked about the phatic and poetic functions of texts. The ph atic function means the establishment and maintenance of contacts while the poetic function refers to the aesthetic aspects of a text. Reiss disagrees that these two functions can determine the type of text; she believes that both functions are common to all types. Even a technical manual, according to her, has poetic functions as it makes use of language in a certain way. A poem also has a phatic function as it can be seen as communication at a different level.
The second stage in textual analysis is the establishment of text variety. This can be done by identifying certain speech or verbal patterns in the text. For example, the chances are high that a story that begins with “Once upon a time...” is a children's story. The last stage is the analysis of style where the translator's skill will be sorely tested. If the SL writer is somebody who uses an ornate style, the translator will have to be careful to reproduce that effect in the TL. |
