Ian Mason

Audience Design in Translating

Abstract Taking skopos as a starting point, this article1 seeks to refine the notion in the light of several insights afforded by interactional sociolinguistics, principally audience design (Bell 1984), the variables of power and distance, and aspects of linguistic politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). By applying these notions to the analysis of various instances of translating, it is suggested that significant translational shifts may be traceable to systematic differences between the audience design and text design of producers of source texts and target texts. This exercise leads to a reflection on appropriate methods for researching audience design in translation and the status of textual evidence.

Research Training in Translation Studies

Abstract Doctoral work in translation studies has grown in volume over recent years, not only in Europe and America but also worldwide. A concomitant trend has been the requirement for research training, either within or as preparation for doctoral programmes, and many generic and discipline-specific training packages are now offered in a wide variety of institutions. But what are the characteristics of doctoral work in the broad field of translation studies and what kinds of area-specific training are appropriate? In a domain characterized by methodological heterogeneity and beset by problems of achieving consensus on what constitutes its object of study, is there a common core that could inform the design of a training course for doctoral research in translation studies? In presenting the contributions to this special issue of ITT, this introductory article argues that, provided research designs are clear, consistent and internally coherent, there will be no need to force individual studies into a common mould. Correspondingly, the goal of mutual understanding and respect will best be served by introducing doctoral students to a full range of theoretical perspectives, empirical tools and methods, among which they will be enabled to perceive the relative scope and effectiveness of those they have selected.

Critical Linguistics, Language and Ideology

The early 1970s was a lean time for those interested in applying insights from a socially situated and socially conscious linguistics to the study of translation. Chomskyan linguistics was still dominant and engagement with the ideas of transformational generative grammar seemed to be almost obligatory – even Eugene Nida, scarcely a formalist, had felt it necessary in his classic Towards a Science of Translating (1964) to propose a model based on transformations operating on deep-level, kernel structure representations of sentences. But context-free linguistics in whatever form had very little to offer to the student of translation. Responsible for teaching a final-year undergraduate course on translation studies from 1974 onwards, I remember distinctly the impact made upon me by an edition of the University of East Anglia Occasional Papers in Linguistics, in which Roger Fowler sketched out an early version of his ideas and those of his colleagues for a critical linguistics. Language as Ideology (Kress and Hodge) was, in fact, written between 1973 and 1976 but not published until 1979, the same year as its companion volume, Language and Control (Fowler, Hodge, Kress and Trew). It is easy to overlook, from our current perspective, the new departure that these works represented. As opposed to the excessive formalism described above or the sociolinguistic obsession of the time with phonological variation, Language as Ideology proposed to relate language to people and social processes: linguistics was now to provide the theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of the linguistic output of actual producers of texts. The task, said the authors in their preface, was “to relate forms of thought to the existence of the producers of those thoughts, as individuals living in a material world under specific conditions in specific societies at given times” The Translator. Volume 13, Number 2 (2007), 341-346 ISBN 978-1-905763-00-9