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#13 Dec 9 - Studies on Translation Theories

張貼者： NTNU GITI BLOG on 2009年10月27日 星期二
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#13 Dec 9 Communication Model excerpts from Basil Hatim and Ian Mason’s The Translator as Communicator (1997): 14-35; 127-142.

1 意見:

charlotte wu 提到...

In these two chapters, Hatim and Mason propose the model of how to analyze texts and also examine the cross-cultural communication.

In terms of Hatim and Mason’s text analysis model, they adopt notions from pragmatics and language analysis such as coherence, cohesion, field, tenor, mode or register. As far as I am concerned, the core and major concern of this model is the intentionality and informativity of the text. I think this is probably the potential answer to the old question in translation from the very beginning of translation history-- whether translation should follow the ‘spirit’ or the ‘content’ of the source text. With this model, what translators can do is to analyze the intentionality, Intertextuality and informativity of the text and then decide what kind of strategy/focus to adopt in their practice. Moreover, the static/dynamic continuum that Hatim and Mason propose also reminds me of Nida’s notions of ‘formal equivalence’ and ‘dynamic equivalence’. It seems to me that in Hatim and Mason’s model, the text can be analyzed in both the linguistic viewpoint and the contextual/cultural perspective. That is why I think this model may be quite useful for translators and translation researchers.

In the second reading, Hatim and Mason use the analysis of argumentation as an example to introduce their notion of ‘cross-cultural communication’. With regard to the analysis on argumentation, I think they have presented a good illustration of how cultural differences on the issues such as power concession and politeness may forge the different kinds of argumentation in Arabic and English context. However, I would doubt whether this analysis can represent all kinds of communication that are cross-cultural. In a way, argumentation is a special kind of register that has strong intentionality, but how about literary texts which may have more than one specific kind of intentionality? For me, I think the implication here is not that Hatim and Mason’s analysis is not complete, but that translation as a means of cultural communication is in fact a very complex process that needs more research to be done.

2009年12月21日 下午5:05

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