An Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies

Michela Canepari

• Publisher: EDUCatt Università Cattolica
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9788867807390
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Traducción e interpretación

The present book, which was devised as a general introduction to language and translation studies, aims at helping readers develop useful strategies with which to approach the analysis of discourse in various contexts.
With this intent, it begins by introducing some of the fundamental notions developed in linguistics, sociolinguistics, semiotics, critical theory, literary and cultural studies, which have influenced research work in the field of language and translation studies.
In fact, in order to understand the aims of language and translation studies and the place these disciplines have in contemporary society, we cannot ignore the theoretical background that has determined their development and still supports them.
The initial sections of this book therefore introduce various (linguistic, semiotic, literary and other) theories which, given the importance they have had for the development of language and translation studies, could not be taken for granted.
The first chapter thus provides the foundations on which the remaining sections rest, and tries to emphasise common features, influences, chronological developments and so on, in an attempt to clarify the historical background from which these theories stemmed and suggest, if only very concisely, the cultural developments which rendered possible the incredible advancement of the intellectual debate we have witnessed in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The second chapter introduces some of the fundamental notions at the basis of discourse analysis, applying some of the theories elaborated on within this field to the analysis of different textual types. Even though translation issues are discussed more systematically in the third chapter, for obvious reasons it was not always possible to keep the two discussions distinct, as the notion of culture which underlies the way human beings belonging to particular communities use language, is fundamental for translation as well.
The third chapter, however, deals more specifically with translation studies, applying some of the fundamental notions recently elaborated on in this field to specific textual types such as advertisements, newspapers, literature and comics.
Rather than being a compendium of theoretical jargon, this volume therefore aims at providing readers with some background in various theories, in order to bring to light the (thematic, chronological and geographical) relationship which exists between them and the impact they have had on language and translation studies. As a result, the links between the developments occurring in different fields of research are explained throughout the text, and these notions are then applied to specific texts[*]. In addition, the analysis of the translation strategies adopted in the British, American and Italian versions of Asterix developed in the Appendix by Enrico Martines offers an in-depth application of the theories approached in the remaining of the book. Tratto dall'Introduzione dell'Autore

Chapter 1
The Development of Language Studies

In this first chapter we shall follow, although very briefly, the developments various scientific and human sciences have undergone as from the beginning of the last century, in order to understand where the theories scholars refer to today stemmed from.

1.1. The Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Whereas the early Victorian era was characterised by a strong moralistic temper, the attempt to establish middle-class values, the importance of religion, a conservatism based on money and tradesman-like qualities, and a communal attempt to improve the condition of England, by the end of the century many thinkers and writers felt that the middle-class values they had previously helped to establish, were intolerably Philistine. Hence the reaction, in the literary production of the last decades of the nineteen century, represented by the aesthetic and the decadent movements, the work of Wilde and Swinburne, and a general emphasis on the importance of the independence from, and resistance to, the oppressive conformities of the Victorian age. During these years – dominated by personalities such as Marx, Darwin, and Spencer – the erosive process, as represented in Butler’s and Meredith’s works – could actually be said to have begun: Victorian synthesis started dissolving, the cultural climate began fragmenting, the progressive, optimistic view characteristic of the preceding era came to an end; religious certainty declined, the old rural order and its values faded, and new technologies developed. The belief that the various thinkers who had made their appearance in the previous years were opening a new age became widespread (I am thinking for example of Nietzsche, who during these years published some of his most important books, Zola and Edison), and several theorists in the different realms of consciousness and psychology began to emerge. For example, in 1890 William James introduced for the first time the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ which would become famous thanks to various modernist authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair; Freud published his Studies on Hysteria in 1895, and Bergson’s Matter and Memory saw the press in 1896.

This was therefore a time of change, distinguished by a strong sense of transition, various scientific discoveries and the development of new technologies – as epitomised by Villiers de l’Isle Adams’s The Future Eve (1886), where Edison builds a female android. A new kind of sensibility developed, leading to an increased curiosity in the darker recesses of the self and the unconscious that Freud was beginning to explore, as testified by Stevenson’s publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

In the 1890s the interests and themes approached by the arts constantly diversified, and if the decade could be described as an age of scientific development and social analysis – during which also the ambiguity intrinsic in the Imperial mission began to be addressed – it could be equally referred to as an age of romance. It was an age marked by a strong sense of contradiction, a moment of transition whose typical uncertainty found an expression in a growing sense of sexual ambiguity, as represented not only in Freud’s theory, but also in the radically changed representation of the sexes we have in the ‘new woman fiction’ – expression of the emergent feminist movement – and the (half-veiled) gay writing produced since the last decade of the nineteen century.

By 1900, new dramas of social and sexual relationship were therefore replacing the Victorian dramas of religion and morality, and it was felt that it was time to break with the conventions Victorianism had implemented on a social, political, economic, philosophical and literary level. This was therefore a time of dawns and twilights, during which the sense of fin de siècle soon found a counterbalance in the feeling of aube de siècle and regeneration. If in 1901 the Victorian era truly closed, the belle époque inaugurated by the accession to the throne of Edward VII simultaneously began, ushering Britain into the twentieth century. A new era was opening, a time of fast change and political uncertainty, in which new schools of thought were developing, religion was often replaced with science and, in spite of all the differences which obviously distinguish the various disciplines, old social acceptances based on a priori assumptions broke down and were rejected in all fields of human knowledge.

The old notions of the universe, man, even God, began to be re-examined, and what Dostoyevsky would call a ‘dialogical’ reality, began to be discovered behind, and in opposition to, the monological and stable world which Victorian society claimed was the ultimate, ‘true’ reality, and which realist fiction claimed to transcribe. A certain element of randomness and uncertainty entered science, for example, thanks to, amongst others, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Planck’s Quantum Theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which all contributed to the abolition of absolute notions and undermined the claims made by science to be delivering the ab­solute truth, suggesting that scientific discourse, like literary discourse, is a construction we use to make sense of the world.

The discovery of the linguistic nature of all symbols (or the symbolic nature of all language), made it possible to consider the discourses of science and lit­erature as equivalent codes in the larger system of language which were seen as contributing to the formation of the individual.

Since the elaboration of Freud’s theory of the unconscious, language had actually appeared fundamental in the constitution of the individual, at least of the individual’s unconscious, where it played a central role in repressing those elements and desires the individual’s self could not accept, and then brought them back to consciousness through neurotic symptoms, dreams and the famous Freudian slips of the tongue.

The importance assumed by language is further demonstrated by the development of the new discipline of linguistics. In fact, in the same way that traditional science was shaken by the theories proposed by Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg, during the first decades of the twentieth century various fields of the humanities were revolutionised by the linguistic theories proposed by the Swiss linguist Saussure and their application to various disciplines subsequently accomplished by structuralism.

1.1.1. Saussure

It was actually Saussure who elaborated some of the dichotomies such as langue (language as a system) and parole (the linguistic expression of individual speakers), which would subsequently become fundamental in linguistics.

In particular, one of the key concepts of Saussure’s theory was that language is a system in which meaning is the product of a phonological and graphological difference which distinguishes one linguistic sign from all other signs available in the system of language. Thus, we understand the word ‘cat’ as ‘not bat’, ‘not rat’, ‘not sat’ etc. Similarly, because language, as a cultural phenomenon, produces meaning by creating a network of differences (and similarities), we understand the sign ‘girl’ as ‘not-boy’, ‘not-woman’, ‘not-man’, ‘not-animal’, ‘not-deity’ etc.

Moreover, it was Saussure who for the first time posited the notion that any linguistic sign consists of two sides: the signifier – that is, the sound-pattern of the word, the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound – and the signified – broadly speaking the concept we want to express; and his idea that the relationship between the two is not naturally determined, but is arbitrary and conventional, would utterly revolutionise the way we think about the world, our fellow human beings and, ultimately, our selves.

Obviously, I am not suggesting that science, psychoanalysis and linguistics developed in the same way. What I am arguing, however, is that at the beginning of the twentieth century there occurred a general change of perspective in relation to many of the notions on which society had previously relied, and although these notions pertain to different domains and are therefore distinguished by their unique concerns and their unique means of investigation, the changes affecting various disciplines can be said to have some features in common. In particular, they share the acknowledgement that there are no universal ‘truths’ such as those which science, philosophy and religion, amongst others, have proposed over the centuries.

By 1910 it seemed in fact clear that life was not as Western metaphysics and realism had suggested, but was filled with indeterminacies, which made it fragmentary and heterogeneous. And this conclusion was reached not only thanks to the discoveries of the new science, but also thanks to, amongst others, Dostoevsky’s polyphonic or dialogic novels – which, as Michail Bakhtin would argue in his important The Dialogic Imagination, make two voices interact in a sort of dialogue thereby disrupting the monological and authoritarian discourse of the epic, the historical and the scientific discourse – and to cubism (whose arbitrary disruption of the continuity that had always united an image pointed to the irrelevance of the traditional appeal of the subject and the credibility of its imitation).

Hence, just as the writing of the age was increasingly drawing readers’ attention to the way the text was actually written, cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space, showing instead that meaning resided in the picture’s stylistic structure.

The necessity to break with the past became increasingly felt in many areas, and the spirit of modernism – stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis, all of which began to undermine the absoluteness of all systems in favour of a more relativistic perspective – was in the air. The first decade of the new century could actually be described as a period of discovery during which various experimental tendencies and movements that would continue to develop throughout the following years made their first appearance.

The stimulating spirit of this modern age – represented for example by the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the literary experiments of vorticism and the narratives produced by authors such as Joyce, Woolf, F.M. Ford and Forster – under­went a great change, however, when confronted with the First World War: it had to deal with a shattered world where the progressive view of history and the sense of stability characteristic of the world opened up by the new century was lost, and where everything was felt to be temporary and pro­visional. Modernism then became marked by its more fragile, decadent tone, and if on the one hand it coincided with the experimental freeing of forms and with an increased attention to consciousness, on the other it was experienced as a reaction to the fragmentation of both culture and the psyche, the violence and the feeling of history as catastrophe that war brought about. It was in this climate, during the post-war 1920s, that most of the fundamental modernist books were published by Lawrence, Conrad, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Forster and Woolf.

However, the mood and the atmosphere of literary London would soon drastically change. By the end of the 1920s, the sense of historical uncertainty, political disillusion­ment and social and economical pessimism had grown, fomented by the stock market crash in 1929 and, in the new decade, by the rise to power of Stalin in Russia, the Nazi ideology of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini’s Fascism in Italy and the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The proletarian fic­tion produced in this age of political and historical instability was filled with a sense of historical, political and psychological crisis, a feeling of anxiety, precariousness and chaos (often expressed in gothic and nightmarish visions) from which political commitment and ideological confrontation seemed initially to offer a way out. In this age, as totalitarianism arose and a new war of world proportions appeared increasingly inevitable, the com­mitment of literature initially took the form, for example in Orwell, of historical realism, ending, after the collapse of the Marxist argument for proletarian realism, in an experimental tendency towards fantasy, parody and satire through which (as in Beckett’s novels) the psychosis and ab­surdity of the world, and the surreality and threat of history (which earlier writers had tried to portray realistically) could be expressed. By the end of the decade, a dark and shadowy mood, brought about by the outbreak of war and the death of many writers who had shaped the previous decade, engulfed the intellectual an...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Development of Language Studies
• Chapter 2 Discourse and its Defining Elements
• Chapter 3 An Introduction to Translation Studies
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Appendix S.P.Q.T.![106] (Those Translators Are Fool!)Translation Problems in the Asterix Comics
• Asterix – Bibliography