Choice And Adaptation

Jef Verschueren proposes a pragmatic perspective view on language use and assumes that language use is a continuous making of linguistic choices with different degrees of salience for the purpose of adaptation. In view of this new understanding of pragmatics, it is suggested that translation, as a form of verbal communication, though secondary if not primary, can be approached in the similar vein. A translating process, therefore, can be defined as the continuous making of linguistic choices, in the secondary communication situations, for adaptation to translation purposes. The so-called secondary translation situations refer to the fact that when interpreting a source text an audience may fail to use the context intended by the source language communicator and perhaps use other contexts instead. This leads to the essential feature of translation—communication involving two contexts and two structures (in Verschueren's terminology). Thus, the choice-making activity in interlingual transfer is notoriously far more complex and dynamic, which means that the basically monolingual adaptation theory will have to be revised or amended to fit the interlingual translation activity.The present research is intended to approach the translation process from the adaptation theory of pragmatics as a perspective. Through exploring the translating process and relevant big issues, the dissertation aims to establish a tentative framework for translation studies in which those traditional aspects of research, including the interplay of translation with context, the nature of translation process, strategies and principles, the role of a translator, and didactics of translation and so on, are possibly accounted for in a practical manner. It is also assumed the proposed model would be conducive to the study of translation universality.The first chapter briefly reviews the current turns in translation studies from prescriptive to descriptive moving on to explanatory paradigms as well as from inter-disiciplinary to multi-disiciplinary and multi-perspectives, which paves the way for introducing the pragmatic perspective view into translation research.Chapter two differentiates between pragmatics as a component of linguistics and pragmatics as a general functional perspective on language use. Although both can be applied to explain translation, the dissertation argues, by tracing and comparing the generally parallel progress made in the fields of pragmatics and translation sdudies, that Verschueren's point of view is more relevant and adaptative, not merely to specific translation problems, but rather to all translation in general.Chapter three is devoted to the preliminary study of translation as a process in the framework of adaptation theory. Following the similar line of argument, the author assumes that"translating must consist of the continuous choice-making and adapting, consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal (i.e.structural) and/or language-external (i.e.contextual) reasons". The examples mostly quoted from classical translation works are analyzed in this way to show that choice and adaptation permeate all translational activities.Chapter four, drawing upon Verschueren's notion of"contextual correlates of adaptability", presents an elaborate account of"translatior's discourse context"in the the proposed framework by formulating a rather intricate but illuminating cognitive diagram, which describes choice-making and adaptating behaviour in terms of an interaction between the translator's cognitive vision of discourse context, source text writer's discourse context, and intended version reader's discourse context. The conception that discourse and context are incorporated in the translator's contextual field of vision not only realigns the countless choice-making factors but is exploratory and interpretive in nature and helps greatly to reexamine some intriguing problems in translation process.Chapter five deals with the issue of research methods concerning the translator's choice behaviour and the nature of translating in the context. It suggests that two empirical study means, namely TAP and CNA, be tried to discover choice-making procedures and collect choice data. In relation to the findings, the study offers a tentative approach to translation in the emerging paradigms of nonlinear and complexity sciences, defending the view that the translation process is entirely typical of nonlinear dynamics, illustrating the abandoment of determinism and the adoption of the principle of unpredictability as the main features of choice-making in translating. It is therefore argued that the event of choice-making in translating is not governed by a rule or a set of rules with a definite'output', but rather by various factors of a different nature, which affect the translator in one way or another.Chapter six dwells upon a few of traditional key translation notions in the context of choice and adaptation, in which translation strategies and principles should be viewed as highly dynamic and adaptable to varied translational context. The concept of'norms', influential in current descriptive translation studies and closely related to decision-making is further interpreted in and supported by the adaptation model advanced in this dissertation. Accordingly, the identity of translator, a typically important element in choice making, is characterised as the focal point, which is posited as a more appropriate evaluation of its role in translating. Last but not the least,in this chapter, the author probes into some implications of the new framework for the didactics of translation, proposing a turn from product-oriented to process-oriented teaching procedure with an ultimate goal of developing translation learners'awareness of making choice and adaptating.The last chapter, as a concluding part, recapitulates the major points concerning the topic of the study by further elaborating on the significance of the new perspective for establishing a comprehensive framework of translation studies. Besides, it is stressed that particular attention should be drawn to the study of translator's risk in making his certain choice, which is indispensable for a comprehensive understanding of translator's choice-making behaviour, but unfortunately left unnoticed frequently in the previous researches. In order to constitute a rounded vision of how the pragmatic perspective view and its relevant adaptation theory relates to translation, the chapter also raises some important questions for still further investigation.To sum up, the study of translation within the framework of Verschueren's theory helps us to acknowledge not only the necessity of making choice(what to do) in translation process, but also the orientation to adaptation (how to do). It is hoped that the main contribution of this dissertation to the study of translation can be made in the four aspects: First, this is a considerably systematic study of translating in the framework of translation as choice and adaptation. Second, in the process of transplanting the theory of adaptation, the TAP and the CNA are introduced for the first time as the empirical methods to study a translator's choice behaviour in translation. Third, the notion of context in pragmatics as a perspective is tentatively broadened by formulating a framework for translation discourse context with the translator as the focal position of observation. Fourth, the study is the first attempt to search for the potential implications of this new model for the innovation of translation teaching.