Eugene A.
Nida,Savannah, GA,
USAMany translators believe that if they take care of the words and the grammar, the discourse will take care of itself, but this concept results from an insufficient under
standing of the role of discourse structure in interlingual communication. The vari
ous means for indicating foregrounding and backgrounding, the diverse ways of indicating emphasis, and the distinctive means of showing the relations between sen
tences, paragraphs, and sections must also be carefully considered.
Some mistakes in treating the discourse patterns of a text result from not reading an entire text before starting to translate or from not paying adequate attention to a following page. In one instance, a translator rendered a statement meaning Thismer
its further consideration anddiscussion as simply As maybe noted in what follows. But he had not read the following page that introduced a completely new subject.
There are significant differences in the beginning and ending of commercial let
ters between business men in Latin America and North America. Intelligent secre
taries in North America know how to delete overly complimentary statements from Latins, and to add appropriate expressions of greeting and friendship from their north American bosses. Otherwise, Latinos will think that American business men are entirely too unfriendly and impersonal, while American business men will be reluctant to do business with Latinos who appear to be too flattering and insincere.
In the Orient there is a tendency to produce documents without topic sentences to begin paragraphs or topic paragraphs to begin a text. These writers often believe that it is much better to state a series of reasons and leave the implications of such information to the addressees to draw the proper conclusions. But people in the Western World interpret such an approach as “beating around the bush” or as calcu
lated evasiveness. Many Orientals, however, consider that their type of approach to certain forms of discourse is more polite because it allows readers to come to the proper conclusions without having been imposed on by introductory statements of theme or purpose. In some instances, translators have rectified possible misunder
standing by appropriate alterations or additions to the titles or introductions to such documents.
The basic components of discourses
The basic components of discourses are not necessarily the formal classes of words, as so many people imagine, but the referential classes that refer to the cul
tural entities of the society in question. These universal referential classes consist of (1) entities (e.g. people, animal, mountain, lake, tree, sun, galaxy, ideas), (2) activities
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or events (e.g. run, walk, explosion, arrival), (3) states, often the result of activities (e.g. sick,alive, angry, happy, depressed), (4) processes, as changes in states or charac
teristics (e.g. reincarnate, enlarge, widen, sicken, beautify), (5) inherent characteristics (e.g. tall, wide, round, red, beautiful), and (6) terms that link words and groups of words (e.g. and, or, because, inorder to, after, during through).
Referential classes are not the same as formal classes. For example, the two phrases his arrival and he arrived contain very different formal classes, but the referential classes are essentially the same, and the semantic relations between the constituent parts are identical, namely, an entity engages in a particular activity. Furthermore, some words consist of more than one referential class, e.g. dancer, that consists of an entity and an activity, “one who dances,” and in the phrase good dancer the adjective qualifies the quality of the dancing, not the character of the person. Similarly, in the phrase molecular biologist the term biologist refers to an entity that does something about living matter, while molecular does not qualify the person but refers to the enti
ties that the biologist studies or deals with.
It may seem strange to regard ideas as entities, but they may be said to be ” bounded thoughts", in the sense of have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that is to say, a definable structure and content. The same type of entities occur in verbaliza
tion, e.g. a speech vs. to speak. The latter is clearly an event, but a speech has a unitary structure that makes it a definable entity, and may be regarded as a verbal entity.
These basic referential components of texts must, however, be organized in such a way as to combine both progression and cohesion. In other words, the content of a text must move from one point to another and at the same time there must be cohe
sion between the parts. Before considering progression and cohesion, however, it is important to mention the integral roles of the three universal constraints: time, space, and thought processes.
The constraints of time, space, and thought processes
In the physical world nothing can exist or happen apart from the constraints of time and space, and all languages have various ways of indicating time, whether it is related to events external to or contained in the discourse. Time may also be related to the time of the utterance or writing of a discourse, and in some languages time is closely related to aspect. Time is, of course, always relative to something else. Tem
poral factors figure primarily in narratives, personal accounts, history, epic poetry, legends, and biography. And space is a crucial factor in the description of entities and of events. Time and space may also be combined in a description of a building, in which a writer describes the building during a tour of its rooms, halls, staircases, and baths. In fact, most narratives are composites of elements related in time and space.
It would be quite wrong to think that all languages handle time and space in the same manner. Some languages do not employ different tense forms, but indicate rel
ative time by separate words and phrases. Likewise, space may be regarded from a quite different perspective if it is related also to time. For example, in some Quechua dialects the “future” is regarded as “behind” and the past is spoken of as “ahead.”
Quechua speakers defend such a viewpoint by insisting that the future that they can
Eugene A. Nida
not “see in the eyes of their minds” must be behind them, while the past, which they can “see in their memory” is ahead.
The thought processes of people also constitute a constraint on the manner in which people reason and the ways in which they express their thoughts. In setting up classes of phenomena, some people are consistent “lumpers,” and others are usually
“splitters.” Some people reason primarily on the basis of analogies, while it seems that others are prone to “a stream of consciousness” as they sort out alternatives in behavior. Some persons seem to prefer tangential reasoning and others are enam
ored with circular reasoning because it is so self-satisfying. Very few people actually engage in formal mental processing involving induction, deduction, or abduction (in the sense employed by Charles Peirce).
The behavior of people is generally rational, that is, there is usually some reason (however, unjustified) that can explain why people act as they do. But human behav
ior is not “logical,” in the sense of being predictable given a particular set of circum
stances. The reasons for this is that past experience always comes with a value tag, and the accumulation and relative rating of such values makes people what they are.
As a result, any attempt to fully understand what a person means by a particular dis
course, requires extreme sensitivity and insight concerning the cultural and personal presuppositions about relevance and truth.
Progression and cohesion
Since progression in discourse so closely reflects progression of events in culture, it is not strange that the primary agents of progression are active entities (from indi
viduals to international institutions) that are the agents of change. Normally passive entities may at times also be agents of change, as when a river floods a plain or when a volcano devastates a region. But for many people patterns of progression are the result of forces controlled by the stars, demons, and God.
The three principal patterns of progression in both culture and discourse are sup
plementation (essentially addition), consequence (e.g. the restrictive relations in purpose-result, cause-event, condition, and concession), and alteration, especially in states of being.
Significant examples of supplementation in scientific discourse can be found in most articles in The Scientific American, in which important discoveries are often explain by the “peeling the onion” technique of providing information on three suc
cessive levels: (1) general information about the relevance and evidence for certain findings, (2) more detailed explanations (designed primarily for people with broad scientific interests), and (3) conspicuously more technical data that confirm the claims made in the first section.
For cohesion some of the primary elements are (1) transitionals, e.g. thenext day, furthermore, first, second, finally, (2) reference, particularly consistency in referring
clearly and consistently to entities and activities, and (3) coherence within the Active or factive world of the discourse.
But a text that contains merely progression and cohesion could be a rather tire
some communication. Discourses must also have both impact and appeal. That is to say, they must not only hit an audience but be able to draw receptors to the text. For impact a text needs relevance for the intended audience, novelty and unpredictability
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to create interest, and clarity, even in cabalistic or apocalyptic writing. But these features of impact will not be effective without some significant aesthetic features to provide appeal. For example, a text should provide a sense of wholeness by means of both unity and completeness. It should also be formally appropriate to the content and to the setting of the communicative event, and it should likewise contain suffi
cient rhetorical devices to make it attractive to readers or hearers, e.g. effective order of words and phrases, formal and semantic parallelism, chiasm, figurative language, hyperbole, litotes, and even anacolutha to highlight particular themes.
But a translator must not take for granted that close attention to the lexical meanings and the grammatical relations will produce the desired effect. A “feeling”
for the totality of the discourse must be sensed by a translator if an adequate func
tional equivalent is to be produced, but sensitivity to discourse can be best experi
enced through a careful examination of various types of discourse.
Examination of certain rhetorical and structural features of two discourses
The two discourses to be examined briefly are the first paragraph of an article on Kreteks (a special type of cigarette with cloves), published in the Wall Street Journal, May 2, 1985 and the translation into English of a stylistically remarkable report by Remy Ourdan, published in Le Monde.
First example
Kreteksare BigBusiness
The kretek is the incense of Indonesia. It is the fragrant haze that chokes visi
tors as soon as they step off a plane. It is the gray cloud that seems to res
onate from the gongs of Javanese gamelan orchestras. It is the strong, aro
matic smoke that fills the lungs of cabinet minister and taxi driver alike. It is the spicy fog that blurs the edge of Indonesia.
Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of this brief paragraph is the effective par
allelism:
It is the fragrant haze that chokes visitors It is the gray cloud that seems to resonate It is the strong aromatic smoke that fills the lungs It is the spicy fog that blurs the edges of Indonesia
The formal parallelism is enhanced by the use of terms in the same semantic domains, e.g. atmosphere: haze, cloud, smoke, fog, as well as related features of smell and taste, fragrant, aromatic, spicy. Suspense is also created by not explaining the meaning of kretek until later in the article, and the largely unknown term gamelan can at least seem exotically significant in the context of Javanese... orchestras. Note also the sense of unity that is created by employing the term Indonesia in both the first and the last sentence, and the realism involved in speaking of cabinet minister and taxi driver, rather than using some generic statement such as everyone or all the people.
Note also the effective manner in which time and space are employed for pro
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gression in this paragraph: (1) getting off the plane, (2) listening to the gamelan orchestra (almost always in the terminal to greet incoming passengers), (3) in the town of Jakarta, where officials and taxi-drivers are in evidence, and (4) the edges of Indonesia, presumably as one leaves by air.
Second example
The following brief article (the six paragraphs have been numbered for ready ref
erence in the discussion that follows) employs the constraints of time and space in a particularly effective manner:
Four years of Hidingout in aBosnian Forest
1. The least noise frightens Zenja. She springs to the window startled and tries not to be seen. Zejna Elkaz lives in Jajce in central Bosnia with a host family. Dressed in a mauve skirt and a red blouse, she looks like an ordi
nary peasant.
2. A week ago, Rajkó was hunting in the nearby mountains, when he saw a shadow fleeing into the underbrush, but he recognized Zejna, a neighbor who had disappeared after the Serbian army captured the region. Officially, Zejna Elkaz had died in November 1992 in a burned out house where Serbs had held the villagers. Actually, she lived four years in the forest and was surprised to learn that the war had ended.
3. „I am not certain of anything. I don’t trust anyone,” she murmured. “I am always afraid of the Serbs and others; I’m afraid of people.” Zejna is haunted by the scenes of that day in November when hell broke out in the peaceful village of Cvetojici. “The villagers had lined up, ready to flee. My mother was too sick and could not walk, so I stayed by her side. When the Serbs entered Cvetojici, there were only thirteen of us, including three men, who were immediately killed. The Serbs then locked us women in a house. Two days later they threw a bomb into the room where we were. Two women tried to escape, but were machine-gunned to death. The bomb exploded, and when I regained consciousness, I saw that my mother was dead, and so I fled into the forest.“
4. Zenja Elkaz did not leave the forest until a week ago. She had left to gather mushrooms when she was discovered by Rajkó the hunter. “I have seen no one for four years. I ate only fruits, mushrooms, herbs, and sometimes some peas. I was not concerned with food. My only worry was that the Serbs would find me. I cannot forget the scenes of knives, blood, my dead mother.
I have not spoken a single word to anyone - only to the birds, to whom I have said, My dear birds, it is so good to have you eating from my hand."
5. When Zejna returned to her cabin in the forest, she jumped for joy, ran through the field, but stopped for a moment to pick some wild strawber
ries. She knows every path in the mountains surrounding Jajce. Zejna’s hideout was built on a steep mountain side covered with trees. The roof was a heavy plastic sheet and the door was a piece of sheet metal. Inside was a pile of old clothing and mildewed pots and pans found along the roads. Zejna was proud of a wood stove that she found in a garbage dump and had carried on her back to her hideout. She offered us a taste of prune
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liquor from a bottle taken from an abandoned house. “I had no problem finding water for there are springs in the forest. The worst thing was the winter weather. It was so cold that when I took off my long underwear, I found that some of the skin of my feet had stuck to the cloth.
6. Zejna Elkaz is no fool. She has not lost her sense of time, thanks to a little calendar she had in her cabin, where she noted the passing of days, months, years, seasons and phases of the moon, but adjusting again to the life of a society does not interest her. Zejna has no love for people. “They want to help me find an apartment,” she said sadly. This forest dweller has lost interest in civilization. “I prefer to go back into the woods, because I miss them. My dream is to be there, even now.”
The treatment of time in this news report is unusually well handled. The first paragraph places Zenja Elkaz in Jajce with a host family, a period of time that can be designated as time (1). But the second paragraph refers first to events prior to the first paragraph and then to events significantly prior to those in the first part of the second paragraph. Therefore, it is useful to designate these two periods of relative time as (-2) and (-3).
The first part of paragraph 3 contains a temporal reference that is more or less equivalent to the (-2) in the second paragraph, while the last part refers to consider
ably prior events, and should therefore be marked as time (-3). In paragraph 4 the same shifts in time take place. There is first a referent to Zenja Elkaz being found by Rajkó, but what follows took place much earlier and should therefore be considered as representing time (-3). The same type of temporal sequence occurs in paragraphs 4 and 5, but paragraph 6 speaks of Zenja in essentially the same time frame as in paragraph 1. Accordingly, the temporal structure may be formulated as (1), (-2 + -3),
(-2 + -3) , (-2 + -3), (-2 + -3), and (1). The unity of the text is emphasized by the same temporal reference in paragraphs 1 and 6, and the way in which the writer has introduced background information in four successive parallel treatments of time is quite remarkable.
The treatment of physical space is treated similarly. Note the sequences of Jajce, forest, Cvetojici, forest, forest, forest, Jajce, forest, forest, and finally anapartment, evidently in Jajce. In this way the writer brings the spatial context back to where the account began. But there is also a significant decrease in the psychological space between the main character and the writer, as well as the addressees. The first two paragraphs contain a statement that anyone could make on the basis of information received from others. Paragraphs 3 and 4 reduce the psychological space because of direct quotations from Zejna Elkaz, and paragraph 5 places the writer at the scene of Zejna’s hideout. In the last paragraph psychological space is reduced even further by Zejna’s sadness about the possibility of her leaving the forest that she misses so much.
The more translators know about the structures and the dynamics of discourse the more readily and accurately they can translate both the content and the spirit of a text.