Approaching Translation From The Perspective Of Text Analysis

Guided by theories of systemic functional linguistics and pragmatics, this paper is focused on approaching translation from the perspective of text analysis. It aims at analyzing, interpreting and ironing out some issues concerning textual translation by means of transplanting linguistic theories and trying to provide a text-oriented perspective in translation studies.The paper consists of six chapters. The first chapter presents a brief introduction to text analysis at home and abroad. Starting from the unit of translation, the second chapter deals with the necessity of text analysis in translation by means of examples, makes a brief difference between discourse and text, and introduces the seven standards of textuality. The third chapter is the key part of the paper. It discusses the role of textuality in translation. The fourth chapter focuses on genre, context of situation and translation. The fifth chapter deals with theory of implied meaning and translation. The last chapter is a retrospect and prospect, which tells the strong points and limitations of the paper, its developing tendency and further research in the future.We support the idea put forward by Beaugrande & Dressier that a typical text should have the following features: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality. All of them are necessary for the make-up of a text that should be taken into good consideration during the course of translation.In the text, cohesion at the superficial structure is the visible web of a text and coherence at the deep structure the invisible web. They are two fundamental standards of the texture, so the translator has to pay attention to both the form and the meaning of the source text. He has to keep the formal cohesion and ensure the semantic continuity among the sentences of the source text.Any text has an intention. Intentionality decides translation strategy. As the trans-language and cross-cultural propagator, the translator should make sense of the intentionality of the source text and then, based on the norms of the target language, tryto create similar contexts to convey the intentions of the author.Acceptability is a text-receiver-centered or reader-centered concept. Proper handling of acceptability opens up for the reader a wider field of vision. The key to translation is to preserve as much as possible the natural image and the features of national conditions. The task of the translator is to lead the reader to accepting the exotic culture and put him in a position to find out differences and contradictions and to achieve common understanding in the course of comparisons and contrasts among different cultural environments.Texts contain information and a measure of that is the informativity of the text. Informativity is related to the text events described, i.e. the expected text events vs. the unexpected ones, and the known text events vs. the unknown ones. In any system of text, the text should offer new information. Generally speaking, the more information the text contains, the more appealing it will seem to the reader. The process of translation is one of interpretation. When constructing the target text, the translator should have full confidence in the reading ability of the reader. He should keep the implied intention of the author in the target text. No translator is supposed to have the right to deprive the reader of his imagination of the text. He should try hard to avoid the tendency to make visible what is implied in the source text. Otherwise, the translation will become flat and insipid, though, superficially, it will seem readable.Situationality refers to the context of situation which is connected with the text events. It has influences on textual cohesion and coherence. So the translator must consider their restrictions in constructing the target text. In order to have a correct understanding of the source text, he must know the exotic culture. Moreover, it is also important that he should develop and reinforce his cultural consciousness and make contrastive studies initiatively. Only so can he pay attention to the cultural connotations of words and avoid cultural clash or cultural misreading in his practice of translation.Intertextuality means that every text is the absorption and transportation of other texts and that semantic components extracted from the text always go beyond the text and are related to other preceding texts. In many cases, the production and acceptance of a text depends on the text knowledge of the text participants. Therefore, in the courseof constructing the target text, the translator must consider whether textual knowledge or extra textual knowledge related to the source text is known to or familiar to the reader. If the reader does not know related information, the translator has to resort to footnotes to help the reader get fid of the barriers in understanding.From what is said above, we can see that the process of translation is the process of constructing the target text in the target language in the same or similar context and with the same or similar function. During the course of translation, the translator has to consider the seven standards of textuality and weigh the construction of the target text. In short, only complete grasps of the texture of the source text can the translator effectively constitute the target text.Genre and context of situation also play an important role in translation. Seen from the context of culture, every text can be seen of certain genre that is realized by schematic structure and realizational patterns. The situation of context has three important elements, namely field, tenor, and mode. They are called register variables, affecting our use of language. In most cases of translation practice, even though the field of the source text is the same as that of the target text, their tenors are different. So long as their tenors change, their modes must also change.Theory of implied meaning can be applied to translation as well. One of the purposes of translation is to translate the implied meaning of text. In his famous article "Logic and ConversatiorT(\915), Grice put forward the idea of conversational implicature: in order to make the conversation go smoothly, both sides have to observe "the cooperative principle". As to the discourse which disobeys the cooperative principle purposefully, translation is quite easy. But when the speakers do not violate the cooperative principle, the translator has to obey the maxim of relation and give a coherent interpretation of the incoherent discourse. This demands not only the knowledge of situation but also the inference of the implied meaning of the discourse. If he fails to grasp the conversational implicature and consequently fails to convey it into the target text, then the target text only conveys the superficial meaning of the source text, and this translation cannot achieve the pragmatic equivalence.