Translatology II: 4th Mid-Term Exam

Mark Newmark

• Functional sentence perspective
• Lower units of discourse
• Idioms

Functional sentence perspective

Functional sentence perspective studies the arrangement of the elements of a sentence in terms of its linguistic, situational and cultural context, and thus determines their function within the paragraph and the text. This approach is mainly focused on the theme/rheme interplay, described whilst taking into account the communicative dynamism, which is what pushes the communication forward.

Theme is the starting-point of a communication which is, incidentally, already known by the addressee. Rheme, on the other hand, is the set of elements which convey the new piece of information, and therefore carry a greater amount of communicative dynamism because it helps the communication to keep going on. Theme in English is often signaled by a definite article, a determiner, or a generic term; rheme by a indefinite article, a determiner, or a specific term. Elements that are neither theme or rheme are transitional.

Since one normally moves from the known to the unknown, the latest elements of a sentence are the ones with the higher degree of communicative dynamism. However, for some reason sometimes the word order is altered by putting a rhematic word at the head of a sentence, especially for the purpose of emphasizing. This procedure needs to be correctly preserved in translation, so the translator has to establish his priorities by considering the text as a whole.

The Lower Units of Translation

Mark Newmark points out that, in fact, all lengths of language can be considered as units in the course of translation. The units of translation described by this author are the text itself (no matter if it consists of one word or one sentence), the chapter or section, the paragraph, the sentence, the clause, the group, the collocation, the word and the morpheme. Each of them play a different functional role within the text; thus, words and collocations (including the idiom and the compound) have a lexical function, groups and clauses have a grammatical function, and sentences, paragraphs and the text contribute a notional value. 

However, the natural unit of translation as well as  of comprehension tends to be the sentence. Within a sentence, transpositions and clause rearrangements are common if FSP is not infringed, and there is a good reason for them. Additionally, unless a sentence is too long, it is unusual to divide it. On the other hand, if it is unusually short, it is likely to be for a special effect. Needless to say, if long sentences are a part of a writer's style in an expressive text, they have to be preserved.

In the translation of these units, one has to be consciously aware of the grammatical and lexical aspects, while making sure that FSP is preserved where important. All the same, operatively, most translation is done at the level of the smaller units (word and clause), leaving the larger units to work automatically, until a difficulty occurs or the revision starts.