Translation modalities – a descriptive model for quantitative studies in translatology
Romansk Forum, (2002)Аннотация
Translation, as indeed any speech act, of any nature or description, is something which occurs between and among individuals and social groups. Translation is also something which takes place between different cultures, ideologies and world images. Furthermore, translation is something which goes on the whole time on the marketplace, involving, in economic terms, an added-value of several US\$ billion a year. Translation is, evidently, something which is done to texts and discourses. And last but, probably, not least, translation is something which expresses itself in sentences, phrases, words. It is my purpose in this paper to provide empirical evidence which demonstrates that, despite the relevance and, indeed, the compelling urgency of adequate investigations into all textual and extra-textual matters related to language in general and to translation specifically, there is still sufficient scope for a closer look into the actual phrase and sub-phrase linguistic mechanisms that manifest themselves in each and every translational act. Indeed, it would be reasonable to expect that the macrostructures revealed on the planes of discourse, text grammar, pragmatics and cultural insertion of texts and their translations in one way or another would be mirrored by the microstructure of sentences, phrases and words.