Invited Keynote speakers:
| Kirsten Malmkjær | Centre for Research in Translation, Middlesex University, UK |
| John Sinclair | Tuscan Word Centre, Italy |
| John Swales | English Language Institute, University of Michigan, USA |
| Joanna Channell | Channell & associates, Language and communication research and training, Derby, UK |
The articulation of meaning - John Sinclair
Human languages have two built-in features for articulating meaning. On the one hand there is "language about language" - the completely natural way in which language can talk about itself . Often inaccurately called metalanguage (Hockett called it "reflexivity"), this is part of our everyday toolkit for effective communication. On the other hand there is paraphrase, the limitless number of ways of saying (approximately) the same thing; also in the toolkit and much used.
The simultaneous deployment of both these strategies gives us definition, which is the most powerful tool for articulating meaning. The language of definition, as found in most dictionaries, is a strange and unnecessarily specialised variety, which severely limits the kinds of expression that can be made comfortably, and cuts the user off from exploiting all the natural implications of normal English. There are many advantages in adopting a variety which is much closer to ordinary English sentences.
Not the least of these is that "defining behaviour" - a broader category than just formal definition - is an important element of the structure of many Special Purpose languages. Most academic and technical discourses - any that rely on terminology - give a prominent role to definition, and composers and users of the texts must become aware of the range of defining behaviour, including informal definitions, semi-definitions etc. (see Jennifer Pearson Terms in Context, Benjamins 1998 for a starting position).
From a theoretical point of view, reflexivity and paraphrase, and especially definition, are the means of articulating the semantic structure and organisation of the language, and so they are of prime importance in description and in language teaching and learning. It is possible to erect thesaurus-type structures by automatic process if the definitions are couched in English sentences, using a specially devised parser.
Many linguistic theories posit semantic structures that lie outside the range of language text, relying on logic, experience of the world, schemata or verbal association (principally) to provide the relationships and hierarchies. Information science follows suit, and tends to claim that language text does not have a reliable organisation that can be used in computational processing. The work reported here is not so pessimistic about the prospects of language, revealing an organisation of meaning that is usable both in "manual" and computational linguistics.
"That master narrative of our time": The Research article Revisited - John M. Swales
The quotation in the title from Montgomery's "The Scientific Voice" (1996) underlines the fact that in many fields and across many countries articles publishing in important journals has become the primary route to academic advancement. In part response to the elevation of this genre, it has been massively investigated by LSP practitioners, discourse analysts and rhetoricians, these investigations being variously historical, cross-cultural, genre-based, textual, ethnographic and corporist. In this talk, I selectively review this work and some of my own and come to a number of conclusions, including:
a) Assuming that the research article is a single genre is a mistake;
b) The causes of cross-cultural differences in this genre are social rather than rhetorical or linguistic;
c) Depiction of methods needs much more attention;
d) The model of article introductions with which I have been associated needs revision.
Language and specific translational purposes - Kirsten Malmkjær
In the translation profession, quality, as a property of translations, is defined in the fit-for-purpose sense: A quality translation is a translation that will fulfil the purpose the client wants and needs the translation to fulfil in the community in which it is to function. This professional emphasis is echoed especially clearly in the approach within translation studies known as Skopos theory, according to which the primary determinant of the characteristics of a translation should be the purpose the translation has to serve, rather than a quest for equivalence with the source text.
Of course, in the case of numerous translations, the desired purpose is that they communicate as completely and clearly as possible whatever the source text communicates, and in discussions on how to achieve this, a version of a time-honoured opposition between a primary focus on signifiers and a primary focus on signifieds is often invoked.
The perception of meaning and mode of expression as “entities” belonging to different ontological orders is present in sectors of most disciplines that deal with language; in translation studies, it surfaces early in the distinction drawn by Cicero between translating word for word and translating sense for sense.
If a census were taken of all translation theorists over the centuries who have held to a distinction of this kind, then the signified, rather than the signifier, would probably emerge as the preferred primary object of concentration. This is not surprising in a discipline that studies a process which hardly ever results in formal identity across the texts involved, but in which equivalence between the texts has nonetheless traditionally been seen as the measure of success.
With this paradox at the discipline’s centre, scholars have found it prudent to seek identity of sense between source text and translation; sense is comfortingly abstract, and it is as difficult to deny an identity-claim as it is to prove it. There is also a belief that it is possible to remain true to the rules and regularities of the language being translated into while retaining the sense of the original; but that it is not possible to retain the sense of the original while reflecting its formal structures in those belonging to the target language.
It is true that the translation of legal documents runs counter to this theory: In legal translation the mantra is to say exactly the same in the translation as in the original and in exactly the same way. In the translation of literary texts, on the other hand, this is held to be quite impossible: Translating imposes a different form on the translation than that enjoyed by the source text, and as the latter’s meaning is intimately tied in with its form, translation, strictly speaking, must give way to what Jakobson called creative transposition.
I want to propose a reconceptualisation of the translation process which does not force a choice between equivalence of form or equivalence of function and which does not tie translational equivalence to either phenomenon.
The other side of the LSP fence: Commercial language consultancy and research - Joanna Channell
Academic research is inspired by the wishes and interests of the researcher; in contrast, commercial research is inspired by the needs, wants and beliefs of the client who commissions it. The challenge for the consultant linguist is to find ways to understand how language - usually some variety of LSP - is understood by non-linguists and ways to communicate the insights of research in usable and understandable forms.
In the ten years since I moved from full-time academia to start my business, a variety of clients, from government departments to individual business people, have commissioned a wide variety of projects, large and small. The largest consisted of a linguistic audit of all the texts of all the vocational qualifications offered in the United Kingdom, while an example of a small project would be coaching an individual social services inspector who, while excellent at the technical part of the role, had difficulties in writing appropriate reports. In this session, I plan to review the consultancy projects undertaken, and use them to report on: