66

“The Name and Nature of Translation Studies” is an expanded version of a paper

presented in the Translation Section of the Third International Congress of Applied
Linguistics, held in Copenhagen, 21-26 August 1972. First issued in the APPTS
series of the Translation Studies Section, Department of General Literary Studies,
University of Amsterdam, 1972, presented here in its second pre-publication form
(1975). A slightly different version appeared in Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics,
13 (1987), pp. 9-24. A Dutch translation was published under the title “Wat is
vertaalwetenschap? In Benard T. Tervoort (ed.), Wetenschap & Taal: Het
verschijnsel taal van verschillende zijden benaderd (Muiderberg: Coutinho, 1977),
pp. 148-165.
 67

The Name the Nature of Translation Studies1

1.1
“Science”, Michael Mulkay points out, “tends to proceed by means of discovery of
new areas of ignorance.”2 The process by which this takes place has been fairly
well defined by the sociologists of science and research.3 As a new problem or set
of problems comes into view in the world of learning, there is an influx of
researches from adjacent areas, bringing with them the paradigms and models that
have proved fruitful in their own fields. These paradigms and models are then
brought to bear on the new problem, with one of two results. In some situations the
problem proves amenable to explicitation, analysis, explication, and at least partial
solution within the bounds of one of the paradigms or models, and in that case it is
annexed as a legitimate branch of an established field of study. In other situations
the paradigms or models fail to produce sufficient results, and researches become
aware that new methods are needed to approach the problem.
In this second type of situation, the result is a tension between researches
investigating the new problem and colleagues in their former fields, and this
tension can gradually lead to the establishment of new channels of communication
and the development of what has been called a new disciplinary utopia, that is, a
new sense of a shared interest in a common set of problems, approaches, and
objectives on the part of a new grouping of researches. As W.O. Hagstrom has
indicated, these two steps, the establishment of communication channels and the
development of a disciplinary utopia, “make it possible for scientists to identify
with the emerging discipline and to claim legitimacy for their point of view when
appealing to university bodies or groups in the larger society.”4

1.2
Though there are no doubt a few scholars who would object, particularly among
the linguists, it would seem to me clear that in regard to the complex of problems
clustered round the phenomenon of translating and translations,5 the second
situation now applies. After centuries of incidental and desultory attention from a
scattering of authors, philologians, and literary scholars, plus here and there a
theologian or an idiosyncratic linguist, the subject of translation has enjoyed and
 68

constant increase in interest on the part of scholars recent years, with the Second
World War as kind of turning point. As the interest has solidified and expanded,
more and more scholars have moved into the field, particularly from the adjacent
fields of linguistics, linguistics philosophy, and literary studies, but also from such
seemingly more remote disciplines as information theory, logic, and mathematics,
each of them carrying with him paradigms, quasi-paradigms, models, and
methodologies that he felt could be brought to bear on this new problem.
At first glance, the resultant situation today would appear to be one of great
confusion, with no consensus regarding the types of models to be tested, the kind
of methods to be applied, to varieties of terminology to be used. More than that,
there is not even likemindedness about the contours of the field, the programs set,
the discipline as such. Indeed, scholars are not so much as agreed on the very
name of the new field.
Nevertheless, beneath the superficial level, there are a number of
indications that for the field of research focusing on the problems translating and
translations Hagstrom’s disciplinary utopia the taking shape. If this is salutary
development (and I believe that it is), it follows that it is worth while to further the
development by consciously turning our attention to matters that are serving to
impede it.

1.3
One of these impediments is the lack of appropriate channels of communication.
For scholars and researchers in the field, but channels that do exist still tend to run
via the older disciplines (with their attendant norms in regard to models, methods,
and terminology), sold that papers on the subject of translation are dispersed over
periodicals in a wide variety of scholarly fields and journals for practising
translators. It is clear that there is a need for other communication channels,
cutting across the traditional disciplines to reach all scholars working in the field,
from whatever background.

2.1
But I should like to focus our attention on the other impediments to the
development of a disciplinary utopia. The first of these, the lesser of the two in
importance, is the seemingly trivial matter of a name for this field of research. It
would not be wise to continue referring to the discipline by its subject matter as
has been done at this conference, for the map, as the General Semanticists
constantly remind us, is not the territory, and failure to distinguish the two can
only further confusion.
Through the years, diverse terms have been used in writings dealing with
translating and translations, and one can find references in English to “the
 69

art” or “the craft” of translation, but also to the “principles” of translation, the
“fundamentals” or the “philosophy”. Similar terms recur in French and German. In
some cases the choice of term reflects the attitude, point of approach, or
background of the writer; in other it has been determined by the fashion of the
moment in the scholarly terminology.
There have been a few attempts to create more “learned” terms, most of
them with the highly active suffix -ology. Roger Goffin, for instance, has
suggested the designation “translatology” in English, and either its cognate or
traductologie in French.6 But since the –ology suffix derives from Greek, purists
reject a contamination of this kind, all the Late Latin in the case of translatio or
Renaissance French in that of traduction. Yet Greek alone offers no way out, for
“metaphorology”, “metaphaseology”, or “metaphastics” would hardly be of aid to
us in making our subject clear even to university bodies, let alone to other “groups
in the larger society.”7 Such other terms as “translatistics” or “translitics”, both of
which have been suggested, would be more readily understood, but hardly more
acceptable.

2.21
Two further, less classically constructed terms have come to the fore in recent
years. One of these began its life in a longer form, “the theory of translating” or
“the theory of translation” (and its corresponding forms: “Theorie des
Übersetzens”, “théorie de la traduction”). In English (and in German) it has since
gone the way of many such terms, and is now usually compressed into “translation
theory” (Übersetzungstheorie). It has been a productive designation, and can be
even more so in future, but only if it is restricted to its proper meaning. For, as I
hope to make clear in the course of this paper, there is much valuable study and
research being done in the discipline, and a need for much more to be done, that
does not, strictly speaking, fall within the scope of theory formation.

2.22
The second term is one that has, to all intents and purposes, won the field in
German as a designation for the entire discipline.8 This is the term
Übersetzungswissenschaft, constructed to form a parallel to Sprachwisseschaft,
Literaturwissenschaft, and many other Wissenschaften. In French, the comparable
designation, “science e la traduction”, has also gained ground, as have parallel
terms in various other languages.
One of the first to use parallel sounding term in English was Eugene Nida,
who in 1964 chose to entitle his theoretical handbook Towards a science of
translating.9 It should be noted, though, that Nida did not
 70

intend the phrase as a name for the entire field of study, but only for one aspect of
the process of translating as such.10 Others, most of them not native speakers of
English, have been more bold, advocating the term “science of translation” (or
“translation science”) as the appropriate designation for this emerging discipline as
a whole. Two years ago this recurrent suggestion was followed by something like
canonization of the term when Bausch, Klegraf, and Wills took the decision to
make it the main title to their analytical bibliography of the entire field.11
It was a decision that I, for one, regret. It is not that I object to the term
Übersetzungswissenchaft, for their are few if any valid arguments against that
designation for the subject in German. The problem is not that the discipline is not
a Wissenschaft, but that not all Wissenschaft can properly be called science. Just
as no one today would take issue with the terms Sprachwisseschaft and
Literaturwissenschaft, while more than a few would questions whether linguistics
has yet reached a stage of precision, formalization, and paradigm formation such
that it can properly be described as a science, and while practically everyone
would agree that literary studies are not, and in the foreseeable future will not be, a
science in any true sense of the English word, in the same way I question whether
we can with any justification use designation for the study of translating and
translations that places it in the company of mathematics, physics, and chemistry,
or even biology, rather than that of sociology, history, and philosophy – or for that
matter of literary studies.

2.3

There is, however, another term that is active in English in the naming of new
disciplines. This is the word “studies”. Indeed, for disciplines that within the old
distinction of the universities tend to fall under the humanities or arts rather than
the sciences as fields of learning, the word would seem to be almost as active in
English as the word Wissenschaft in German. One need only think of Russian
studies, American studies, Commonwealth studies, population studies,
communications studies. True, the word raises a few new complications, among
them the fact that it is difficult to derive an adjectival form. Nevertheless, the
designation “translation studies” would seem to be the most appropriate of all
those available in English, in its adoption as the standard term for the discipline as
a whole would remove a fair amount of confusion and misunderstanding. I shall
set the example by making use of it in the rest of this paper.
 71

3
A greater impediment than the lack of a generally accepted name in the way of the
development of translation studies is the lack of any general consensus as to the
scope and structure of the discipline. What constitutes the field of translation
studies? A few would say it coincides with comparative (or contrastive)
terminological and lexicographical studies; several look upon it as practically
identical with comparative or contrastive theory. But surely it is different, if not
always distinct, from the case of emerging disciplines, there has as yet been little
meta-reflection on the nature of translation studies as such – at least that has made
its way into print and to my attention. One of the few cases that I have found is
that of Werner Koller, who has given the following delineation of the subject:
“Übersetzungswissenschaft ist zu verstehen als Zusammenfassung und
Überbegriff für alle Forschungsbemühungen, die von Phãnomenen ‘Übersetzen’
und “Übersetzung’ ausgehen oder auf diese Phãnomene zielen.” (Translation
studies is to be understood as a collective and inclusive designation for all research
activities taking the phenomena of translating and translation as their basis or
focus.12)

3.1
From this delineation it follows that translation studies is, as no one I suppose
would deny, an empirical discipline. Such disciplines, it has often been pointed
out, have two major objectives, which Carl G. Hempel has phrased as “to describe
particular phenomena in the world of our experience and to establish general
principles by means of which they can be explained and predicted.”13 As a field of
pure research – that is to say, research pursued for its own sake, quite apart from
any direct practical application outside its own terrain – translation studies thus has
two main objectives: (1) to describe the phenomena of translating and
translation(s) as they manifest themselves in the world of our experience, and (2)
to establish general principles by means of which these phenomena can be
explaining to and predicted. The two branches of pure translation studies
concerning themselves with these objectives can be designated descriptive
translation studies (DTS) or translation description (TD) and theoretical
translation studies (ThTS) or translation theory (TTh).

3.11

Of these two, it is perhaps appropriate to give force consideration to descriptive

translation studies, as the branch of the discipline which constantly maintains the
closest contact with the empirical phenomena
 72

under study. There would seem to be three major kinds of research in DTS, which
may be distinguished by their focus as product-oriented, function-oriented, and
process-oriented.

3.111
Product-oriented DTS, that area of research which describes existing translations,
has traditionally been an important area of academic research in translation
studies. The starting point for this type of study is the description of individual
translations, or text-focused translation description. A second phase is that all
comparative translation description, image comparative and analyses are made of
various languages. Such individual and comparative descriptions provide the
materials for surveys of larger corpuses of translations, for instance those made
within a specific period, language, and/or text are discourse type. In practice the
corpus has usually been restricted in all three ways: seventeenth-century literary
translations into French, or medieval English Bible translations. But such
descriptive surveys can also be larger in scope, diachronic as well as
(approximately) synchronic, and one of the eventual goals of product-oriented
DTS might possibly be a general history of translations – however ambitious such
a goal may sound at this time.

3.112
Function-oriented DTS is not interested in the description of translations in
themselves, but in the description of their function in the recipient social-cultural
situation: it is a study of contexts rather than texts. Pursuing such questions as
which texts were (and, often as important, were not) translated at certain time in a
certain place, and what influences were exerted in consequence, this area of
research is one that has attracted less concentrated attention than the area just
mentioned, though it is often introduced as a kind of sub-theme or counter-theme
in histories of translations and literary histories. Greater emphasis on it could lead
to the development of a field of translation sociology (or – less felicitous but more
accurate, since it is a legitimate area of translation studies as well as also sociology
– socio-translation studies).

3.113
Process-oriented DTS concerns itself with the process or act of translation itself.
The problem of what exactly takes place in the “little black box” of the translator’s
“mind” as he creates a new, more or less matching text in another language has
been the subject of much speculation on the part of translation’s theorists, but there
has been very little attempt at systematic
 73

investigation of this process on their laboratory conditions. Admittedly, the

process is an unusually complex one, one which, if I. A. Richards is correct,” may
very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of
the cosmos.”14 But psychologists have developed an are developing highly
sophisticated methods for analysing and describing other complex mental process,
and it is to be hoped that in the future this problem, too, will be given closer
attention from a leading to an area of study that might be called in translation
psychology or psycho-translation studies.

3.12
The other main branch of pure translation studies, theoretical translation studies
or translation theory, is, as its name implies, not interest in describing existing
translations, observed translation functions, or experimentally determined
translating process, but in using the results of descriptive translation studies, in
combination with the information available from related fields and disciplines, to
evolve principles, theories, and models which will serve to explain and predict
what translating and translations are and will be.

3.121
The ultimate goal of the translation theorist in the broad sense must undoubtedly
be to develop a full, inclusive theory accommodating so many elements that I can
serve to explain and predict all phenomena falling within the terrain of translating
and translation, to the exclusion of all phenomena falling outside it. It hardly
needs to be pointed out that a general translation theory in such a true sense of the
term, if indeed it is achievable, will necessarily be highly formalized and, however
the scholar may strive after economy, also highly complex.
Most of the theories that have been produced to date are in reality little
more than prolegomena to such a general translation theory. A good share of
them, in fact, are not actually theories at all, in any scholarly sense of the term, but
an array of axioms, postulates, and hypotheses that are so formulated as to be both
too inclusive (covering also non-translatory acts and non-translations) and too
exclusive (shutting out some translatory acts and some works generally recognized
as translations).

3.122
Others, though they too may bear the designation of “general” translation theories
(frequently preceded by the scholar’s protectively cautions “towards”) are in fact
not general theories, but partial or specific in their scope, dealing with only one or
a few of the various aspects of translation theory as a whole. It is in this area of
partial theories that the most
 74

significant advances have been made in recent years, and in fact it will probably be
necessary for a great deal of further research to be conducted in them before we
can even begin to think about arriving at true general theory in this sense I have
just outlined. Partial translation theories are specified in a number of ways. I
would suggest, though, that they can be grouped together into six main kinds.

3.1221
First of all, there are translation theories that I have called, with a somewhat
unorthodox extension of the term, medium-restricted translation theories,
according to the medium that is used. Medium-restricted theories can be further
subdivided into theories of translation as performed by humans (human
translation), as performed by computers (machine translation), and performed by
the two in conjunction (mixed or machine-aided translation). Human translation
breaks down into (and restricted theories or "theories" have been developed for)
oral translation or interpreting (with the further distinction between consecutive
and simultaneous) and written translation. Numerous examples of valuable
research into machine and machine-aided translation are no doubt familiar to us
all, and perhaps also several into oral human translation. That examples of
medium-restricted theories of written translation do not come to mind so easily is
largely owing to the fact that their authors have the tendency to present them in the
guise of unmarked or general theories.

3.1222
Second, there are theories that area-restricted. Area-restricted theories can be of
two closely related kinds; restricted as to the languages involved or, which is
usually not quite the same, and occasionally hardly at all, as to the cultures
involved. In both cases, language restriction and culture restriction, the degree of
actual limitation can vary. Theories are feasible for translation between, say,
French and German (language-pair restricted theories) as opposed to translation
within Slavic languages (language-group restricted theories) or from Romance
languages to Germanic languages (language-group pair restricted theories).
Similarly, theories might at least hypothetically be developed for translation within
Swiss culture (one-culture restricted), or for translation between Swiss and Belgian
cultures (cultural-pair restricted), as opposed to translation within western Europe
(cultural-group restricted) or between languages reflecting a pre-technological
culture and the languages of contemporary Western culture (cultural-group pair
restricted). Language-restricted theories have close affinities with the work being
done in comparative linguistics and stylistics (though it must always be
remembered that a language-pair
 75

translation grammar must be a different thing from a contrastive grammar

developed for the purpose of language acquisition). In the field of culture-restrict
theories there has been little detailed research, though culture restrictions, by being
confused with language restrictions, sometimes get introduced into language-
restricted theories, where they are out of place in all but those rare case where
culture and language boundaries coincide in both the source and target situations.
It is moreover no doubt true that some aspects of theories that are presented as
general in reality pertain only to the Western cultural area.

3.1223
Third, there are rank-restricted theories, that is to say, theories that deal with
discourse or texts as wholes, but concern themselves with lower linguistic ranks or
levels. Traditionally, a great deal of writing on translation was concerned almost
entirely with the rank of the word, and the word and the word group are still the
ranks at which much terminologically-oriented thinking about scientific and
technological translation takes place. Most linguistically-oriented research, on the
other hand, has until very recently taken the sentence as its upper rank limit,
largely ignoring the macro-structural aspects of entire texts as translation
problems. The clearly discernible trend away from sentential linguistics in the
direction of textual linguistics will, it is to be hoped, encourage linguistically-
oriented theorists to move beyond sentence-restricted translation theories to more
complex task of developing text-rank (more "rank-free") theories.

3.1224
Fourth, there are text-type (or discourse-type) restricted theories, dealing with the
problem of translating specific types are genres of lingual messages. Authors and
literary scholars have long concerned themselves with the problems intrinsic to
translating literary texts or genres of literary texts; theologians, similarly, have
devoted much attention to questions of how to translate the Bible and other sacred
works. In recent years some effort has been made to develop specific theory for
the translation of scientific texts. All these studies break down, however, because
we still lack anything like a formal theory of message, text, or discourse types.
Both Bülers theory of types of communication, as further developed by the Prague
structuralists, and the definitions of language varieties arrived at by linguists
particularly of the British school provides material for criteria in defining text
types that would lend themselves to operationalization more aptly than the
inconsistent and mutually contradictory definitions or traditional genre theories.
On the other hand, the traditional theories
 76

cannot be ignored, for they continue to play a large part in creating the expectation
criteria of translation readers. Also requiring study is the important question of
text type skewing or shifting in translation.

3.1225
Fifth, there are time-restricted theories, which fall into two types: theories
regarding the translation of contemporary texts from an older period. Again there
would seem to be a tendency to present one of the theories, that having to do with
contemporary texts, in the guise of general theory; the other, the theory of what
can perhaps best be called cross-temporal translation, is a matter that has led to
much disagreement, particularly among literarily oriented theorists, but to few
generally valid conclusions.

3.1226
Finally, there are problem-restricted theories, theories which confine themselves
to one or more specific problems within the entire area of general translation
theory, problems that can range from such broad and basic questions as the limits
of variance and invariance in translation or the nature of translation equivalence
(or, as I should prefer to call it, translation matching) to such more specific to
matters as the translation of metaphors or of proper names.

3.123
It should be noted that theories can frequently be restricted in more than one way.
Contrastive linguists interested in translation, for instance, will probably produce
theories that are not only language-restricted but rank- and time-restricted, having
to do with translation between specific pairs of contemporary temporal dialects at
sentence rank. The theories of literary scholars, similarly, usually are restricted as
to medium and text type, and generally also as to culture group; they normally
have to do with written texts within the (extended) Western literary tradition. This
does not necessarily reduce the worth of such partial theories, for even a
theoretical study restricted in every way - say a theory of the manner in which
subordinate clauses in contemporary German novels should be translated into
written English - can have implications for the more general theory towards which
scholars must surely work. It would be wise, though, not to lose sight of such a
truly general theory, and wiser still not to succumb to the delusion that a body of
restrict theories - for instance, a complex of language-restricted theories of how to
translate sentences - can be an adequate substitute for it.
 77

3.2
After it this rapid overview of the two main branches of pure research in
translation studies, I should like to turn to that branch of the discipline which is, in
Bacon's words, "of use" rather than "of light": applied translation studies.15

3.22
In this discipline, as in so many others, the first thing that comes to mind when one
considers the implications tha extend beyond the limits of the discipline itself is
that of teaching. Actually, the teaching of translating is of two types which need
to be carefully distinguished. In the one case, translating as being used for
centuries as a technique in foreign-language teaching and test of foreign-language
acquisition. I shall return to this type in a moment. In the second case, a more
recent phenomenon, translating these taught in schools and courses to train
professional translators. This second situation, that of translator training, has
raised a number of questions that fairly cry for answers: questions that have stood
the primarily with teaching methods, testing techniques, and curriculum planning.
It is obvious that the search for well-founded, reliable answers to these questions
contributes a major area (and for the time being, at least, the major area) of
research in applied translation studies.

3.22
A second, closely related area has to do with the needs for translation aids, both
for use in translator training and to meet requirements of the practising translator.
The needs are many and various, but fall largely into two classes: (1)
lexicographical and terminological aids and (2) grammars. Both these classes of
aids have traditionally been provided by scholars in other, related disciplines, and
it could hardly be argued that work on them should be taken over in toto as areas
of applied translation studies. But lexicographical aids often fall far short of
translation needs, and contrastive grammars developed for language-acquisition
purposes are not really an adequate substitute for variety-marked translation-
matching grammars. There would seem to be a need for scholars in applied
translation studies to clarify and define the specific requirements that aids of these
kinds should fulfil if they are to meet the needs of practising and prospective
translators, and to work together with lexicologists and contrastive linguists in
developing them.

3.23
A third area of applied translation studies is that of translation policy. The task of
the translation scholar in this area is to render informed advice to
 78

others in defining the place and role of translators, translating, and translation in
society at large: such questions, for instance, as determining the social and
economic position of the translator is and should be, or (and here I return to the
point raised above) what part is translating should play in the teaching and
learning of foreign languages. In regard to that last policy question, since it should
hardly be the task of translation studies to abet the use of translating in places
where it is dysfunctional, it would seem to me that priority should be given to
extensive and rigorous research to assess the efficacy of translating as a technique
and testing method in language learning. The chance that it is not efficacious
would appear to be so great that in this case it would seem imperative for program
research to be preceded by policy research.

3.24
A fourth, quite different area of applied translation studies in that of translation
criticism. The level of such criticism is today still frequently very low, and in
many countries still quite uninfluenced by developments within the field of
translation studies. Doubtless the activities of translation interpretation and
evaluation will always elude the grasp of objective analysis to some extent, and so
continue to reflect the intuitive, impressionist attitudes and stances of the critic.
But closer contact between translation scholars and translation critics could do a
great deal to reduce the intuitive element to a more acceptable level.

3.31
After this brief survey of the main branches of translation studies, there are two
further points that I should like to make. The first is this: in what has preceded,
descriptive, theoretical, and applied translation studies have been presented as
three fairly distinct branches of the entire discipline, and the order of presentation
might be taken to suggest that their import for one another is unidirectional,
translation description supplying the basic data upon which translation theory is to
be built, and the two of them providing the scholarly findings which are to be put
to use in applied translation studies. In reality, of course, the relation is a
dialectical one, which each of the three branches supplying materials for the other
two, and making use of the findings which they in turn provide it. Translation
theory, for instance, cannot do without the solid, specific data yielded by research
in descriptive and applied translation studies, while on the other hand one cannot
even begin to work in one of the other two fields without having at least and
intuitive theoretical hypothesis as one's starting point. In view of this dialectical
relationship, it follows that, though the needs of a
 79

given moment may vary, attention to all three branches is required if the discipline
is to grow and flourish.

3.32
The second point is that, in each of the three branches of translation studies, there
are two further dimensions that I have not mentioned, dimensions, but of
translation studies itself. One of these dimensions is historical: there is a field of
the history of translation theory, in which some valuable work has been done, but
also one of the history of translation description and of applied translation studies
(largely a history of translation teaching and translator training) both of which are
fairly well virgin territory. Likewise there is a dimension that might be called the
methodological or meta-theoretical, concerning itself with problems of what
methods and models can best be used in research in the various branches of the
discipline (how translation theories, for instance, can be formed for greatest
validity, or what analytic methods can best be used to achieve the most objective
and meaningful descriptive results), but also devoting its attention to such basic
issues as what the discipline itself comprises.

This paper has made a few excursions into the first of these two
dimensions, but all in all it is meant to be a contribution to the second. It does not
ask above all for agreement. Translation studies has reached a stage where it is
time to examine the subject itself. Let the meta-discussion begin.

Notes
1
Written in August 1972, this paper is presented in its second pre-publication form with only a few stylistics revisions.
Despite the intervening years, most of my remarks can, I believe, stand as they were formulated, thought in one or two
places I would phrase matters somewhat differently if I were writing today. In section 3.1224, for instance, subsequent
developments in textual linguistics, particularly in Germany, are noteworthy. More directly relevant, the dearth of meta-
reflection on the nature of translation studies, referred to at the beginning of section 3, is somewhat less striking today that
1972, again thanks largely to German scholars. Particularly relevant is Wolfram Wilss’ as yet published paper “methodische
Probleme der allgemeinen und angewandten Übersetzungswissenschatft”, read at a colloquium on translation studies held in
Germershein, West Germany, 3-4 May 1975.
2
Michael Mulkay, “Cultural Growth in Science”, in Barry Barnes (ed.), Sociology of Science: Selected Readings
(Harmonfsworth, Middlesex: Penguin; Modern Sociology Readings), pp. 126-141 (abriged reprint of “Some Aspects of
Cultural Growth in The Natural Sciences”, Social Research, 36 [1969], No. 1), quotation p. 136.
3
See e.g. W.O. Hagstrom, “The Differentiation of Disciplines”, in Barnes, pp. 121-125 (reprinted from Hagstrom, The
Scientific Community [New York: Basics Books, 1965], pp. 222-226).
4
Hagstrom, p .123.
5
Here and Throughout, these terms are used only in the strict sense of interlingual translating and translation. On the three
types of translation in the broader sense of the word, intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic, see Roman Jakobson, “On
Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, in Reuben A. Brower (ed.), On Translation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1959), pp. 232-239.
6
Roger Goffin, “Pour une formation universitaire “sui generis” du traducteur: Réflexions sur certain aspects
méthodologiques et sur la recherche scientifique dans le domaine de la traduction”, Meta, 16 (1971), 57-68, see esp. p. 59.
7
See the Hagstrom quotation in section 1.1 above.
8
Though, given the lack of a general paradigm, scholars frequently tend to restrict the meaning of the term to only a part of
the discipline. Often, in fact, it would seem to be more or less synonymous with “translation theory”.
9
Eugene Nida, Towards a Theory of Translating, with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible
Translating (Leiden: Brill, 1964).
10
Cf. Nida’s later enlightening remark on his use of the term: “the science of translation (or, perhaps more accurately stated,
the scientific description of the process involved in translating)”, Eugene A. Nida, “Science of Translation”, Language, 45
[1969], 483-498, quotation p. 483 n. 1; my italics).
11
K.-Richard Baush Josef Klegraf, and Wolfram Wilss, The Science of Translation: An Analytical Bibliography (Tübingen:
Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik). Vol. I (1970; TBL, No. 21) covers the years 1962-1969; Vol. II (1972: TBL, No. 33) the
years 1970-1971 plus a supplement over the years covered by the first volume.
12
Werner Koller, “Übersetzen, Übersetzung und Übersetzer. Zu schwedischen Symposien über Probleme der Übersetzung”,
Babel, 17 (1971), 3-11, quotation p. 4. See further in this article (also p. 4) the summary of a paper “Übertsetzungspraxis,
Übertstzungtheorie und Übersetzungswissenschaft” presented by Koller at the Second Swedish-German Translator’s
Symposium, held in Stockholm, 23-24 October 1969.
13
Carl G. Hempel, Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967;
International Encyclopedia of Social Science, Foundations of the Unity of Sciences, II, Fase. 7), p. 1.
14
I. A. Richards, “Towards a Theory of Translating”, in Arthur F. Wright (ed.), Studies in Chinese Thought (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1953; also published as Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, 55 [1953],
Memoir 75), pp. 247-262.
15
Bacon’s distinction was actually not between two types of research in the broader sense, but of experiments:
“Experiments of Use” as against “Experiments of Light”. See S. Pit Corder, “Problems and Solutions in Applied
Linguistics”, paper presented in a plenary session of the 1972 Copenhagen Congress of Applied Linguistics.
 Lawrence Venuti (ed.)
The Translation Studies Reader,
3rd ed. (Abingdon and New York:
Chapter 11 Routledge, 2012)

Roman Jakobson

ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS
OF TRANSLATION

A C C O R D I N G T O B E R T R A N D R U S S E L L , “no one can understand

the word ‘cheese’ unless he has a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese.”1 If,
however, we follow Russell’s fundamental precept and place our “emphasis upon
the linguistic aspects of traditional philosophical problems,” then we are obliged to
state that no one can understand the word “cheese” unless he has an acquaintance
with the meaning assigned to this word in the lexical code of English. Any repre-
sentative of a cheese-less culinary culture will understand the English word “cheese”
if he is aware that in this language it means “food made of pressed curds” and if he
has at least a linguistic acquaintance with “curds.” We never consumed ambrosia or
nectar and have only a linguistic acquaintance with the words “ambrosia,” “nectar,”
and “gods” – the name of their mythical users; nonetheless, we understand these
words and know in what contexts each of them may be used.
The meaning of the words “cheese,” “apple,” “nectar,” “acquaintance,” “but,”
“mere,” and of any word or phrase whatsoever is definitely a linguistic – or to be
more precise and less narrow – a semiotic fact. Against those who assign meaning
(signatum) not to the sign, but to the thing itself, the simplest and truest argument
would be that nobody has ever smelled or tasted the meaning of “cheese” or of
“apple.” There is no signatum without signum. The meaning of the word “cheese” can-
not be inferred from a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheddar or with camembert
without the assistance of the verbal code. An array of linguistic signs is needed to
introduce an unfamiliar word. Mere pointing will not teach us whether “cheese” is
the name of the given specimen, or of any box of camembert, or of camembert in
general or of any cheese, any milk product, any food, any refreshment, or perhaps

1959
 ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION 127

any box irrespective of contents. Finally, does a word simply name the thing in ques-
tion, or does it imply a meaning such as offering, sale, prohibition, or malediction?
(Pointing actually may mean malediction; in some cultures, particularly in Africa, it
is an ominous gesture.)
For us, both as linguists and as ordinary word-users, the meaning of any
linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign, especially a sign
“in which it is more fully developed,” as Peirce, the deepest inquirer into the essence
of signs, insistently stated.2 The term “bachelor” may be converted into a more
explicit designation, “unmarried man,” whenever higher explicitness is required.
We distinguish three ways of interpreting a verbal sign: it may be translated into
other signs of the same language, into another language, or into another, nonverbal
system of symbols. These three kinds of translation are to be differently labeled:

1 Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by

means of other signs of the same language.
2 Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs
by means of some other language.
3 Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs
by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.

The intralingual translation of a word uses either another, more or less synonymous,
word or resorts to a circumlocution. Yet synonymy, as a rule, is not complete
equivalence: for example. “every celibate is a bachelor, but not every bachelor is
a celibate.” A word or an idiomatic phrase-word, briefly a code-unit of the highest
level, may be fully interpreted only by means of an equivalent combination of code-
units, i.e., a message referring to this code-unit: “every bachelor is an unmarried
man, and every unmarried man is a bachelor,” or “every celibate is bound not to
marry, and everyone who is bound not to marry is a celibate.”
Likewise, on the level of interlingual translation, there is ordinarily no full
equivalence between code-units, while messages may serve as adequate interpreta-
tions of alien code-units or messages. The English word “cheese” cannot be
completely identified with its standard Russian heteronym “syr” because cottage
cheese is a cheese but not a syr. Russians say: prinesi syru i tvoro©u “bring
cheese and [sic] cottage cheese.” In standard Russian, the food made of pressed curds
is called syr only if ferment is used.
Most frequently, however, translation from one language into another substi-
tutes messages in one language not for separate code-units but for entire messages
in some other language. Such a translation is a reported speech; the translator
recodes and transmits a message received from another source. Thus translation
involves two equivalent messages in two different codes.
Equivalence in difference is the cardinal problem of language and the pivotal
concern of linguistics. Like any receiver of verbal messages, the linguist acts as their
interpreter. No linguistic specimen may be interpreted by the science of language
without a translation of its signs into other signs of the same system or into signs
of another system. Any comparison of two languages implies an examination of their
mutual translatability; widespread practice of interlingual communication, particu-
larly translating activities, must be kept under constant scrutiny by linguistic science.
128 ROMAN JAKOBSON

It is difficult to overestimate the urgent need for and the theoretical and practical
significance of differential bilingual dictionaries with careful comparative definition
of all the corresponding units in their intention and extension. Likewise differen-
tial bilingual grammars should define what unifies and what differentiates the two
languages in their selection and delimitation of grammatical concepts.
Both the practice and the theory of translation abound with intricacies, and from
time to time attempts are made to sever the Gordian knot by proclaiming the dogma
of untranslatability. “Mr. Everyman, the natural logician,” vividly imagined by
B. L. Whorf, is supposed to have arrived at the following bit of reasoning: “Facts
are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for unlike formulation
of them.”3 In the first years of the Russian revolution there were fanatic visionaries
who argued in Soviet periodicals for a radical revision of traditional language and
particularly for the weeding out of such misleading expressions as “sunrise” or
“sunset.” Yet we still use this Ptolemaic imagery without implying a rejection of
Copernican doctrine, and we can easily transform our customary talk about the
rising and setting sun into a picture of the earth’s rotation simply because any sign
is translatable into a sign in which it appears to us more fully developed and precise.
A faculty of speaking a given language implies a faculty of talking about this
language. Such a “metalinguistic” operation permits revision and redefinition of the
vocabulary used. The complementarity of both levels – object-language and meta-
language – was brought out by Niels Bohr: all well-defined experimental evidence
must be expressed in ordinary language, “in which the practical use of every word
stands in complementary relation to attempts of its strict definition.”4
All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing
language. Whenever there is deficiency, terminology may be qualified and ampli-
fied by loan-words or loan-translations, neologisms or semantic shifts, and finally,
by circumlocutions. Thus in the newborn literary language of the Northeast Siberian
Chukchees, “screw” is rendered as “rotating nail,” “steel” as “hard iron,” “tin” as “thin
iron,” “chalk” as “writing soap,” “watch” as “hammering heart.” Even seemingly
contradictory circumlocutions, like “electrical horse-car” (zlektriheskaq konka),
the first Russian name of the horseless street car, or “flying steamship” (jena paragot),
the Koryak term for the airplane, simply designate the electrical analogue of the
horse-car and the flying analogue of the steamer and do not impede communica-
tion, just as there is no semantic “noise” and disturbance in the double oxymoron
– “cold beef-and-pork hot dog.”
No lack of grammatical device in the language translated into makes impossible
a literal translation of the entire conceptual information contained in the original.
The traditional conjunctions “and,” “or” are now supplemented by a new connective
– “and/or” – which was discussed a few years ago in the witty book Federal
Prose – How to Write in and/or for Washington.5 Of these three conjunctions, only the
latter occurs in one of the Samoyed languages.6 Despite these differences in the
inventory of conjunctions, all three varieties of messages observed in “federal prose”
may be distinctly translated both into traditional English and into this Samoyed
language. Federal prose: 1) John and Peter, 2) John or Peter, 3) John and/or Peter
will come. Traditional English: 3) John and Peter or one of them will come.
Samoyed: John and/or Peter both will come, 2) John and/or Peter, one of them
will come.
 ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION 129

If some grammatical category is absent in a given language, its meaning may be

translated into this language by lexical means. Dual forms like Old Russian bra©a
are translated with the help of the numeral: “two brothers.” It is more difficult to
remain faithful to the original when we translate into a language provided with a
certain grammatical category from a language devoid of such a category. When
translating the English sentence “She has brothers” into a language which discrimin-
ates dual and plural, we are compelled either to make our own choice between two
statements “She has two brothers” – “She has more than two” or to leave the deci-
sion to the listener and say: “She has either two or more than two brothers.” Again
in translating from a language without grammatical number into English one is
obliged to select one of the two possibilities – “brother” or “brothers” or to confront
the receiver of this message with a two-choice situation: “She has either one or more
than one brother.”
As Boas neatly observed, the grammatical pattern of a language (as opposed to
its lexical stock) determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed
in the given language: “We have to choose between these aspects, and one or the
other must be chosen.”7 In order to translate accurately the English sentence “I hired
a worker,” a Russian needs supplementary information, whether this action was
completed or not and whether the worker was a man or a woman, because he must
make his choice between a verb of completive or noncompletive aspect – nanql or
nanimal – and between a masculine and feminine noun – rabotnika or rabotnipu.
If I ask the utterer of the English sentence whether the worker was male or female,
my question may be judged irrelevant or indiscreet, whereas in the Russian version
of this sentence an answer to this question is obligatory. On the other hand, what-
ever the choice of Russian grammatical forms to translate the quoted English
message, the translation will give no answer to the question of whether I “hired” or
“have hired” the worker, or whether he/she was an indefinite or definite worker
(“a” or “the”). Because the information required by the English and Russian gram-
matical pattern is unlike, we face quite different sets of two-choice situations;
therefore a chain of translations of one and the same isolated sentence from English
into Russian and vice versa could entirely deprive such a message of its initial
content. The Geneva linguist S. Karcevski used to compare such a gradual loss with
a circular series of unfavorable currency transactions. But evidently the richer the
context of a message, the smaller the loss of information.
Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may
convey. Each verb of a given language imperatively raises a set of specific yes-or-
no questions, as for instance: is the narrated event conceived with or without
reference to its completion? Is the narrated event presented as prior to the speech
event or not? Naturally the attention of native speakers and listeners will be
constantly focused on such items as are compulsory in their verbal code.
In its cognitive function, language is minimally dependent on the grammatical
pattern because the definition of our experience stands in complementary relation
to metalinguistic operations – the cognitive level of language not only admits but
directly requires recoding interpretation, i.e., translation. Any assumption of in-
effable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a contradiction in terms. But in
jest, in dreams, in magic, briefly, in what one would call everyday verbal mythology
and in poetry above all, the grammatical categories carry a high semantic import.
130 ROMAN JAKOBSON

In these conditions, the question of translation becomes much more entangled and
controversial.
Even such a category as grammatical gender, often cited as merely formal, plays
a great role in the mythological attitudes of a speech community. In Russian the
feminine cannot designate a male person, nor the masculine specify a female. Ways
of personifying or metaphorically interpreting inanimate nouns are prompted by
their gender. A test in the Moscow Psychological Institute (1915) showed that
Russians, prone to personify the weekdays, consistently represented Monday,
Tuesday, and Thursday as males and Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday as females,
without realizing that this distribution was due to the masculine gender of the first
three names (ponedel=nik, tornik, hetverg) as against the feminine gender of the
others (sreda, pqtnica, subboga). The fact that the word for Friday is masculine in
some Slavic languages and feminine in others is reflected in the folk traditions of
the corresponding peoples, which differ in their Friday ritual. The widespread
Russian superstition that a fallen knife presages a male guest and a fallen fork a
female one is determined by the masculine gender of no… “knife” and the feminine
of vilka “fork” in Russian. In Slavic and other languages where “day” is masculine
and “night” feminine, day is represented by poets as the lover of night. The Russian
painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German
artists: he did not realize that “sin” is feminine in German (die Sünde), but mascu-
line in Russian (rpex). Likewise a Russian child, while reading a translation of
German tales, was astounded to find that Death, obviously a woman (Russian
smert;, fem.), was pictured as an old man (German der Tod, masc.). My Sister Life,
the title of a book of poems by Boris Pasternak, is quite natural in Russian, where
“life” is feminine …izn;, but was enough to reduce to despair the Czech poet Josef
Hora in his attempt to translate these poems, since in Czech this noun is masculine
život.
What was the initial question which arose in Slavic literature at its very begin-
ning? Curiously enough, the translator’s difficulty in preserving the symbolism of
genders, and the cognitive irrelevance of this difficulty, appears to be the main topic
of the earliest Slavic original work, the preface to the first translation of the
Evangeliarium, made in the early 860s by the founder of Slavic letters and liturgy,
Constantine the Philosopher, and recently restored and interpreted by A. Vaillant.8
“Greek, when translated into another language, cannot always be reproduced iden-
tically, and that happens to each language being translated,” the Slavic apostle states.
“Masculine nouns as πταμς ‘river’ and στηρ ‘star’ in Greek, are feminine in
another language as rka and zvzda in Slavic.” According to Vaillant’s commen-
tary, this divergence effaces the symbolic identification of the rivers with demons
and of the stars with angels in the Slavic translation of two of Matthew’s verses
(7:25 and 2:9). But to this poetic obstacle, Saint Constantine resolutely opposes the
precept of Dionysius the Areopagite, who called for chief attention to the cognitive
values (sil razumu) and not to the words themselves.
In poetry, verbal equations become a constructive principle of the text.
Syntactic and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes and their
components (distinctive features) – in short, any constituents of the verbal code –
are confronted, juxtaposed, brought into contiguous relation according to the prin-
ciple of similarity and contrast and carry their own autonomous signification.
 ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION 131

Phonemic similarity is sensed as semantic relationship. The pun, or to use a more

erudite, and perhaps more precise term – paronomasia, reigns over poetic art, and
whether its rule is absolute or limited, poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only
creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition – from one poetic
shape into another, or interlingual transposition – from one language into another,
or finally intersemiotic transposition – from one system of signs into another, e.g.,
from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting.
If we were to translate into English the traditional formula Traduttore, traditore
as “the translator is a betrayer,” we would deprive the Italian rhyming epigram of
all its paronomastic value. Hence a cognitive attitude would compel us to change
this aphorism into a more explicit statement and to answer the questions: translator
of what messages? betrayer of what values?

Notes
1 Bertrand Russell, “Logical Positivism,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, IV
(1950), 18; cf. p. 3.
2 Cf. John Dewey, “Peirce’s Theory of Linguistic Signs, Thought, and Meaning,”
The Journal of Philosophy, XLIII (1946), 91.
3 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.,
1956), p. 235.
4 Niels Bohr, “On the Notions of Causality and Complementarity,” Dialectica, I
(1948), 317f.
5 James R. Masterson and Wendell Brooks Phillips, Federal Prose (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1948), p. 40f.
6 Cf. Knut Bergsland, “Finsk-ugrisk og almen språkvitenskap,” Norsk Tidsskrift
for Sprogvidenskap, XV (1949), 374f.
7 Franz Boas, “Language,” General Anthropology (Boston, 1938), pp. 132f.
8 André Vaillant, “Le Préface de l’évangeliaire vieux-slave,” Revue des études
Slaves, XXIV (1948), 5f.
 Lawrence Venuti (ed.)
The Translation Studies Reader,
Chapter 15 3rd ed. (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2012)

Gideon Toury

THE NATURE AND ROLE OF

NORMS IN TRANSLATION

H O W E V E R H I G H L Y O N E M A Y T H I N K of Linguistics, Text-
Linguistics, Contrastive Textology or Pragmatics and of their explanatory
power with respect to translational phenomena, being a translator cannot be
reduced to the mere generation of utterances which would be considered “transla-
tions” within any of these disciplines. Translation activities should rather be regarded
as having cultural significance. Consequently, “translatorship” amounts first and fore-
most to being able to play a social role, i.e., to fulfil a function allotted by a
community – to the activity, its practitioners and/or their products – in a way
which is deemed appropriate in its own terms of reference. The acquisition of a set
of norms for determining the suitability of that kind of behaviour, and for manoeuv-
ring between all the factors which may constrain it, is therefore a prerequisite for
becoming a translator within a cultural environment.
The process by which a bilingual speaker may be said to gain recognition in
his/her capacity as a translator has hardly been studied so far. [. . .] In the present
chapter the nature of the acquired norms themselves will be addressed, along with
their role in directing translation activity in socio-culturally relevant settings. This
presentation will be followed by a brief discussion of translational norms as a second-
order object of Translation Studies, to be reconstructed and studied within the kind
of framework which we are now in the process of sketching. As strictly transla-
tional norms can only be applied at the receiving end, establishing them is not merely
justified by a target-oriented approach but should be seen as its very epitome.

1978/revised 1995
 NORMS IN TRANSLATION 169

1 Rules, norms, idiosyncrasies

In its socio-cultural dimension, translation can be described as subject to constraints
of several types and varying degree. These extend far beyond the source text; the
systemic differences between the languages and textual traditions involved in the
act, or even the possibilities and limitations of the cognitive apparatus of the trans-
lator as a necessary mediator. In fact, cognition itself is influenced, probably even
modified by socio-cultural factors. At any rate, translators performing under
different conditions (e.g., translating texts of different kinds, and/or for different
audiences) often adopt different strategies, and ultimately come up with markedly
different products. Something has obviously changed here, and I very much doubt
it that it is the cognitive apparatus as such.
In terms of their potency, socio-cultural constraints have been described along
a scale anchored between two extremes: general, relatively absolute rules, on the
one hand and pure idiosyncrasies on the other. Between these two poles lies a vast
middle-ground occupied by intersubjective factors commonly designated norms.
The norms themselves form a graded continuum along the scale: some are stronger,
and hence more rule-like, others are weaker, and hence almost idiosyncratic. The
borderlines between the various types of constraints are thus diffuse. Each of the
concepts, including the grading itself, is relative too. Thus what is just a favoured
mode of behaviour within a heterogeneous group may well acquire much more
binding force within a certain (more homogeneous) section thereof, in terms of
either human agents (e.g., translators among texters in general) or types of activity
(e.g., interpreting, or legal translation, within translation at large).
Along the temporal axis, each type of constraint may, and often does move into
its neighbouring domain(s) through processes of rise and decline. Thus, mere whims
may catch on and become more and more normative, and norms can gain so much
validity that, for all practical purposes, they become as binding as rules; or the other
way around, of course. Shifts of validity and force often have to do with changes of
status within a society. In fact, they can always be described in connection with the
notion of norm, especially since, as the process goes on, they are likely to cross its
realm, i.e., actually become norms. The other two types of constraints may even
be redefined in terms of norms: rules as “[more] objective”, idiosyncrasies as “[more]
subjective [or: less intersubjective]” norms.
Sociologists and social psychologists have long regarded norms as the translation
of general values or ideas shared by a community – as to what is right and wrong,
adequate and inadequate – into performance instructions appropriate for and applic-
able to particular situations, specifying what is prescribed and forbidden as well as
what is tolerated and permitted in a certain behavioural dimension (the famous
“square of normativity”, which has lately been elaborated on with regard
to translation in De Geest 1992: 38–40). Norms are acquired by the individual
during his/her socialization and always imply sanctions – actual or potential, negative
as well as positive. Within the community, norms also serve as criteria according
to which actual instances of behaviour are evaluated. Obviously, there is a point
in assuming the existence of norms only in situations which allow for different
kinds of behaviour, on the additional condition that selection among them be
170 GIDEON TOURY

non-random.1 Inasmuch as a norm is really active and effective, one can therefore
distinguish regularity of behaviour in recurrent situations of the same type, which
would render regularities a main source for any study of norms as well.
The centrality of the norms is not only metaphorical, then, in terms of their
relative position along a postulated continuum of constraints; rather, it is essential:
Norms are the key concept and focal point in any attempt to account for the social
relevance of activities, because their existence, and the wide range of situations they
apply to (with the conformity this implies), are the main factors ensuring the estab-
lishment and retention of social order. This holds for cultures too, or for any of the
systems constituting them, which are, after all, social institutions ipso facto. Of
course, behaviour which does not conform to prevailing norms is always possible
too. Moreover, “non-compliance with a norm in particular instances does not invali-
date the norm” (Hermans 1991: 162). At the same time, there would normally be
a price to pay for opting for any deviant kind of behaviour.
One thing to bear in mind, when setting out to study norm-governed behav-
iour, is that there is no necessary identity between the norms themselves and any
formulation of them in language. Verbal formulations of course reflect awareness of
the existence of norms as well as of their respective significance. However, they
also imply other interests, particularly a desire to control behaviour i.e., to dictate
norms rather than merely account for them. Normative formulations tend to be
slanted, then, and should always be taken with a grain of salt.

2 Translation as a norm-governed activity

Translation is a kind of activity which inevitably involves at least two languages and
two cultural traditions, i.e., at least two sets of norm-systems on each level. Thus,
the “value” behind it may be described as consisting of two major elements:

1 being a text in a certain language, and hence occupying a position, or filling

in a slot, in the appropriate culture, or in a certain section thereof;
2 constituting a representation in that language/culture of another, pre-existing
text in some other language, belonging to some other culture and occupying
a definite position within it.

These two types of requirement derive from two sources which – even though
the distance between them may vary greatly – are nevertheless always different and
therefore often incompatible. Were it not for the regulative capacity of norms, the
tensions between the two sources of constraints would have to be resolved on an
entirely individual basis, and with no clear yardstick to go by. Extreme free varia-
tion may well have been the result, which it certainly is not. Rather, translation
behaviour within a culture tends to manifest certain regularities, one consequence
being that even if they are unable to account for deviations in any explicit way, the
persons-in-the-culture can often tell when a translator has failed to adhere to sanc-
tioned practices.
It has proven useful and enlightening to regard the basic choice which can be
made between requirements of the two different sources as constituting an initial
 NORMS IN TRANSLATION 171

norm. Thus, a translator may subject him-/herself either to the original text, with
the norms it has realized, or to the norms active in the target culture, or, in that
section of it which would host the end product. If the first stance is adopted, the
translation will tend to subscribe to the norms of the source text, and through them
also to the norms of the source language and culture. This tendency; which has
often been characterized as the pursuit of adequate translation,2 may well entail
certain incompatibilities with target norms and practices, especially those lying
beyond the mere linguistic ones. If, on the other hand, the second stance is adopted,
norms systems of the target culture are triggered and set into motion. Shifts from
the source text would be an almost inevitable price. Thus, whereas adherence to
source norms determines a translation’s adequacy as compared to the source text,
subscription to norms originating in the target culture determines its acceptability.
Obviously, even the most adequacy-oriented translation involves shifts from the
source text. In fact, the occurrence of shifts has long been acknowledged as a true
universal of translation. However, since the need itself to deviate from source-text
patterns can always be realized in more than one way, the actual realization of
so-called obligatory shifts, to the extent that it is non-random, and hence not idio-
syncratic, is already truly norm-governed. So is everything that has to do with
non-obligatory shifts, which are of course more than just possible in real-life trans-
lation: they occur everywhere and tend to constitute the majority of shifting in any
single act of human translation, rendering the latter a contributing factor to, as well
as the epitome of regularity.
The term “initial norm” should not be overinterpreted, however. Its initiality
derives from its superordinance over particular norms which pertain to lower, and
therefore more specific levels. The kind of priority postulated here is basically
logical, and need not coincide with any “real”, i.e., chronological order of applica-
tion. The notion is thus designed to serve first and foremost as an explanatory tool.
Even if no clear macro-level tendency can be shown, any micro-level decision can
still be accounted for in terms of adequacy vs. acceptability. On the other hand, in
cases where an overall choice has been made, it is not necessary that every single
lower-level decision be made in full accord with it. We are still talking regulari-
ties, then, but not necessarily of any absolute type. It is unrealistic to expect absolute
regularities anyway, in any behavioural domain.
Actual translation decisions (the results of which the researcher would confront)
will necessarily involve some ad hoc combination of, or compromise between the
two extremes implied by the initial norm. Still, for theoretical and methodological
reasons, it seems wiser to retain the opposition and treat the two poles as distinct
in principle: If they are not regarded as having distinct theoretical statuses, how would
compromises differing in type or in extent be distinguished and accounted for?
Finally, the claim that it is basically a norm-governed type of behaviour applies
to translation of all kinds, not only literary, philosophical or biblical translation,
which is where most norm-oriented studies have been conducted so far. As has
recently been claimed and demonstrated in an all too sketchy exchange of views in
Target (M. Shlesinger 1989 and Harris 1990), similar things can even be said
of conference interpreting. Needless to say, this does not mean that the exact same
conditions apply to all kinds of translation. In fact, their application in different
cultural sectors is precisely one of the aspects that should be submitted to study.
172 GIDEON TOURY

In principle, the claim is also valid for every society and historical period, thus
offering a framework for historically oriented studies which would also allow for
comparison.

3 Translation norms: an overview

Norms can be expected to operate not only in translation of all kinds, but also at
every stage in the translating event, and hence to be reflected on every level of its
product. It has proven convenient to first distinguish two larger groups of norms
applicable to translation: preliminary vs. operational.
Preliminary norms have to do with two main sets of considerations which
are often interconnected: those regarding the existence and actual nature of a defi-
nite translation policy, and those related to the directness of translation.
Translation policy refers to those factors that govern the choice of text types; or
even of individual texts, to be imported through translation into a particular
culture/language at a particular point in time. Such a policy will be said to exist
inasmuch as the choice is found to be non-random. Different policies may of course
apply to different subgroups, in terms of either text-types (e.g., literary vs. non-
literary) or human agents and groups thereof (e.g., different publishing houses), and
the interface between the two often offers very fertile grounds for policy hunting.
Considerations concerning directness of translation involve the threshold of toler-
ance for translating from languages other than the ultimate source language: is
indirect translation permitted at all? In translating from what source languages/text-
types/periods (etc.) is it permitted/prohibited/tolerated/preferred? What are the
permitted/prohibited/tolerated/preferred mediating languages? Is there a tendency/
obligation to mark a translated work as having been mediated or is this fact ignored/
camouflaged/denied? If it is mentioned, is the identity of the mediating language
supplied as well? And so on.
Operational norms, in turn, may be conceived of as directing the decisions
made during the act of translation itself. They affect the matrix of the text – i.e.
the modes of distributing linguistic material in it – as well as the textual make-up
and verbal formulation as such. They thus govern – directly or indirectly – the rela-
tionships as well that would obtain between the target and source texts, i.e., what
is more likely to remain invariant under transformation and what will change.
So-called matricial norms may govern the very existence of target-language
material intended as a substitute for the corresponding source-language material
(and hence the degree of fullness of translation), its location in the text (or the form
of actual distribution), as well as the textual segmentation.3 The extent to which omis-
sions, additions, changes of location and manipulations of segmentation are referred
to in the translated texts (or around them) may also be determined by norms, even
though the one can very well occur without the other.
Obviously, the borderlines between the various matricial phenomena are not
clear-cut. For instance, large-scale omissions often entail changes of segmentation
as well, especially if the omitted portions have no clear boundaries, or textual-
linguistic standing, i.e., if they are not integral sentences, paragraphs or chapters.
By the same token, a change of location may often be accounted for as an omission
 NORMS IN TRANSLATION 173

(in one place) compensated by an addition (elsewhere). The decision as to what

may have “really” taken place is thus description-bound: What one is after is (more
or less cogent) explanatory hypotheses, not necessarily “true-to-life” accounts, which
one can never be sure of anyway.
Textual-linguistic norms, in turn, govern the selection of material to
formulate the target text in, or replace the original textual and linguistic material
with. Textual-linguistic norms may either be general, and hence apply to translation
qua translation, or particular, in which case they would pertain to a particular text-
type and/or mode of translation only. Some of them may be identical to the norms
governing non-translational text-production, but such an identity should never be
taken for granted. This is the methodological reason why no study of translation
can, or should proceed from the assumption that the latter is representative of the
target language, or of any overall textual tradition thereof. (And see our discussion
of “translation-specific lexical items” [in Toury 1995: chap. 11].)
It is clear that preliminary norms have both logical and chronological prece-
dence over the operational ones. This is not to say that between the two major
groups there are no relationships whatsoever, including mutual influences or even
two-way conditioning. However, these relations are by no means fixed and given,
and their establishment forms an inseparable part of any study of translation as a
norm-governed activity. Nevertheless, we can safely assume at least that the rela-
tions which do exist have to do with the initial norm. They might even be found
to intersect it – another important reason to retain the opposition between “adequacy”
and “acceptability” as a basic coordinate system for the formulation of explanatory
hypotheses.4
Operational norms as such may be described as serving as a model, in accord-
ance with which translations come into being, whether involving the norms realized
by the source text (i.e., adequate translation) plus certain modifications or purely
target norms, or a particular compromise between the two. Every model supplying
performance instructions may be said to act as a restricting factor: it opens up certain
options while closing others. Consequently, when the first position is fully adopted,
the translation can hardly be said to have been made into the target language as a
whole. Rather, it is made into a model language, which is at best some part of the
former and at worst an artificial, and as such non-existent variety.5 In this last case,
the translation is not really introduced into the target culture either, but is imposed
on it, so to speak. Sure, it may eventually carve a niche for itself in the latter, but
there is no initial attempt to accommodate it to any existing “slot”. On the other
hand, when the second position is adopted, what a translator is introducing into the
target culture (which is indeed what s/he can be described as doing now) is a version
of the original work, cut to the measure of a pre-existing model. (And see our
discussion of the opposition between the “translation of literary texts” and “literary
translation” as well as the detailed presentation of the Hebrew translation of a
German Schlaraffenland text [in Toury 1995: 147–80].)
The apparent contradiction between any traditional concept of equivalence and
the limited model into which a translation has just been claimed to be moulded can
only be resolved by postulating that it is norms that determine the (type
and extent of) equivalence manifested by actual translations. The study
of norms thus constitutes a vital step towards establishing just how the functional–
174 GIDEON TOURY

relational postulate of equivalence has been realized – whether in one translated

text, in the work of a single translator or “school” of translators, in a given histor-
ical period, or in any other justifiable selection.6 What this approach entails is a
clear wish to retain the notion of equivalence, which various contemporary
approaches (e.g., Hönig and Kussmaul 1982; Holz-Mänttäri 1984; Snell-Hornby
1988) have tried to do without, while introducing one essential change into it: from
an ahistorical, largely prescriptive concept to a historical one. Rather than being a
single relationship, denoting a recurring type of invariant, it comes to refer to any
relation which is found to have characterized translation under a specified set of
circumstances.
At the end of a full-fledged study it will probably be found that translational
norms, hence the realization of the equivalence postulate, are all, to a large extent,
dependent on the position held by translation – the activity as well as its products
– in the target culture. An interesting field for study is therefore comparative: the
nature of translational norms as compared to those governing non-translational kinds
of text-production. In fact, this kind of study is absolutely vital, if translating and
translations are to be appropriately contextualized.

4 The multiplicity of translational norms

The difficulties involved in any attempt to account for translational norms should
not be underestimated. These, however, lie first and foremost in two features
inherent in the very notion of norm, and are therefore not unique to Translation
Studies at all: the socio-cultural specificity of norms and their basic instability.
Thus, whatever its exact content, there is absolutely no need for a norm to
apply – to the same extent, or at all – to all sectors within a society. Even less
necessary, or indeed likely, is it for a norm to apply across cultures. In fact, “same-
ness” here is a mere coincidence – or else the result of continuous contacts between
subsystems within a culture, or between entire cultural systems, and hence a
manifestation of interference. (For some general rules of systemic interference see
Even-Zohar 1990: 53–72.) Even then, it is often more a matter of apparent than
of a genuine identity. After all, significance is only attributed to a norm by the system
in which it is embedded, and the systems remain different even if instances of
external behaviour appear the same.
In addition to their inherent specificity, norms are also unstable, changing enti-
ties; not because of any intrinsic flaw but by their very nature as norms. At times,
norms change rather quickly; at other times, they are more enduring, and the
process may take longer. Either way, substantial changes, in translational norms
too, quite often occur within one’s lifetime.
Of course it is not as if all translators are passive in face of these changes.
Rather, many of them, through their very activity, help in shaping the process,
as do translation criticism, translation ideology (including the one emanating from
contemporary academe, often in the guise of theory), and, of course, various norm-
setting activities of institutes where, in many societies, translators are now being
trained. Wittingly or unwittingly, they all try to interfere with the “natural” course
of events and to divert it according to their own preferences. Yet the success of
 NORMS IN TRANSLATION 175

their endeavours is never fully foreseeable. In fact, the relative role of different
agents in the overall dynamics of translational norms is still largely a matter of
conjecture even for times past, and much more research is needed to clarify it.
Complying with social pressures to constantly adjust one’s behaviour to norms
that keep changing is of course far from simple, and most people – including trans-
lators, initiators of translation activities and the consumers of their products – do
so only up to a point. Therefore, it is not all that rare to find side by side in a society
three types of competing norms, each having its own followers and a position of its
own in the culture at large: the ones that dominate the centre of the system, and
hence direct translational behaviour of the so-called mainstream, alongside the
remnants of previous sets of norms and the rudiments of new ones, hovering in the
periphery. This is why it is possible to speak – and not derogatorily – of being
“trendy”, “old-fashioned” or “progressive” in translation (or in any single section
thereof) as it is in any other behavioural domain.
One’s status as a translator may of course be temporary, especially if one fails
to adjust to the changing requirements, or does so to an extent which is deemed
insufficient. Thus, as changes of norms occur, formerly “progressive” translators
may soon find themselves just “trendy”, or on occasion as even downright “passé”.
At the same time, regarding this process as involving a mere alternation of gener-
ations can be misleading, especially if generations are directly equated with age
groups. While there often are correlations between one’s position along the “dated”
–“mainstream”–“avant-garde” axis and one’s age, these cannot, and should not be
taken as inevitable, much less as a starting point and framework for the study of
norms in action. Most notably, young people who are in the early phases of their
initiation as translators often behave in an extremely epigonic way: they tend to
perform according to dated, but still existing norms, the more so if they receive
reinforcement from agents holding to dated norms, be they language teachers,
editors, or even teachers of translation.
Multiplicity and variation should not be taken to imply that there is no such
thing as norms active in translation. They only mean that real-life situations tend to
be complex; and this complexity had better be noted rather than ignored, if one is
to draw any justifiable conclusions. As already argued, the only viable way out seems
to be to contextualize every phenomenon, every item, every text, every act, on the
way to allotting the different norms themselves their appropriate position and
valence. This is why it is simply unthinkable, from the point of view of the study
of translation as a norm-governed activity, for all items to be treated on a par, as
if they were of the same systemic position, the same significance, the same level of
representativeness of the target culture and its constraints. Unfortunately, such an
indiscriminate approach has been all too common, and has often led to a complete
blurring of the normative picture, sometimes even to the absurd claim that no norms
could be detected at all. The only way to keep that picture in focus is to go beyond
the establishment of mere “check-lists” of factors which may occur in a corpus and
have the lists ordered, for instance with respect to the status of those factors as char-
acterizing “mainstream”, “dated” and “avant-garde” activities, respectively.
This immediately suggests a further axis of contextualization, whose necessity
has so far only been implied; namely, the historical one. After all, a norm can only
be marked as “dated” if it was active in a previous period, and if, at that time, it had
176 GIDEON TOURY

a different, “non-dated” position. By the same token, norm-governed behaviour can

prove to have been “avant-garde” only in view of subsequent attitudes towards it: an
idiosyncrasy which never evolved into something more general can only be
described as a norm by extension, so to speak (see Section 1 above). Finally, there
is nothing inherently “mainstream” about mainstream behaviour, except when it
happens to function as such, which means that it too is time-bound. What I am
claiming here, in fact, is that historical contextualization is a must not only for a
diachronic study, which nobody would contest, but also for synchronic studies, which
still seems a lot less obvious unless one has accepted the principles of so-called
“Dynamic Functionalism” (for which, see the Introduction to Even-Zohar 19907 and
Sheffy 1992: passim).
Finally, in translation too, non-normative behaviour is always a possibility. The
price for selecting this option may be as low as a (culturally determined) need to
submit the end product to revision. However, it may also be far more severe to
the point of taking away one’s earned recognition as a translator; which is precisely
why non-normative behaviour tends to be the exception, in actual practice. On the
other hand, in retrospect, deviant instances of behaviour may be found to have
effected changes in the very system. This is why they constitute an important field
of study, as long as they are regarded as what they have really been and are not put
indiscriminately into one basket with all the rest. Implied are intriguing questions
such as who is “allowed” by a culture to introduce changes and under what circum-
stances such changes may be expected to occur and/or be accepted.

5 Studying translational norms

So far we have discussed norms mainly in terms of their activity during a transla-
tion event and their effectiveness in the act of translation itself. To be sure, this is
precisely where and when translational norms are active. However, what is actu-
ally available for observation is not so much the norms themselves, but rather
norm-governed instances of behaviour. To be even more precise, more often than
not, it is the products of such behaviour. Thus, even when translating is claimed to
be studied directly, as is the case with the use of “Thinking-Aloud Protocols”, it is
only products which are available, although products of a different kind and order.
Norms are not directly observable, then, which is all the more reason why some-
thing should also be said about them in the context of an attempt to account for
translational behaviour.
There are two major sources for a reconstruction of translational norms, textual
and extratextual:8
1 textual: the translated texts themselves, for all kinds of norms, as well as
analytical inventories of translations (i.e., “virtual” texts), for various prelimin-
ary norms;
2 extratextual: semi-theoretical or critical formulations, such as prescriptive
“theories” of translation, statements made by translators, editors, publishers,
and other persons involved in or connected with the activity, critical appraisals
of individual translations, or the activity of a translator or “school” of trans-
lators, and so forth.
 NORMS IN TRANSLATION 177

There is a fundamental difference between these two types of source: Texts are
primary products of norm-regulated behaviour, and can therefore be taken as immed-
iate representations thereof. Normative pronouncements, by contrast, are merely
by-products of the existence and activity of norms. Like any attempt to formulate
a norm, they are partial and biased, and should therefore be treated with every
possible circumspection; all the more so since – emanating as they do from inter-
ested parties – they are likely to lean toward propaganda and persuasion. There
may therefore be gaps, even contradictions, between explicit arguments and
demands, on the one hand, and actual behaviour and its results, on the other, due
either to subjectivity or naïveté, or even lack of sufficient knowledge on the part
of those who produced the formulations. On occasion, a deliberate desire to mislead
and deceive may also be involved. Even with respect to the translators themselves,
intentions do not necessarily concur with any declaration of intent (which is often
put down post factum anyway, when the act has already been completed); and the
way those intentions are realized may well constitute a further, third category still.
Yet all these reservations – proper and serious though they may be – should
not lead one to abandon semi-theoretical and critical formulations as legitimate
sources for the study of norms. In spite of all its faults, this type of source still has
its merits, both in itself and as a possible key to the analysis of actual behaviour. At
the same time, if the pitfalls inherent in them are to be avoided, normative
pronouncements should never be accepted at face value. They should rather be taken
as pre-systematic and given an explication in such a way as to place them in a narrow
and precise framework, lending the resulting explicata the coveted systematic status.
While doing so, an attempt should be made to clarify the status of each formula-
tion, however slanted and biased it may be, and uncover the sense in which it was
not just accidental; in other words how, in the final analysis, it does reflect the
cultural constellation within which, and for whose purposes it was produced. Apart
from sheer speculation, such an explication should involve the comparison of various
normative pronouncements to each other, as well as their repeated confrontation
with the patterns revealed by [the results of] actual behaviour and the norms recon-
structed from them – all this with full consideration for their contextualization. (See
a representative case in Weissbrod 1989.)
It is natural, and very convenient, to commence one’s research into transla-
tional behaviour by focusing on isolated norms pertaining to well-defined behavioural
dimensions, be they – and the coupled pairs of replacing and replaced segments
representing them – established from the source text’s perspective (e.g., transla-
tional replacements of source metaphors) or from the target text’s vantage, point
(e.g., binomials of near-synonyms as translational replacements). However, trans-
lation is intrinsically multi-dimensional: the manifold phenomena it presents are
tightly interwoven and do not allow for easy isolation, not even for methodical
purposes. Therefore, research should never get stuck in the blind alley of the “para-
digmatic” phase which would at best yield lists of “normemes”, or discrete norms.
Rather, it should always proceed to a “syntagmatic” phase, involving the integration
of normemes pertaining to various problem areas. Accordingly, the student’s task
can be characterized as an attempt to establish what relations there are between
norms pertaining to various domains by correlating his/her individual findings and
weighing them against each other. Obviously, the thicker the network of relations
178 GIDEON TOURY

thus established, the more justified one would be in speaking in terms of a norma-
tive structure (cf. Jackson 1960: 149–60) or model.
This having been said, it should again be noted that a translator’s behaviour
cannot be expected to be fully systematic. Not only can his/her decision-making
be differently motivated in different problem areas, but it can also be unevenly
distributed throughout an assignment within a single problem area. Consistency in
translational behaviour is thus a graded notion which is neither nil (i.e., total erratic-
ness) nor 1 (i.e., absolute regularity); its extent should emerge at the end of a study
as one of its conclusions, rather than being presupposed.
The American sociologist Jay Jackson suggested a “Return Potential Curve”,
showing the distribution of approval/disapproval among the members of a social
group over a range of behaviour of a certain type as a model for the representation
of norms. This model (reproduced as Figure 15.1) makes it possible to make a
gradual distinction between norms in terms of intensity (indicated by the height of
the curve, its distance from the horizontal axis), the total range of tolerated behaviour
(that part of the behavioural dimension approved by the group), and the ratio of one
of these properties of the norm to the others.
One convenient division that can be re-interpreted with the aid of this model
is tripartite:9

a. Basic (primary) norms, more or less mandatory for all instances of a

certain behaviour (and hence their minimal common denominator). Occupy
the apex of the curve. Maximum intensity, minimum latitude of behaviour.
b. Secondary norms, or tendencies, determining favourable behaviour. May
be predominant in certain parts of the group. Therefore common enough, but
not mandatory, from the point of view of the group as a whole. Occupy that
part of the curve nearest its apex and therefore less intensive than the basic
norms but covering a greater range of behaviour.
c. Tolerated (permitted) behaviour. Occupies the rest of the “positive” part
of the curve (i.e., that part which lies above the horizontal axis), and there-
fore of minimal intensity.

“A special group,” detachable from (c), seems to be of considerable interest and

importance, at least in some behavioural domains:

c′. Symptomatic devices. Though these devices may be infrequently used,

their occurrence is typical for narrowing segments of the group under study.
On the other hand, their absolute non-occurrence can be typical of other
segments.

We may, then, safely assume a distributional basis for the study of norms: the
more frequent a target-text phenomenon, a shift from a (hypothetical) adequate
reconstruction of a source text, or a translational relation, the more likely it is to
reflect (in this order) a more permitted (tolerated) activity, a stronger tendency, a
more basic (obligatory) norm. A second aspect of norms, their discriminatory capacity,
is thus reciprocal to the first, so that the less frequent a behaviour, the smaller the
group it may serve to define. At the same time, the group it does define is not just
 NORMS IN TRANSLATION 179

Highly +
approve 4

3 (c)

2
(b)

Indifferent 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
(a)
–1
(d)
–2

–3

Highly –4
disapprove –

Figure 15.1 Schematic diagram showing the Return Potential Model for representing norms: (a)
a behaviour dimension; (b) an evaluation dimension; (c) a return potential curve,
showing the distribution of approval–disapproval among the members of a group
over the whole range of behaviour; (d) the range of tolerable or approved behaviour.
Source: Jackson 1960

any group; it is always a subgroup of the one constituted by higher-rank norms.

To be sure, even idiosyncrasies (which, in their extreme, constitute groups-of-one)
often manifest themselves as personal ways of realizing [more] general attitudes
rather than deviations in a completely unexpected direction.10 Be that as it may,
the retrospective establishment of norms is always relative to the section under
study, and no automatic upward projection is possible. Any attempt to move in that
direction and draw generalizations would require further study, which should be
targeted towards that particular end.
Finally, the curve model also enables us to redefine one additional concept: the
actual degree of conformity manifested by different members of a group to a norm
that has already been extracted from a corpus, and hence found relevant to it. This
aspect can be defined in terms of the distance from the point of maximum return
(in other words, from the curve’s apex).
Notwithstanding the points made in the last few paragraphs, the argument for
the distributional aspect of the norms should not be pushed too far.
As is so well known, we are in no position to point to strict statistical methods
for dealing with translational norms, or even to supply sampling rules for actual
research (which, because of human limitations, will always be applied to samples
180 GIDEON TOURY

only). At this stage we must be content with our intuitions, which, being based on
knowledge and previous experience, are “learned” ones, and use them as keys for
selecting corpuses and for hitting upon ideas. This is not to say that we should
abandon all hope for methodological improvements. On the contrary: much energy
should still be directed toward the crystallization of systematic research methods,
including statistical ones, especially if we wish to transcend the study of norms,
which are always limited to one societal group at a time, and move on to the formu-
lation of general laws of translational behaviour, which would inevitably be
probabilistic in nature. To be sure, achievements of actual studies can themselves
supply us with clues as to necessary and possible methodological improvements.
Besides, if we hold up research until the most systematic methods have been found,
we might never get any research done.

Notes
1 “The existence of norms is a sine qua non in instances of labelling and regu-
lating; without a norm, all deviations are meaningless and become cases of
free variation” (Wexler 1974: 4, n. 1).
2 “An adequate translation is a translation which realizes in the target language
the textual relationships of a source text with no breach of its own [basic]
linguistic system” (Even-Zohar 1975: 43; my translation).
3 The claim that principles of segmentation follow universal patterns is just a
figment of the imagination of some discourse and text theoreticians intent on
uncovering as many universal principles as possible. In actual fact, there have
been various traditions (or “models”) of segmentation, and the differences
between them always have implications for translation, whether they are taken
to bear on the formulation of the target text or ignored. Even the segmenta-
tion of sacred texts such as the Old Testament itself has often been tampered
with by its translators, normally in order to bring it closer to target cultural
habits, and by so doing enhance the translation’s acceptability.
4 Thus, for instance, in sectors where the pursuit of adequate translation is
marginal, it is highly probable that indirect translation would also become
common, on occasion even preferred over direct translation. By contrast, a
norm which prohibits mediated translation is likely to be connected with a
growing proximity to the initial norm of adequacy. Under such circumstances,
if indirect translation is still performed, the fact will at least be concealed, if
not outright denied.
5 And see, in this connection, Izre’el’s “Rationale for Translating Ancient Texts
into a Modern Language” (1994). In an attempt to come up with a method
for translating an Akkadian myth which would be presented to modern Israeli
audiences in an oral performance, he purports to combine a “feeling-of-
antiquity” with a “feeling-of-modernity” in a text which would be altogether
simple and easily comprehensible by using a host of lexical items of biblical
Hebrew in Israeli Hebrew grammatical and syntactic structures. Whereas “the
lexicon . . . would serve to give an ancient flavor to the text, the grammar
would serve to enable modern perception”. It might be added that this is a
 NORMS IN TRANSLATION 181

perfect mirror image of the way Hebrew translators started simulating spoken
Hebrew in their texts: spoken lexical items were inserted in grammatical and
syntactic structures which were marked for belonging to the written varieties
(Ben-Shahar 1983), which also meant “new” into “old”.
6 See also my discussion of “Equivalence and Non-Equivalence as a Function of
Norms” (Toury 1980: 63–70).
7 “There is a clear difference between an attempt to account for some major
principles which govern a system outside the realm of time, and one which
intends to account for how a system operates both ‘in principle’ and ‘in time.’
Once the historical aspect is admitted into the functional approach, several
implications must be drawn. First, it must be admitted that both synchrony
and diachrony are historical, but the exclusive identification of the latter with
history is untenable. As a result, synchrony cannot and should not be equated
with statics, since at any given moment, more than one diachronic set is oper-
ating on the synchronic axis. Therefore, on the one hand a system consists of
both synchrony and diachrony; on the other, each of these separately is obvi-
ously also a system. Second, if the idea of structuredness and systemicity need
no longer be identified with homogeneity, a semiotic system can be conceived
of as a heterogeneous, open structure. It is, therefore, very rarely a uni-system
but is, necessarily, a polysystem” (Even-Zohar 1990: 11).
8 Cf. e.g., Vodička (1964: 74), on the possible sources for the study of literary
norms, and Wexler (1974: 7–9), on the sources for the study of prescriptive
intervention (“purism”) in language.
9 Cf. e.g., Hrushovski’s similar division (in Ben-Porat and Hrushovski 1974:
9–10) and its application to the description of the norms of Hebrew rhyme
(in Hrushovski 1971).
10 And see the example of the seemingly idiosyncratic use of Hebrew ki-xen as a
translational replacement of English “well” in a period when the norm dictates
the use of lu-vexen.
 Lawrence Venuti (ed.)
The Translation Studies Reader,
3rd ed. (Abingdon and New York:
Chapter 16 Routledge, 2012)

Hans J. Vermeer

SKOPOS AND COMMISSION IN

TRANSLATIONAL ACTION

Translated by Andrew Chesterman

T H I S P A P E R I S A S H O R T S K E T C H of my skopos theory (cf. Vermeer

1978, 1983; Reiss and Vermeer 1984; Vermeer 1986; and also Gardt 1989).

1 Synopsis
The skopos theory is part of a theory of translational action (translatorisches Handeln
– cf. Holz-Mänttäri 1984; Vermeer 1986: 269–304 and also 197–246; for the
historical background see e.g. Wilss 1988: 28). Translation is seen as the particular
variety of translational action which is based on a source text (cf. Holz-Mänttäri
1984, especially p. 42f; and Nord 1988: 31). (Other varieties would involve e.g.
a consultant’s information on a regional economic or political situation, etc.)
Any form of translational action, including therefore translation itself, may be
conceived as an action, as the name implies. Any action has an aim, a purpose. (This
is part of the very definition of an action – see Vermeer 1986.) The word skopos,
then, is a technical term for the aim or purpose of a translation (discussed in more
detail below). Further: an action leads to a result, a new situation or event, and
possibly to a “new” object. Translational action leads to a “target text” (not neces-
sarily a verbal one); translation leads to a translatum (i.e. the resulting translated
text), as a particular variety of target text.
The aim of any translational action, and the mode in which it is to be realized,
are negotiated with the client who commissions the action. A precise specification
of aim and mode is essential for the translator. – This is of course analogously true

1989
192 HANS J. VERMEER

of translation proper: skopos and mode of realization must be adequately defined if

the text-translator is to fulfil his task successfully.
The translator is “the” expert in translational action. He is responsible for the
performance of the commissioned task, for the final translatum. Insofar as the duly
specified skopos is defined from the translator’s point of view, the source text is a
constituent of the commission, and as such the basis for all the hierarchically ordered
relevant factors which ultimately determine the translatum. (For the text as part of
a complex action-in-a-situation see Holz-Mänttäri 1984; Vermeer 1986.)
One practical consequence of the skopos theory is a new concept of the status
of the source text for a translation, and with it the necessity of working for an
increasing awareness of this, both among translators and also the general public.
As regards the translator himself: experts are called upon in a given situation
because they are needed and because they are regarded as experts. It is usually
assumed, reasonably enough, that such people “know what it’s all about”; they are
thus consulted and their views listened to. Being experts, they are trusted to know
more about their particular field than outsiders. In some circumstances one may
debate with them over the best way of proceeding, until a consensus is reached, or
occasionally one may also consult other experts or consider further alternative
ways of reaching a given goal. An expert must be able to say – and this implies both
knowledge and a duty to use it – what is what. His voice must therefore be
respected, he must be “given a say”. The translator is such an expert. It is thus up
to him to decide, for instance, what role a source text plays in his translational
action. The decisive factor here is the purpose, the skopos, of the communication
in a given situation. (Cf. Nord 1988: 9.)

2 Skopos and translation

At this point it should be emphasized that the following considerations are not only
intended to be valid for complete actions, such as whole texts, but also apply as far
as possible to segments of actions, parts of a text (for the term “segment” (Stück)
see Vermeer 1970). The skopos concept can also be used with respect to segments
of a translatum, where this appears reasonable or necessary. This allows us to state
that an action, and hence a text, need not be considered an indivisible whole. (Sub-
skopoi are discussed below; cf. also Reiss 1971 on hybrid texts.)
A source text is usually composed originally for a situation in the source culture;
hence its status as “source text”, and hence the role of the translator in the process
of intercultural communication. This remains true of a source text which has been
composed specifically with transcultural communication in mind. In most cases the
original author lacks the necessary knowledge of the target culture and its texts. If
he did have the requisite knowledge, he would of course compose his text under
the conditions of the target culture, in the target language! Language is part of a
culture.
It is thus not to be expected that merely “trans-coding” a source text, merely
“transposing” it into another language, will result in a serviceable translatum. (This
view is also supported by recent research in neurophysiology – cf. Bergström 1989.)
 SKOPOS AND COMMISSION 193

As its name implies, the source text is oriented towards, and is in any case bound
to, the source culture. The target text, the translatum, is oriented towards the target
culture, and it is this which ultimately defines its adequacy. It therefore follows that
source and target texts may diverge from each other quite considerably, not only
in the formulation and distribution of the content but also as regards the goals which
are set for each, and in terms of which the arrangement of the content is in fact
determined. (There may naturally be other reasons for a reformulation, such as
when the target culture verbalizes a given phenomenon in a different way, e.g. in
jokes – cf. Broerman 1984; I return to this topic below.)
It goes without saying that a translatum may also have the same function (skopos)
as its source text. Yet even in this case the translation process is not merely a “trans-
coding” (unless this translation variety is actually intended), since according to a
uniform theory of translation a translatum of this kind is also primarily oriented,
methodologically, towards a target culture situation or situations. Trans-coding, as
a procedure which is retrospectively oriented towards the source text, not pros-
pectively towards the target culture, is diametrically opposed to the theory of
translational action. (This view does not, however, rule out the possibility that trans-
coding can be a legitimate translational skopos itself, oriented prospectively towards
the target culture: the decisive criterion is always the skopos.)
To the extent that a translator judges the form and function of a source text to
be basically adequate per se as regards the predetermined skopos in the target
culture, we can speak of a degree of “intertextual coherence” between target and
source text. This notion thus refers to a relation between translatum and source text,
defined in terms of the skopos. For instance, one legitimate skopos might be an
exact imitation of the source text syntax, perhaps to provide target culture readers
with information about this syntax. Or an exact imitation of the source text struc-
ture, in a literary translation, might serve to create a literary text in the target
culture. Why not? The point is that one must know what one is doing, and what
the consequences of such action are, e.g. what the effect of a text created in this
way will be in the target culture and how much the effect will differ from that of
the source text in the source culture. (For a discussion of intertextual coherence
and its various types, see Morgenthaler 1980: 138–140; for more on Morgenthaler’s
types of theme and rheme, cf. Gerzymisch-Arbogast 1987.)
Translating is doing something: “writing a translation”, “putting a German text
into English”, i.e. a form of action. Following Brennenstuhl (1975), Rehbein (1977),
Harras (1978; 1983), Lenk (edited volumes from 1977 on), Sager (1982) and
others, Vermeer (1986) describes an action as a particular sort of behaviour: for an
act of behaviour to be called an action, the person performing it must (potentially)
be able to explain why he acts as he does although he could have acted otherwise.
Furthermore, genuine reasons for actions can always be formulated in terms of aims
or statements of goals (as an action “with a good reason”, as Harras puts it). This
illustrates a point made in another connection by Kaspar (1983: 139): “In this sense
the notion of aim is in the first place the reverse of the notion of cause.” (Cf. also
Riedl 1983: 159f.) In his De Inventione (2.5.18.) Cicero also gives a definition of an
action when he speaks of cases where “some disadvantage, or some advantage is
neglected in order to gain a greater advantage or avoid a greater disadvantage”
(Cicero 1949: 181–3).
194 HANS J. VERMEER

3 Arguments against the skopos theory

Objections that have been raised against the skopos theory fall into two main types.

3.1 Objection (1) maintains that not all actions have an aim: some have “no aim”.
This is claimed to be the case with literary texts, or at least some of them. Unlike
other texts (!), then, such texts are claimed to be “aimless”. In fact, the argument
is that in certain cases no aim exists, not merely that one might not be able expli-
citly to state an aim – the latter situation is sometimes inevitable, owing to human
imperfection, but it is irrelevant here. As mentioned above, the point is that an aim
must be at least potentially specifiable.
Let us clarify the imprecise expression of actions “having” an aim. It is more
accurate to speak of an aim being attributed to an action, an author believing that he
is writing to a given purpose, a reader similarly believing that an author has so
written. (Clearly, it is possible that the performer of an action, a person affected
by it, and an observer, may all have different concepts of the aim of the action. It
is also important to distinguish between action, action chain, and action element –
cf. Vermeer 1986.)
Objection (1) can be answered prima facie in terms of our very definition of an
action: if no aim can be attributed to an action, it can no longer be regarded as an
action. (The view that any act of speech is skopos-oriented was already a common-
place in ancient Greece – see Baumhauer 1986: 90f.) But it is also worth specifying
the key concept of the skopos in more detail here, which we shall do in terms of
translation proper as one variety of translational action.
The notion of skopos can in fact be applied in three ways, and thus have three
senses: it may refer to

a. the translation process, and hence the goal of this process;

b. the translation result, and hence the function of the translatum;
c. the translation mode, and hence the intention of this mode.

Additionally, the skopos may of course also have sub-skopoi.

Objection (1), then, can be answered as follows: if a given act of behaviour has
neither goal nor function nor intention, as regards its realization, result or manner,
then it is not an action in the technical sense of the word.
If it is nevertheless claimed that literature “has no purpose”, this presumably
means that the creation of literature includes individual moments to which no goal,
no function or intention can be attributed, in the sense sketched above.
For instance, assume that a neat rhyme suddenly comes into one’s mind. (This
is surely not an action, technically speaking.) One then writes it down. (Surely an
action, since the rhyme could have been left unrecorded.) One continues writing
until a sonnet is produced. (An action, since the writer could have chosen to do
something else – unless the power of inspiration was simply irresistible, which I
consider a mere myth.)
If we accept that the process of creating poetry also includes its publication
(and maybe even negotiations for remuneration), then it becomes clear that such
behaviour as a whole does indeed constitute an action. Schiller and Shakespeare
 SKOPOS AND COMMISSION 195

undoubtedly took into account the possible reactions of their public as they wrote,
as indeed anyone would; must we actually denounce such behaviour (conscious, and
hence purposeful), because it was in part perhaps motivated by such base desires as
fame and money?
Our basic argument must therefore remain intact: even the creation of litera-
ture involves purposeful action.
Furthermore, it need not necessarily be the case that the writer is actually
conscious of his purpose at the moment of writing – hence the qualification (above)
that it must be “potentially” possible to establish a purpose.
One recent variant of objection (1) is the claim that a text can only be called
“literature” if it is art, and art has no purpose and no intention. So a work which
did have a goal or intention would not be art. This seems a bit hard on literature,
to say the least! In my view it would be simpler to concede that art, and hence
also literature, can be assigned an intention (and without exception too). The objec-
tion seems to be based on a misunderstanding. Nowadays it is extremely
questionable whether there is, or has even been, an art with no purpose. Cf. Busch
(1987: 7):

Every work of art establishes its meaning aesthetically [. . .] The

aesthetic can of course serve many different functions, but it may also
be in itself the function of the work of art.

Busch points out repeatedly that an object does not “have” a function, but that a
function is attributed or assigned to an object, according to the situation.
And when Goethe acknowledges that he has to work hard to achieve the correct
rhythm for a poem, this too shows that even for him the creation of poetry was not
merely a matter of inspiration:

Oftmals hab’ ich auch schon in ihren Armen gedichtet,

Und des Hexameters Mass leise mit fingernder Hand
Ihr auf dem Rücken gezählt.
(Römische Elegien 1.5.)

[Often have I composed poems even in her arms,

Counting the hexameter’s beat softly with fingering hand
There on the back of the beloved.]

Even the well-known “l’art pour l’art” movement (“art for art’s sake”) must be under-
stood as implying an intention: namely, the intention to create art that exists for
its own sake and thereby differs from other art. Intentionality in this sense is already
apparent in the expression itself. (Cf. also Herding (1987: 689), who argues that
the art-for-art’s-sake movement was “a kind of defiant opposition” against idealism
– i.e. it did indeed have a purpose.)

3.2 Objection (2) is a particular variant of the first objection. It maintains that not
every translation can be assigned a purpose, an intention; i.e. there are translations
that are not goal-oriented. (Here we are taking “translation” in its traditional sense,
196 HANS J. VERMEER

for “translation” with no skopos would by definition not be a translation at all, in

the present theory. This does not rule out the possibility that a “translation” may
be done retrospectively, treating the source text as the “measure of all things”; but
this would only be a translation in the sense of the present theory if the skopos was
explicitly to translate in this way.)
This objection too is usually made with reference to literature, and to this extent
we have already dealt with it under objection (1): it can scarcely be claimed that
literary translation takes place perforce, by the kiss of the muse. Yet there are three
specifications of objection (2) that merit further discussion:

a. The claim that the translator does not have any specific goal, function or inten-
tion in mind: he just translates “what is in the source text”.
b. The claim that a specific goal, function or intention would restrict the trans-
lation possibilities, and hence limit the range of interpretation of the target
text in comparison to that of the source text.
c. The claim that the translator has no specific addressee or set of addressees in
mind.

Let us consider each of these in turn.

a. Advertising texts are supposed to advertise; the more successful the advertise-
ment is, the better the text evidently is. Instructions for use are supposed to describe
how an apparatus is to be assembled, handled and maintained; the more smoothly
this is done, the better the instructions evidently are. Newspaper reports and their
translations also have a purpose: to inform the recipient, at least; the translation
thus has to be comprehensible, in the right sense, to the expected readership, i.e.
the set of addressees. There is no question that such “pragmatic texts” must be goal-
oriented, and so are their translations.
It might be said that the postulate of “fidelity” to the source text requires that
e.g. a news item should be translated “as it was in the original”. But this too is a
goal in itself. Indeed, it is by definition probably the goal that most literary trans-
lators traditionally set themselves. (On the ambiguity of the notion “fidelity”, see
Vermeer 1983: 89–130.)
It is sometimes even claimed that the very duty of a translator forbids him from
doing anything else than stick to the source text; whether anyone might eventually
be able to do anything with the translation or not is not the translator’s business.
The present theory of translational action has a much wider conception of the trans-
lator’s task, including matters of ethics and the translator’s accountability.

b. The argument that assigning a skopos to every literary text restricts its possi-
bilities of interpretation can be answered as follows. A given skopos may of course
rule out certain interpretations because they are not part of the translation goal; but
one possible goal (skopos) would certainly be precisely to preserve the breadth of
interpretation of the source text. (Cf. also Vermeer 1983: a translation realizes
something “different”, not something “more” or “less”; for translation as the real-
ization of one possible interpretation, see Vermeer 1986.) How far such a skopos is
in fact realizable is not the point here.
 SKOPOS AND COMMISSION 197

11111 c. It is true that in many cases a text-producer, and hence also a translator, is not
2 thinking of a specific addressee (in the sense of: John Smith) or set of addressees
3 (in the sense of: the members of the social democrat party). In other cases, however,
4 the addressee(s) may indeed be precisely specified. Ultimately even a communi-
5 cation “to the world” has a set of addressees. As long as one believes that one is
6 expressing oneself in a “comprehensible” way, and as long as one assumes, albeit
7 unconsciously, that people have widely varying levels of intelligence and education,
8 then one must in fact be orienting oneself towards a certain restricted group of
9111 addressees; not necessarily consciously – but unconsciously. One surely often uses
10 one’s own (self-evaluated) level as an implicit criterion (the addressees are (almost)
1 as intelligent as one is oneself . . .). Recall also the discussions about the best way
2 of formulating news items for radio and television, so that as many recipients as
3 possible will understand.
4 The problem, then, is not that there is no set of addressees, but that it is an
15 indeterminate, fuzzy set. But it certainly exists, vague in outline but clearly present.
6 And the clarity or otherwise of the concept is not specified by the skopos theory.
7 A fruitful line of research might be to explore the extent to which a group of recip-
8 ients can be replaced by a “type” of recipient. In many cases such an addressee-type
9 may be much more clearly envisaged, more or less consciously, than is assumed
20 by advocates of the claim that translations lack specific addressees. (Cf. also
1 Morgenthaler 1980: 94 on the possibility of determining a “diffuse public” more
2
closely; on indeterminacy as a general cultural problem see Quine 1960.)
3111
The set of addressees can also be determined indirectly: for example, if a
4
publisher specializing in a particular range of publications commissions a translation,
5
a knowledge of what this range is will give the translator a good idea of the intended
6
7 addressee group (cf. Heinold et al. 1987: 33–6).
8
9 3.3 Objection (2) can also be interpreted in another way. In text linguistics and
30111 literary theory a distinction is often made between text as potential and text as real-
1 ization. If the skopos theory maintains that every text has a given goal, function or
2 intention, and also an assumed set of addressees, objection (2) can be understood
3 as claiming that this applies to text as realization; for a text is also potential in the
4 “supersummative” sense (Paepcke 1979: 97), in that it can be used in different situ-
5 ations with different addressees and different functions. Agreed; but when a text is
6 actually composed, this is nevertheless done with respect to an assumed function
7 (or small set of functions) etc. The skopos theory does not deny that the same text
8 might be used later (also) in ways that had not been foreseen originally. It is well
9 known that a translatum is a text “in its own right” (Holz-Mänttäri et al. 1986: 5),
40111 with its own potential of use: a point overlooked by Wilss (1988: 48). For this
1 reason not even potential texts can be set up with no particular goal or addressee
2 – at least not in any adequate, practical or significant way.
3 This brings us back again to the problem of the “functional constancy” between
4 source and target text: Holz-Mänttäri (1988) rightly insists that functional
45 constancy, properly understood, is the exception rather than the rule. Of relevance
46111 to the above objections in general is also her following comment (ibid.: 7):
471111
198 HANS J. VERMEER

Where is the neuralgic point at which translation practice and theory so

often diverge? In my view it is precisely where texts are lifted out of
their environment for comparative purposes, whereby their process
aspect is ignored. A dead anatomical specimen does not evade the
clutches of the dissecting knife, to be sure, but such a procedure only
increases the risk that findings will be interpreted in a way that is trans-
lationally irrelevant.

3.4 I have agreed that one legitimate skopos is maximally faithful imitation of the
original, as commonly in literary translation. True translation, with an adequate
skopos, does not mean that the translator must adapt to the customs and usage of
the target culture, only that he can so adapt. This aspect of the skopos theory has
been repeatedly misunderstood. (Perhaps it is one of those insights which do not
spread like wildfire but must first be hushed up and then fought over bitterly, before
they become accepted as self-evident – cf. Riedl 1983: 147.)
What we have is in fact a “hare-and-tortoise” theory (Klaus Mudersbach,
personal communication): the skopos is always (already) there, at once, whether
the translation is an assimilating one or deliberately marked or whatever. What the
skopos states is that one must translate, consciously and consistently, in accordance
with some principle respecting the target text. The theory does not state what the
principle is: this must be decided separately in each specific case. An optimally
faithful rendering of a source text, in the sense of a trans-coding, is thus one
perfectly legitimate goal. The skopos theory merely states that the translator should
be aware that some goal exists, and that any given goal is only one among many
possible ones. (How many goals are actually realizable is another matter. We might
assume that in at least some cases the number of realizable goals is one only.)
The important point is that a given source text does not have one correct or best
translation only (Vermeer 1979 and 1983: 62–88).
We can maintain, then, that every reception or production of a text can at least
retrospectively be assigned a skopos, as can every translation, by an observer or
literary scholar etc.; and also that every action is guided by a skopos. If we now
turn this argument around we can postulate a priori that translation – because it is
an action – always presupposes a skopos and is directed by a skopos. It follows that
every translation commission should explicitly or implicitly contain a statement of
skopos in order to be carried out at all. Every translation presupposes a commis-
sion, even though it may be set by the translator to himself (I will translate this keeping
close to the original . . .). “A” statement of skopos implies that it is not necessarily
identical with the skopos attributed to the source text: there are cases where such
identity is not possible.

4 The translation commission

Someone who translates undertakes to do so as a matter of deliberate choice
(I exclude the possibility of translating under hypnosis), or because he is required
to do so. One translates as a result of either one’s own initiative or someone else’s:
in both cases, that is, one acts in accordance with a “commission” (Auftrag).
 SKOPOS AND COMMISSION 199

Let us define a commission as the instruction, given by oneself or by someone

else, to carry out a given action – here: to translate. (Throughout the present article
translation is taken to include interpretation.)
Nowadays, in practice, commissions are normally given explicitly (Please trans-
late the accompanying text), although seldom with respect to the ultimate purpose of
the text. In real life, the specification of purpose, addressees etc. is usually suffi-
ciently apparent from the commission situation itself: unless otherwise indicated, it
will be assumed in our culture that for instance a technical article about some astro-
nomical discovery is to be translated as a technical article for astronomers, and the
actual place of publication is regarded as irrelevant; or if a company wants a busi-
ness letter translated, the natural assumption is that the letter will be used by the
company in question (and in most cases the translator will already be sufficiently
familiar with the company’s own in-house style, etc.). To the extent that these
assumptions are valid, it can be maintained that any translation is carried out
according to a skopos. In the absence of a specification, we can still often speak of
an implicit (or implied) skopos. It nevertheless seems appropriate to stress here the
necessity for a change of attitude among many translators and clients: as far as
possible, detailed information concerning the skopos should always be given.
With the exception of forces majeures – or indeed even including them, according
to the conception of “commission” (cf. the role of so-called inspiration in the case
of biblical texts) – the above definition, with the associated arguments, allows us
to state that every translation is based on a commission.
A commission comprises (or should comprise) as much detailed information as
possible on the following: (1) the goal, i.e. a specification of the aim of the commis-
sion (cf. the scheme of specification factors in Nord 1988: 170); (2) the conditions
under which the intended goal should be attained (naturally including practical
matters such as deadline and fee). The statement of goal and the conditions should
be explicitly negotiated between the client (commissioner) and the translator, for
the client may occasionally have an imprecise or even false picture of the way a text
might be received in the target culture. Here the translator should be able to make
argumentative suggestions. A commission can (and should) only be binding and
conclusive, and accepted as such by the translator, if the conditions are clear enough.
(I am aware that this requirement involves a degree of wishful thinking; yet it is
something to strive for.) Cf. Holz-Mänttäri 1984: 91f and 113; Nord 1988: 9 and
284, note 4.
The translator is the expert in translational action (Holz-Mänttäri 1984 and
1985); as an expert he is therefore responsible for deciding whether, when, how,
etc., a translation can be realized (the Lasswell formula is relevant here – see
Lasswell 1964: 37; Vermeer 1986: 197 and references there).
The realizability of a commission depends on the circumstances of the target
culture, not on those of the source culture. What is dependent on the source culture
is the source text. A commission is only indirectly dependent on the source cul-
ture to the extent that a translation, by definition, must involve a source text. One
might say that the realizability of a commission depends on the relation between the
target culture and the source text; yet this would only be a special case of the general
dependence on the target culture: a special case, that is, insofar as the commission
is basically independent of the source text function. If the discrepancy is too great,
200 HANS J. VERMEER

however, no translation is possible – at most a rewritten text or the like. We shall

not discuss this here. But it should be noted that a target culture generally offers a
wide range of potential, including e.g. possible extension through the adoption of
phenomena from other cultures. How far this is possible depends on the target
culture. (For this kind of adoption see e.g. Toury 1980.)
I have been arguing – I hope plausibly – that every translation can and must be
assigned a skopos. This idea can now be linked with the concept of commission: it
is precisely by means of the commission that the skopos is assigned. (Recall that a
translator may also set his own commission.)
If a commission cannot be realized, or at least not optimally, because the client
is not familiar with the conditions of the target culture, or does not accept them,
the competent translator (as an expert in intercultural action, since translational
action is a particular kind of intercultural action) must enter into negotiations with
the client in order to establish what kind of “optimal” translation can be guaranteed
under the circumstances. We shall not attempt to define “optimal” here – it is
presumably a supra-individual concept. We are simply using the term to designate
one of the best translations possible in the given circumstances, one of those that
best realize the goal in question. Besides, “optimal” is clearly also a relative term:
“optimal under certain circumstances” may mean “as good as possible in view of the
resources available” or “in view of the wishes of the client”, etc. – and always only
in the opinion of the translator, and/or of the recipient, etc. The translator, as the
expert, decides in a given situation whether to accept a commission or not, under
what circumstances, and whether it needs to be modified.
The skopos of a translation is therefore the goal or purpose, defined by the
commission and if necessary adjusted by the translator. In order for the skopos to
be defined precisely, the commission must thus be as specific as possible (Holz-
Mänttäri 1984). If the commission is specific enough, after possible adjustment
by the translator himself, the decision can then be taken about how to translate
optimally, i.e. what kind of changes will be necessary in the translatum with respect
to the source text.
This concept of the commission thus leads to the same result as the skopos
theory outlined above: a translatum is primarily determined by its skopos or its
commission, accepted by the translator as being adequate to the goal of the action.
As we have argued, a translatum is not ipso facto a “faithful” imitation of the source
text. “Fidelity” to the source text (whatever the interpretation or definition of
fidelity) is one possible and legitimate skopos or commission. Formulated in this
way, neither skopos nor commission are new concepts as such – both simply make
explicit something which has always existed. Yet they do specify something that has
hitherto either been implicitly put into practice more unconsciously than
consciously, or else been neglected or even rejected altogether: that is, the fact that
one translates according to a particular purpose, which implies translating in a
certain manner, without giving way freely to every impulse; the fact that there must
always be a clearly defined goal. The two concepts also serve to relativize a view-
point that has often been seen as the only valid one: that a source text should be
translated “as literally as possible”.
Neglecting to specify the commission or the skopos has one fatal consequence:
there has been little agreement to date about the best method of translating a given
 SKOPOS AND COMMISSION 201

text. In the context of the skopos or the commission this must now be possible, at
least as regards the macrostrategy. (As regards individual text elements we still
know too little about the functioning of the brain, and hence of culture and language,
to be able to rely on much more than intuition when choosing between different
variants which may appear to the individual translator to be equally possible and
appropriate in a given case, however specific the skopos.) The skopos can also help
to determine whether the source text needs to be “translated”, “paraphrased” or
completely “re-edited”. Such strategies lead to terminologically different varieties
of translational action, each based on a defined skopos which is itself based on a
specified commission.
The skopos theory thus in no way claims that a translated text should ipso facto
conform to the target culture behaviour or expectations, that a translation must
always “adapt” to the target culture. This is just one possibility: the theory equally
well accommodates the opposite type of translation, deliberately marked, with the
intention of expressing source-culture features by target-culture means. Everything
between these two extremes is likewise possible, including hybrid cases. To know
what the point of a translation is, to be conscious of the action – that is the goal of
the skopos theory. The theory campaigns against the belief that there is no aim
(in any sense whatever), that translation is a purposeless activity.
Are we not just making a lot of fuss about nothing, then? No, insofar as the
following claims are justified: (1) the theory makes explicit and conscious some-
thing that is too often denied; (2) the skopos, which is (or should be) defined in the
commission, expands the possibilities of translation, increases the range of possible
translation strategies, and releases the translator from the corset of an enforced –
and hence often meaningless – literalness; and (3) it incorporates and enlarges the
accountability of the translator, in that his translation must function in such a way
that the given goal is attained. This accountability in fact lies at the very heart of
the theory: what we are talking about is no less than the ethos of the translator.
By way of conclusion, here is a final example illustrating the importance of the
skopos or commission.
An old French textbook had a piece about a lawsuit concerning an inheritance
of considerable value. Someone had bequeathed a certain sum to two nephews. The
will had been folded when the ink was still wet, so that a number of small ink-blots
had appeared in the text. In one place, the text could read either as deux “two” or
d’eux “of them”. The lawsuit was about whether the sentence in question read à
chacun deux cent mille francs “to each, two hundred thousand francs,” or à chacun d’eux
cent mille francs “to each of them, one hundred thousand francs”. Assume that the
case was being heard in, say, a German court of law, and that a translation of the
will was required. The skopos (and commission) would obviously be to translate in
a “documentary” way, so that the judge would understand the ambiguity. The trans-
lator might for instance provide a note or comment to the effect that two readings
were possible at the point in question, according to whether the apostrophe was
interpreted as an inkblot or not, and explain them (rather as I have done here). –
Now assume a different context, where the same story occurs as a minor incident
in a novel. In this case a translator will surely not wish to interrupt the flow of the
narrative with an explanatory comment, but rather try to find a target language
solution with a similar kind of effect, e.g. perhaps introducing an ambiguity
202 HANS J. VERMEER

concerning the presence or absence of a crucial comma, so that 2000,00 francs

might be interpreted either as 2000 or as 200000 francs. Here the story is being
used “instrumentally”; the translation does not need to reproduce every detail, but
aims at an equivalent effect. – The two different solutions are equally possible and
attainable because each conforms to a different skopos. And this is precisely the
point of the example: one does not translate a source text in a void, as it were, but
always according to a given skopos or commission.
The above example also illustrates the fact that any change of skopos from
source to target text, or between different translations, gives rise to a separate target
text, e.g. as regards its text variety. (On text varieties (Textsorten), see Reiss and
Vermeer 1984; but cf. also Gardt’s (1987: 555) observation that translation strate-
gies are bound to text varieties only “in a strictly limited way”.) The source text
does not determine the variety of the target text, nor does the text variety deter-
mine ipso facto the form of the target text (the text variety does not determine the
skopos, either); rather, it is the skopos of the translation that also determines the
appropriate text variety. A “text variety”, in the sense of a classificatory sign of a
translatum, is thus a consequence of the skopos, and thereby secondary to it. In a
given culture it is the skopos that determines which text variety a translatum should
conform to. For example:
An epic is usually defined as a long narrative poem telling of heroic deeds. But
Homer’s Odyssey has also been translated into a novel: its text variety has thus
changed from epic to novel, because of a particular skopos. (Cf. Schadewaldt’s
(1958) translation into German, and the reasons he gives there for this change; also
see Vermeer 1983: 89–130.)
 Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer

Towards a General Theory

of Translational Action

Skopos Theory Explained

Translated from the German by Christiane Nord

English reviewed by Marina Dudenhöfer
First published  by St. Jerome Publishing

Published 2014 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© English translation, Christiane Nord 2013

© Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.

Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience
broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical
treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in
evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In
using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of
others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors,
assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products
liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products,
instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

ISBN 13:  (Qbk)

Typeset by
Delta Typesetters, Cairo, Egypt

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reiss, Katharina, author.
[Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. English]
Towards a general theory of translational action : skopos theory explained
/ Katharina Reiss and Hans J. Vermeer ; Translated from the German by
Christiane Nord ; English reviewed by Marina Dudenhöfer.
pages cm
“Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie, first published in 1984.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-905763-95-5 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Translating and interpreting. I. Vermeer, Hans J. (Hans Josef), 1930- author.
II. Nord, Christiane, translator. III. Dudenhöfer, Marina, editor of compilation.
IV. Title.
P306.R4313 1984
418’.02--dc23
2012049567
12. Text type and translation

12.0 Preliminary remarks

Considering the large variety of texts that have to be translated in professional

practice, it seems appropriate to follow the example of text linguistics and
elaborate a classification system for the textual ‘cosmos’. Such a classification
system could shed light on the behaviour of professional translators, which
varies intuitively depending on the texts, and could also provide a theoretical
explanation and support for such variations in behaviour. In text linguistics,
efforts to construct a typology have increasingly focussed on both the analysis
of genre characteristics (which, of course, also play an important role for trans­
lation studies,  11.) and on the possibilities of and conditions for describing
them. Translation studies, whose object of study is, among other things, the
conditions for and possibilities of translating, is primarily interested in a more
general and more abstract taxonomy, which would come before the classifi­
cation of genres and which would help to explain the different behaviour of
translators. It is for this reason that we propose the classification of text types.
Thus, in translation theory, the concepts of text type and genre do not com­
pete with each other at the same level, as they do in text linguistics (where,
according to Henschelmann 1979: 68, the term ‘genre’ recently seems to be
gaining ground over ‘text type’), but refer to different phenomena. The text
typology presented in this chapter does not claim to be generally applicable
to text linguistics; rather, it is designed to be relevant to translation. Contrary
to text linguistics, which deals with one language only, translation studies is
not concerned with texts as such but with texts that are being translated, will
be translated or have been translated. It is therefore important to gain some
insight into the status enjoyed by a particular text (as a prospective source
text) in the source culture before deciding about the status this text is intended
to (or can) have in the target culture.

12.1 Text status

The general functional translation theory developed in Part I of this book

facilitates and even demands an analysis not only of the function of transla­
tion processes and products but also that of any texts which are being, will
be or have been subjected to a translation process. The concept of function
is understood here according to the definition given by Klappenbach and
Steinitz: “[Function is] the role of being operative or effective in a particular
way (within a system)”.85
The status of a particular text within a culture largely depends on the func­
85
Aufgabe (innerhalb eines Ganzen) in einer bestimmten Weise wirksam, tätig zu sein.
(Klappenbach and Steinitz 1971: 1424)
182 Text type and translation

tion its author or authors wish(ed) to be assigned to it on the basis of the specific
text configuration features. Due to the intention (understood as purpose, aim
or motivation for verbal communication) verbalized by an author in his text,
this text (as an information offer,  3.) is assigned a general communicative
function which, in turn, determines its status within a culture community.

12.2 Text function

Drawing on Bühler’s ([1934]1990: 35) organon model, in which representa­

tion, expression and appeal are presented as the three basic functions of a
linguistic sign, we propose three basic functions of texts which are determined
by the author’s communicative intention (Reiß [1971]2000, 1976a, 1978b)
and which we have used as a basis for the classification of three different
text types. However, it does not make sense to apply Bühler’s model of
sign functions directly to entire texts. On the one hand, some scholars have
identified additional functions, such as the phatic and the poetic function (cf.
Jakobson), which, as far as we can see, seem to operate at a different level;
on the other hand, texts are more than (and different from) just the sum of
individual signs. What is valid for a sign of a lower level, e.g. a word, cannot
simply be transferred to signs of a higher level (e.g. a text); similarly, we have
to distinguish between word, sentence and text semantics, which have both
similar and distinctive features.

12.3 Text types

Before composing a text, an author will choose one of three basic communica­
tive forms, which are probably common to all culture communities and which
is why text types may be described as universal phenomena. These three basic
communicative types can be described on the basis of Bühler’s organon model.
If an author wants the information offer to convey content, i.e. if the text has
been composed with the intention of passing on news, knowledge, views,
etc. (which can be assigned to the representational function of language), we
speak of an informative text type. If the author wants the information offer
to convey artistically organized content, consciously verbalizing the content
according to aesthetic criteria (an intention which can be assigned to the
expressive function of language), we speak of an expressive text type. If an
author wants the information offer to convey persuasively organized content in
order to encourage the recipient to act in accordance with the intentions of the
text sender (or of the commissioner), which can be assigned to the appellative
function of language, we speak of an operative text type. In other words: these
three types are ‘encoded’ at different levels. The informative type is encoded
at the level of content; the expressive type is encoded at the level of content
and aesthetic organization; the operative type is encoded at the level of content
and persuasion (to which the level of aesthetic organization is occasionally
added). The following table illustrates this hierarchy.
Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer 183

informative expressive operative

E content (+ aesthetic or­ x
N ganization); persuasive
C L configuration
O E
D V content; aesthetic x (x)
I E organization
N L
G content x x x

A few examples may help to clarify this typology.

Operating instructions will convey the necessary information to enable

the reader to use an object correctly → this is a text of the informative
type (although it may contain certain linguistic signs that, in isolation,
would be categorized as appellative in Bühler’s model, such as impera­
tives, which are quite common in this genre).
A poem transmits content based on both the meaning of the indi­
vidual linguistic signs and on the combination of these signs to form
an aesthetic design, as well as from the associations and ideas evoked
by these signs → this is a text of the expressive type.
A propaganda pamphlet is intended to make the recipients react
in exactly the way the sender wants them to react. This is usually
not achieved by matter­of­fact, objective information nor by an aes­
thetically organized piece of communication alone but mainly by the
persuasive composition of the text (for details, see Reiß 1976a) → this
is a text of the operative type.
In a satirical novel, authors also intend to win the readers over to
their views, not only to inform them about such views. In such cases,
the aesthetic organization of the content (novel = expressive text)
is combined with a persuasive composition → this is a text of the
operative type with an expressive secondary function or a text of the
expressive type with an operative secondary function depending on
the level of encoding which predominates.

12.4 Hybrid forms

The last example shows that the three text types do not always occur in a pure
form. With regard to their textual function within a communicative event, the
first three examples (the operating instructions, the poem and the propaganda
pamphlet) can be regarded as pure representatives of their respective types. In
practice, however, we can find not only bad texts where, for some reason, the
author has failed to achieve the intended text type but also texts that pursue two
or more intentions or (longer) texts that include sections or paragraphs belong­
ing to different text types. As the example of the satirical novel shows, multiple
184 Text type and translation

intentions can be put into a hierarchical order (i.e. one function is subordinate
to the other) or they can have equal weight, as in the following example.

(1) i before e except after c

or when sounded like a
as in neighbour or weigh.86

In this mnemonic verse, we can identify at least three different intentions, i.e.
the intention to:
1. convey a rule;
2. facilitate the remembering of the rule by giving the text an aesthetic form
(rhyme, metre),
3. make learning more fun with a catchy jingle.

In our opinion, this is a hybrid form which combines the expressive and the
informative type. Both functions have to be regarded as carrying equal weight,
at least in English. If the text is translated into another language, the translator
has to decide which function to retain, unless the target language allows him
to retain both (for more on translation relevance, see  12.7.).
The three basic functions may even alternate with one another in the same
text, e.g. in the final speech of a defence lawyer in court, who wants to obtain
the least heavy sentence or even an acquittal for the accused. Its dominating
function classifies the speech as a text of the operative type, which requires
appellative language and persuasive strategies of verbalization. However,
such a speech will usually also include passages describing the situation in a
purely informative way.

12.5 Identifying signals

In their pre­translational source­text analysis, translators may find some se­

mantic and pragmatic guidelines for the classification of the text type, while
their world knowledge and text experience may provide additional help. For
example, “pre­signals” (Große 1976: 20) like titles or genre specifications can
facilitate their analysis. A law informs – without any aesthetic organization or
persuasive devices – about facts the recipient has to take notice of and consider
in order to avoid sanctions. A contract informs about the state of particular
circumstances and about the duties and rights of the partners who are using
this text to fix the terms of their agreement in writing. Both texts can only be
classified as belonging to the informative type. However, if a text is referred
to as a novel or as a sonnet, we can expect it to follow the tradition which of­
fers aesthetically organized content; it is therefore categorized as text of the
86
The original quotes a similar German mnemotechnical verse which refers to French
pronunciation and spelling: “C vor o und u und a spricht man immer wie ein k; soll es wie
ein c erklingen, lässt man die Cedille springen.” (Translator’s note)
Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer 185

expressive type.
“Metapropositional expressions” (Große 1976: 22) can make the typo­
logical classification of texts easier because they are often conventional,
particularly in genres where everybody is familiar with their communicative
function. In the name of the People is a typical introduction for a verdict pro­
nounced in court; By virtue of this deed I grant introduces a general power
of attorney, etc. ( 11.4.1.). What is particularly important, however, is the
language and style used in a text. A high frequency of evaluative words and
phrases (which are either positive with regard to the addressers, or to the
cause to which they have committed themselves, or negative with regard to
any obstacle to their commitment), the particular frequency of certain rhe­
torical devices (e.g. anaphora, alliteration, antithesis, parallelism, hyperbole,
leading questions) may point to a text of the operative type. The “feature that
individual speech elements can point beyond themselves to the meaning of
the whole” (cf. Große 1976: 1127), as well as all the phenomena related to the
“principle of linkage” (e.g. rhymes, metaphorical fields, leitmotifs, recurrent
lexical and syntactic devices, or rhythm) may lead us to the conclusion that
the text belongs to the expressive type.
Some of the linguistic features mentioned so far are shared by both the
expressive and the operative text types, but having pragmatic knowledge of the
communicative use of the text may still make it possible for us to determine
the function of the respective text elements.

(2) Sea, sun, sand, seclusion – and Spain. (From a hotel

advertisement)

This is an advertising slogan, in which the dominant function of the allitera­

tion is not to achieve an aesthetic organization of the text but (as is typical for
operative texts) to make the slogan catchy and to transfer positive associations
(sea, sun … ) to the advertised product (Spain).

(3) Now the news.

Night raids on Five cities. Fires started.
Pressure applied by pincer movement
In threatening thrust. Third Division Enlarges beachhead.
Lucky charm Saves sniper.
Sabotage hinted In steel­mill stoppage. […] (W. H. Auden, The Age
of Anxiety, [1947]2011: 10 )87

87
The original quotes the poem “Nachtblume” by the Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff
(1788­1857): Nacht ist wie ein stilles Meer / Lust und Leid und Liebesklagen / kommen so
verworren her / in dem linden Wellenschlagen. English trans. by Emily Ezust: Night is like
a quiet sea: / joy and sorrow and the laments of love / become tangled up / in the gentle
throbbing of the waves. (http:// [Link]/lieder/get_text.html?Ttextld=5324, last
accessed 01/02/2012) (Translator’s note)
186 Text type and translation

In contrast, the alliterative verse W. H. Auden (1907­1973) uses in his poem

is intended to symbolize the bombing he is describing so that the readers can
virtually hear it themselves. It is thus one of the elements of the aesthetic
organization of this expressive text. A translation of the two texts aiming at
equivalence would have to focus on reproducing the positive associations
in (2) and the symbolic potential in (3).
If these characteristics are lacking or occur only as sporadic stylistic ele­
ments, the text would be categorized as belonging to the informative type.

(4) We hold these truths to be self­evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
(The Declaration of Independence, 1776)

(5) It didn’t work as well as you’d expect, and now [Manchester] City
are relying on Tevez once again to ‘freshen’ the squad and help it across
the finishing line after recent stumbles have seen [Chelsea] United
overtake them in the league. (From a football match report)

(6) FROM RUSSIA WITH GLOVES. Chelsea played their first

European away game for years. They won 4­2 on aggregate against
Viktoria Zizkov. Russian goalkeeper Dmitri Kharine saved a crucial
penalty. (From a football match report)

Neither the tricolon in (4) nor the metaphors in (5) nor the pun in (6) turn
these passages into a text of the expressive or operative type. They are only
isolated elements of poetic language whose occurrence in texts of the informa­
tive type is due to stylistic reasons or to the genre. Match reports often use
metaphorical or connotative language; national declarations use rhetorical
figures and pathos, etc.

12.6 Amplification of the typology

Although they are presented in the written medium, source texts are often
only one component of a complex offer of communication transmitted si­
multaneously or successively in more than one medium. Thus, it would be
advisable to postulate a fourth text type for translation studies. This may not
be as obvious from a monolingual standpoint as when we look at texts in their
function as material for translation. In interpreting, for example, it is not just
the language used but also the facial expressions and gestures which encap­
sulate the offer of information to be transferred. When translating oral speech
(addresses and lectures, text for radio and television, films and theatre plays,
etc.), it is important that the translatum can be spoken out loud. Written texts
which provide a joint information offer that includes images (picture books,
Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer 187

comics, slides and transparencies with text, etc.) or music (songs, musical
comedies, etc.) are usually characterized by the mutual dependence of the
various media used. These texts cannot be translated without due considera­
tion of this interdependence. They will therefore have to be categorized as a
fourth type which (adopting Spillner’s suggestion to replace the former term
‘audio­medial’) we shall call a multimedial text type. This fourth type is a
‘hyper­type’ which is superimposed over the three other basic types, each of
which may occur in the form of a multimedial text.

12.7 The relevance of text types for translation

At this point, we may stop to ask whether, in addition to the classification of

genres, we need a classification of text types. Some translation scholars would
deny the necessity of such a classification, particularly if they are mainly
concerned with modern texts or texts which can be assigned to only one of the
types defined above. These scholars prefer to stick to the traditional dichotomy
between literary and non­literary texts, which Schleiermacher ([1838]2004)
strictly correlated with two very different translation methods. Within the
framework of such a dichotomy, they are satisfied with a classification of
genres. However, in the practice of translating, genre categories are by no
means sufficient to explain, justify and describe different translation strategies,
as Kelly (1979) aptly demonstrated in relation to translation functions. What
Kelly claims regarding the three possible functions of target texts (based also
on Bühler’s organon model, without giving separate consideration to the in­
fluence of multimedial communication on the conditions of and possibilities
for translation), cannot be ignored with regard to the basic functions of source
texts. A genre can be verbalized by different text types (although this is not
a rule). The function of a begging letter (persuasive) is different from that of
a letter telling us about travel experiences (informative) or from that of an
aesthetically organized poetic letter (expressive, cf. example 19,  10.13.).
As translators do not only deal with contemporary texts, we should also
take into account that both the functions of texts and the traditions behind
the wording may change over time. For example, due to the higher status of
rhymed language in the Middle Ages, legal texts were often written in verse
(aesthetic organization), which is why we would assign such texts to the ex­
pressive type today. Temporal distance may also be a reason for the function
intended by the author only being accessible today to experts familiar with
the period in question and not to modern readers. For ordinary readers (even
if they can read the original), it may not be clear that Jonathan Swift wrote
his Gulliver’s Travels as a satire on contemporary social ills (expressive type
with operative secondary function). As they are not able to identify the aim of
the satire, they are more likely to read the text as a fantastic adventure story
(expressive type), and this is how the book is translated today.
Thus, there are two reasons why we think a classification of source texts
188 Text type and translation

is justified and necessary, not only with regard to genres but also with regard
to text types.

12.7.1 Invariance of text type in translation

From the function of the source text and its status in the source culture, we
can infer the functional value of individual text components. The translation
strategies applied to individual text elements will differ depending on the text
type to which a particular source text is assigned because the target text is
supposed to represent the same text type as the source text, at least where the
aim of the translation process is an invariance of function.
Let us take the well­known dictum attributed to the French king Francis
I as an example:

(7) Souvent femme varie, bien fol est qui s’y fie.

If this sentence is mentioned, for example, in a history book (informative text),

the content may be rendered as follows:

(7a) Frauen sind wankelmütig. Ein Narr ist, wer ihnen traut.
Woman is fickle; he who trusts her, a fool.

The same utterance is used in Victor Hugo’s drama Le roi s’amuse (The King
Amuses Himself), an expressive text of the multimedial type.88 A German
translation reads:

(7b) Ein Weib ändert sich jeden Tag,

ein Narr ist, wer ihr trauen mag.

An English translation into blank verse, probably by Frederick L. Slous, reads:

Changeful women, constant never,

He’s a fool who trusts her ever.89

Translating a text of the expressive type, the translator often has to make some
alterations of the source text (e.g. translating souvent, ‘often’, by jeden Tag,
‘every day’, and adding mag, ‘may’, in the German translation; or translating

88
The original attributes the quote to Victor Hugo’s drama Marie Tudor, translated into Ger­
man by Georg Büchner in 1835. A search in Hugo’s original works revealed that it is from
Le roi s’amuse, which served as a model for Verdi’s opera Rigoletto. (Translator’s note)
89
Victor Hugo: Three Plays: Hernani, The king amuses himself, Ruy Blas. Washington
Square Press 1964.
Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer 189

souvent by never and adding ever in the English translation), which can be
explained and justified precisely by the text type.
The first line of this verse was used in a text promoting a French wine:

(8) Souvent femme varie. Les vins du Postillon ne varient jamais.

(Literally: A woman often changes. Postillon wines never change.)

In German, neither (7a) nor (7b) would meet the requirements of the text type.
In this (operative) text, the quote serves as a literary allusion (well­known in
France) intended to confer prestige on the promoted product. It is a catchy
slogan, appealing to the connoisseur of (French) history, literature and good
wine. As the German reader can hardly have the same background knowledge,
a literal translation of the content would not achieve this function because it
lacks the appellative or persuasive effect.

(8a) Frauenherzen sind trügerisch. Postillon­Weine betrügen dich nie.

(Literally: Women’s hearts are deceptive. Postillon wines will never
deceive you.)

The historical and literary allusion is replaced by an allusion to a well­known

line in the German libretto of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto.90 By directly addressing
the reader (dich, ‘you’) and punning on the words trügerisch (‘deceptive’) and
betrügen (‘to deceive’), the somewhat frivolous allusion of the first part leads
to the promise of reliability in the second part, which is strengthened by the
antithetical construction of the slogan. Thus, the association of reliability can
be transferred to the product, unfolding its full persuasive potential.
In order to achieve equivalence (which, of course, is only aimed at in
communicative translations,  10.5.2., where the skopos requires that the
target text achieve the same function as the source text), it is, therefore, not
sufficient to identify the genre because the decisive clue is often provided by
the text type. Thus, the translation strategies described here apply not only to
individual genres but also to more comprehensive classes of texts, independent
of the genre they represent.

12.7.2 Change of text type in translation

It is by no means an a priori rule that the target text must, can or should have
the same communicative function as the source text. We have illustrated this
90
The Italian aria La donna è mobile / Qual piuma al vento … has been translated into Ger­
man by O wie so trügerisch / Sind Weiberherzen … The English translation of the first two
lines would not work as a source for this allusion because the reference to the woman’s heart
has been shifted to the end of the stanza: Plume in the summerwind / Waywardly playing
[…] Thus heart of womankind / Ev’ry way bendeth. (Translator’s note)
190 Text type and translation

claim by distinguishing between several translation types ( 10.5.), which

may be determined by historical translation norms differing from those of a
communicative translation or by the function of the target text or any of its
parts having been intentionally changed in order to produce a target text ap­
propriate for a specific purpose or use. In such cases, the choice of adequate
translation procedures depends, among other things, on the function the target
text is intended to achieve.
The following example is from the speech Pompidou gave after the death
of General de Gaulle. It was broadcast all over the French media and presents
all the features of a classical, rhetorically organized funeral address (expres­
sive text type). We base our analysis on Paepcke (1974), although we do not
agree with all his arguments concerning the translation. This speech contained
the following line:

(9) Le général de Gaulle est mort. La France est veuve.

(Literally: General de Gaulle is dead. France is a widow.)

How this line is translated depends on the translation type: if the purpose is
to translate the entire text in its function as a funeral address characterized by
an aesthetic organization (expressive text type), the adequate translation type
would be a communicative translation; if the purpose is to inform the target
audience about the words used by the French author to formulate this text (ex­
pressive text type), a philological translation would be the appropriate type.

(9a) General de Gaulle ist tot. Frankreich ist Witwe.

The German translation would provide the German reader with the desired
information, including the metaphor used in the original to express the emo­
tional attachment and grief felt by France. However, a German reader who
is not familiar with the fact that La France has a feminine gender (contrary
to Frankreich which like all German names of countries is neuter in gender)
may find the female personification (Witwe, ‘widow’) inappropriate or even
ridiculous, which would destroy the rhetorical effect.

(9b) General de Gaulle ist tot. Frankreich ist verwaist.

(Literally: General de Gaulle is dead. France is orphaned.)

Now the image is coherent. A content element has been replaced by another
one, but the function of referring to France’s grief at having lost a dear relative
is retained, although through the use of a different image.
It should have become clear that the eternal question of how ‘free’ or how
‘faithful’ a translation can, must or should be, to which translation scholars
Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer 191

often respond by quoting the rather vague motto ‘as literal as possible but
as free as necessary’, can be answered in a more precise way. It depends not
only on the genre but also on the text type to which the source text can be
assigned and on the purpose which the translation is intended to achieve in
the communicative event.
Epilogue

At the beginning of this book, we wrote that we were not planning to offer a
complete theory of translational action but, rather, that we would offer parts of
a theory in such a way that they can be completed and expanded on by specific
partial theories at any moment in time. We have tried to pursue this aim. With
hindsight, it has become clear to us that the theory must be developed and
completed with regard to the following aspects (Vermeer 1983b):

(1) The first question is why texts (and translations) are produced at all (
3.8.) and how this should be done, taking into account each situation and in line
with the intended skopos ( 4.). Seen from our present viewpoint, a theory of
text production could best be developed as a specific action theory (cf., among
others, Rehbein 1977, and Harras 1978; for an epistemological basis see Riedel
1978: 165-72). This theory of text production should be complemented by a
contrastive culture theory (Vermeer 1977 and 1978; cf. Beneke 1979a, 1979b,
1983) which could study the culture-specific conditions of textualization.

(2) This raises another closely related question: which skopoi can be achieved
by a translation and under which conditions? Here we are faced with two
subordinate problems.
(2a) In many translations, we can assume that invariance of skopos (and
function) will be the normal case. (Methodologically, however, we shall define
invariance of skopos as a specific case, where the difference is ‘zero’, whereas
change of skopos is the general case which is, therefore, the starting point for
a general theory of translational action.) Invariance of skopos will be most
frequently aimed at in the translation of pragmatic texts: operating instructions
are usually translated as operating instructions. However, with regard to novels,
we may have to make a distinction: light fiction will usually be translated as
light fiction, but the skopos may change in that certain subfunctions may be
different. One of the subfunctions has clearly been changed if, for example,
sociocritical light fiction is translated as entertaining social criticism (e.g.
Eça de Queirós’ O crime do Padre Amaro → Das Verbrechen des Paters
Amaro in an East-German translation, cf. The Crime of Father Amaro in an
English translation; cf. also the transformation of the English cockney social
dialect in My Fair Lady into the regional dialect of Berlin in the German
production). The change of function is less obvious when the target recipient
reads a novel from another culture in order to learn about this culture: the
interests guiding a French reader’s way of reading Queneau’s Zazie dans le
metro will be different from that of an English recipient of Zazie in the metro
(in his discussion of the German translation, Albrecht 1981 does not touch
upon this point). We claim that this kind of change in skopos is the more
Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer 193

typical case in works like these. How far does it determine the translator’s
strategies? (In the case of My Fair Lady the change in strategy is probably
obvious.) Starting from the problems mentioned above, the question of skopos
may be dealt with in relation to text typology and genre classification (cf.
Reiß [1971]2000 and 1976a,  11. and 12.).
(2b) Let us assume that a marketing agency commissions the transla-
tion of an advertising leaflet in order to use it for the promotion of a product.
In order to optimize the advertising skopos (‘operative text type’, according
to Reiß), the translator may have to reformulate the source text from scratch.
The skopos is different when a company wishes to use an advertising leaflet
in order to gain information about the products of a subcontractor. In this case,
it is still an advertising leaflet that is translated, but the goal here is to gain as
much information as possible (“informative text type”, according to Reiß).
Thus, putting it in a different way, the leaflet is converted into a ‘document’
and any radical revision of it is ruled out. The translation strategy is changed
due to the skopos, which in turn changes according to whether the translation
is commissioned by the text producer or the text recipient (these questions are
dealt with in Holz-Mänttäri 1984).

(3) Another question is how actions (and, therefore, texts) can be understood.
A theory of understanding would have to explain, with regard to translation,
how the conditions of target-text reception differ from those of source-text
reception (cf. Vermeer [1979]1983: 62-88).

(4) It will be necessary to develop a theory of coherence ( 6.2. on intratex-

tual coherence), including taking into consideration the different conditions
for source and target texts due to different cultural backgrounds.

(5) Finally, we would like to mention one last desideratum. It concerns the
study of the formal surface characteristics of a translatum which are based
both on its dependence on the translation skopos ( 4.) and on the conditions
for imitating the source text (3.9.). A translation-oriented theory on style may
provide some surprising insights into common translation strategies, which
might even have to be thoroughly revised as a result of this.

For example: Thomas Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia

is written in a Teutonic style, with very long and complex sentences
(Oakman 1982). If this book were to be translated into German, the
usual strategy to translate sentence by sentence would result in a
stylistically unmarked text which perfectly conforms to the German
style conventions for this genre. In order to render the specificity of
Carlyle’s style, the translator would probably have to adapt the text to
Kantian ways of expression.
194 Epilogue

Some of the aspects mentioned above have been developed further in later
publications as listed below.91
Fundamental translation issues are discussed in Reiß (1988) and Reiß
(1989). Combining the theory of translational action presented in this book
with Justa Holz-Mänttäri’s theory of translatorial action, published almost sim-
ultaneously (Holz-Mänttäri 1984), we might be able to set out a comprehensive
theory as conceptualized in Vermeer (1990b), where a theory of the translation
brief or commission complements the skopos theory. In the same study (i.e.
Vermeer 1990b), the roles in translatorial action discussed by Holz-Mänttäri
are further developed by a formula which relates the factors characterizing
the actors in each case with each other.
What is transmitted ‘from one mind to another’ and how is it transmitted?
These are the questions dealt with in Vermeer and Witte (1990), where ‘scenes-
and-frames’ theory is combined with ‘channel’ theory, drawing on Poyatos
(1983). Both Hönig and Kußmaul (1982) and, later, Ammann (1990a) offer a
practical introduction to the state of the art in skopos theory which addresses
young trainee translators. Cultural aspects are discussed by Witte (1987)92
and Löwe (1990).
The following publications deal with particular aspects of translational
action: Nord ([1988]2005) develops a model for pre-translational text analy-
sis, Ammann (1990b) discusses a theory of translation criticism, drawing on
Reiß’s seminal work in this area (Reiß [1971]2000). Reiß (1990) and Vermeer
(1990a) discuss the ontological status of texts as seen from the producer’s
standpoint and texts as seen from the recipient’s point of view and the rela-
tionship between the two.
Vermeer (1989) attempts to develop a distinction between surface and
deep-structure translation which might be useful in machine translation (cf.
also Vermeer 1988).
With regard to technical translation, cf., above all, Peter A. Schmitt’s pub-
lications, particularly Schmitt 199093, to name but one out of many important
studies.
Kistner-Deppert (1988) and Hild-Thomas (1989) deal with culture-sensitive
dictionaries. Löwe (1990) and Witte (1989) discuss the application of skopos
theory in the translation classroom, which Nord ([1990-1991]2001) attempts

91
This list of publications was first included in the 1991 revised edition of the book. Ref-
erences to later editions or English versions have been added in the bibliography where
available. For an overview of recent developments in functional approaches to translation,
cf. also Nord 2012. (Translator’s note)
92
In her doctoral dissertation, Witte elaborates her concept of the translator’s cultural com-
petence and discusses how it can be trained: Witte, Heidrun (2000) Die Kulturkompetenz
des Translators. Begriffliche Grundlegung und Didaktisierung, Tübingen: Stauffenburg..
(Translator’s note).
93
In English, cf. P. A. Schmitt 1992. (Translator’s note)
Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer 195

to put into practice in a student manual for Spanish-German translation. Am-

mann and Vermeer (1990) demonstrate how skopos theory could be applied
to the development of a syllabus for translator training.
In this book, interpreting has perhaps not received the attention it deserves.
Some studies dealing with this variant of translational action can be found
in Albrecht 1990, Poyatos 1987, Salevsky 1990, Seleskovitch and Lederer
1989, among others.94
With regard to the possibility of creating a new profession, the ‘cultural
consultant’ as an expert on regional studies, cf. Löwe (1990) and others.

94
Franz Pöchhacker was the first to apply skopos theory to conference interpreting in his
1994 title Simultandolmetschen als komplexes Handeln (Tübingen:
Tübingen: Narr). In English,
cf. also Pöchhacker, F. (1995) ‘Simultaneous Interpreting: A Functionalist Perspective’,
Hermes. Journal of Linguistics 14: 31-53).
). ((Translator’s note)
 Michael Cronin,
Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene
(Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017)

1 Translation and the global

economy

In AD 828, two merchants arrived in the city of Venice with a corpse. The body
was not any old body, however, but that of St Mark, the Evangelist. They had
stolen the mortal remains of the saint from the tomb where he lay in Alexandria
with the help of the Christian guards who were fearful for the fate of Mark under
Saracen rule. The shroud was slit up the back, the body removed and the remains
of St Claudian put in its place. The mortal remains were taken to a waiting ship
where they were covered in quantities of pork and the dead saint was spirited
away to a city which would make the lion of the Evangelist a symbol of its great-
ness in the centuries to come (Norwich 1983: 28–9).

Translation
Saintly body-snatching was not an uncommon practice in the medieval period. In
The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity Peter Brown notes,‘A
hectic trade in, accompanied by frequent thefts of, relics, is among the most
dramatic, not to say picturesque aspects of Western Christendom in the Middle
Ages’ (Brown 1981: 88). It was, after all, preferable to bring the relics to believers
than have large numbers of believers travelling long, uncertain distances to the
relics, or as Brown puts it,‘Translations – the movements of relics to people – and
not pilgrimages – the movement of people to relics – hold the centre of stage in
late antique and early medieval piety’ (ibid.: 90).
The act of translation may have saved on time but it did not save on distance. In
other words, although the time it took for a pious Venetian to get to the Basilica
was much less than it would have taken him or her to get to the Evangelist’s tomb
in Alexandria, the distance between the believer and the relic when the believer
was in the presence of the relic was just as great. The relic carried the miraculous
aura of origin, confirmed by tales of divine intervention in allowing the translation
to be effected, and nearness to its presence was a reminder of farness from its
essence. The shrines containing relics were all closed surfaces, the faithful glimps-
ing fragments and shreds of the sacred through narrow openings. In Brown’s
 Translation and the global economy 9
words, the shrine housing the translated saint is replicating what he calls the
‘therapy of distance’ that is at the heart of pilgrimage (Brown 1981: 87).When pil-
grims go on a journey, the principal discovery is not destination but distance. The
spiritual value lies as much, if not more, in the wandering as in the arrival. The her-
meticism of the reliquary makes the distance travelled palpable for those who have
left and real for those who have stayed. In this chapter, we wish to explore the
notion of a therapy of distance in the secular rather than the religious domain (see
also Josipovici 1996: 65–78). In particular, we want to examine what this medieval
practice of translatio might tell us about translation in the new global economy and
about our roles as translators, teachers and theoreticians of translation in changing
economic, political and cultural circumstances.
Venice was not unusual in being symbolically grateful to the dead. There are
few cities which do not owe their prestige to mythical investiture by the presence
of departed deities, emperors, saints or spirits. Régis Debray sees sepulchres as
primordial mnemonics, an early stage in the elaboration of a symbolic dimension
to human experience:

L’os, notre point fixe. Toute civilisation débute par des restes.‘Tu es Pierre et
sur cette pierre . . .’ Martyr, tu seras réduit à l’os; cet os sera mis en châsse;
ce réliquaire attirera les pèlerins, qui bâtiront une église par-dessus; et toute
une ville va grandir alentour.1
(Debray 2000: 25)

The standing stone links the past, present and future. It reminds those who are of
those who were before and indicates a future time when they will no longer be,
but others will be there in their place, contemplating the same stone. In linking a
tangible presence to an intelligible absence, the stone or tomb or reliquary is per-
forming a primary symbolic operation. The monument as physical trace also
makes the existence of individual human beings transindividual through objecti-
fication. It is the materialization of the inscription as monument which allows the
subject to emerge for other subjects. Humanity, in other words, is not con-
structed as an idealist antithesis between subjects and objects with freedom lying
in the realm of the subjective mind and necessity resting in the realm of objects. It
is the object which allows the subject to emerge and it is in and through objects
that our subjectivity is constructed and endures.
And this will be the second theme of this chapter, the relationship between
translation and things. In the history of translation studies, the tendency at one
stage was to dwell on translation and texts. Translation studies compared source
texts and target texts to see what happened and used the results of the analysis to
form prescriptive or descriptive laws (depending on the School) of systemic
change. In more recent times, there has been a greater focus on translation and
10 Translation and the global economy
translators. In part, this is due to the strong emergence of translation history as a
sub-discipline in translation studies but there have also been the theoretical contri-
butions of Douglas Robinson, Daniel Simeoni, Luise von Flotow and Edwin
Gentzler (Robinson 1991; Simeoni 1995: 445–60; von Flotow 1997; Gentzler
2001). However, relatively little attention has been paid to translation and things. By
things, we mean here all the tools or elements of the object world which trans-
lators use or have been affected by in their work down through the centuries.
Though tools are routinely described in an instrumental fashion in the periodical
literature of translation technology, thinking on the relationship between trans-
lation and the technosphere has been in the main [Link] yet like any
other realm of human activity, it is impossible to conceive of translation outside
the object-world it inhabits.
The standing stone is a reminder not only of time passing but of time past and
how all that is human changes to dust. In the final section of this chapter, we want
to explore what goes on in the afterlife of the soil and suggest that in translation
terms our ends may very well be our beginnings.

The informational and global economy

So what kind of world is the contemporary context for our thinking about trans-
lation, distance and things? The dramatic slump in Western economies in the
1970s, with record unemployment and high inflation triggered by oil price
increases in 1974 and 1979, led to a fundamental restructuring of economies in
the developed world, with a strong emphasis on privatization and deregulation
(see Castells 1980). The period also witnessed the advent of the information tech-
nology revolution that would dramatically transform work practices at local and
international levels. The invention of the transistor (1947), the use of silicon for
the production of semiconductors (1954), the invention of the integrated circuit
(1957), and the creation of the computer on a chip, the microprocessor, by Ted
Hoff of Intel (1971) laid the technological basis for the IT revolution (Castells
1996: 40–6). The emergence of PC software in the 1970s would allow the
advances in microelectronics to bear fruit in the widespread dissemination of the
personal computer (Rheingold 1991). In the agricultural mode of development,
increasing surplus comes from increases in the amount of labour or natural
resources (such as land) available for the production process. In the industrial
mode of development, new energy sources (steam, electricity) are the principal
source of productivity alongside the ability to distribute energy through appropri-
ate circulation and production processes. As Christopher Freeman notes, ‘The
contemporary change of paradigm may be seen as a shift from a technology based
primarily on cheap inputs of energy to one predominantly based on cheap inputs
of information derived from advances in microelectronic and telecommunications
 Translation and the global economy 11
technology’ (Freeman 1988: 10). Manuel Castells, for his part, has described the
economy that has emerged over the last two decades as informational and global.
The economy is informational because the productivity and competitiveness of
firms, regions and nations basically depend upon their ability to create, process
and apply efficiently knowledge-based information.
Informationalism is directed towards technological development, in the form
of the accumulation of knowledge and the move towards higher levels of complex-
ity in information processing. The ‘informational society’ is to be distinguished
from the information society in that all human societies rely for their cohesion and
indeed survival on the communication of relevant information to their members
but ‘informational’ refers to a particular way of organizing the economy and
society. Castells makes comparisons with the use of the word ‘industrial’:

the term informational indicates the attribute of a specific form of social

organisation in which information generation, processing, and transmission
become the fundamental sources of productivity and power, because of new
technological conditions emerging in this historical period. My terminology
tries to establish a parallel with the distinction between industry and indus-
trial. An industrial society . . . is not just a society where there is industry,
but a society where the social and technological forms of industrial organiza-
tion permeate all spheres of activity, starting with the dominant activities,
located in the economic system and in military technology, and reaching the
objects and habits of everyday life.
(Castells 1996: 21)

Information technologies range from microelectronics and computing to broad-

casting, optoelectronics and genetic engineering. What is significant about the
information technology revolution is the presence of a cumulative feedback loop
between innovation and the uses of innovation so that information and knowledge
are applied to further information processing and knowledge generation in a vir-
tuous circle that is also a non-negligible factor of acceleration. Furthermore, as
we use information in all aspects of our lives, the effects of informationalism are
all-pervasive.
This new economy is global because the central activities of production, con-
sumption and circulation, as well as their components (capital, labour, raw mat-
erials, management, information, technology, markets), are organized on a global
scale, either directly or through a network of connections between different eco-
nomic agents.
The informational economy emerged at the end of the twentieth century
because the information technology revolution provided the tools or the material
basis for this new economy. A world economy is of course nothing new. The
12 Translation and the global economy
history of empires has shown us that capital accumulation proceeding throughout
the world has been with us for a long time (see Braudel 1967;Wallerstein 1974).
However, as Castells points out, ‘A global economy is something different: it is an
economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale’ (Castells
1996: 92 [his emphasis]).Another way of analysing recent transformations is to see
the economy as shifting from a Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production or
from an industrial system dominated by mass production to one favouring flexible
production. For much of the twentieth century, the mass-production model was
paramount. It was based on the productivity gains from the economies of scale
realized by the mechanized, assembly-line production of a standard product. The
product in turn was sold into a market dominated by large corporations which
were structured on the principles of vertical integration and institutionalized
social and technical division of labour. With the economic slump of the 1970s,
diversification of world markets and the emergence of IT rendering obsolete
single-purpose production technology, Fordism was a paradigm which was gener-
ating diminishing returns. Hence, the advent of post-Fordism or high-volume
flexible production which combined high-volume output with easy-to-programme
computerized production units. These units could respond rapidly to changes in
demand (product flexibility) or technology (process flexibility).
Post-Fordism is the era of lean production, time-to-market, flexitime, the hori-
zontal corporation, the meteoric rise of sub-contracting and the exponential
increase in advertising budgets (see Harvey 1990). The main resources driving
the new economy are information and knowledge. Castells notes, ‘Because infor-
mationalism is based on the technology of knowledge and information, there is a
specially close linkage between culture and productive forces, between spirit and
matter, in the informational mode of development’ (Castells 1996: 18). The
relationship between spirit and matter in these new circumstances is not,
however, always a harmonious one. In a world of ceaseless change and the unend-
ing global flows of wealth, power and images, the search for specific identity,
whether religious or ethnic, as refuge and source of meaning becomes intense.
There follows, in Castells’ words,‘a fundamental split between abstract, universal
instrumentalism, and historically rooted, particularistic identities. Our societies are
increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self’ (ibid.: 3
[his emphasis]).

Self and the Net

Has translation been affected by the fundamental changes in the way in which the
world does business? The answer of course is yes, but as always translation is a
figure less of certainty than of recurrent ambiguity. In the bipolar opposition
sketched by Castells translation occupies a typically both/and position. In other
 Translation and the global economy 13
words, translation partakes both of the Self and of the Net. It is linked both to
abstract, universal instrumentalism and to specific, rooted identities. This is cold
comfort for those who prefer the digital certainties of on/off, for or against cul-
ture, for or against modernization, for or against diversity, for or against hom-
ogenization. However, it is precisely translation’s analogue status which allows us
to think out the world in its complexity rather than in the reductive simplicities of
Manichaean polemic. Let us start with the Net, to be understood here in the broad
sense of a worldwide, electronically mediated environment that underpins the
operations of the new global economy. An area of substantial growth in the trans-
lation industry over the last two decades has been the activity of localization. So
what is it? The Yearbook produced by the Localisation Resources Centre based in
the University of Limerick gives a useful definition of software localization:

Software localisation covers many different aspects of industrial and academic

activity, ranging from the manufacture of diskettes and CD-ROMs, through
translation, engineering and testing software applications, to the complete
management of complex projects taking place simultaneously, sometimes in a
dozen different locations all over the world, involving people working in dif-
ferent languages and cultures.
(Localisation Resources Centre 1997: 7–8)

Localization clearly relates to the translation needs generated by the informational

economy in an era of global markets. It is important at this point to make a distinc-
tion between internationalization, which is the design of a product so that it can
easily be adapted to foreign markets, and localization, which is taking a product
that has already been designed and tailoring it to meet the needs of a specific local
market (Sprung 2000: xvi–xvii). The implications of the new economy in terms of
volume growth in translation are striking. The world market for software and Web
localization was estimated by Allied Business Research to be around US$11 billion
for 1999 and expanding to US$20 billion by 2004. The number of full-time and
part-time translators in the world was conservatively put at 317,000 in 1999 and
continues to grow (Sprung 2000: ix). The scale of projects undertaken is com-
mensurate with the rapid expansion in the size and global spread of business
operations. One example was a project undertaken by Image Partnership, a multi-
lingual project-management company based in London. They were responsible,
along with the printer Ventura Litho, for producing 40 brochures, each of 56 to 88
pages, in 11 languages for 19 countries, with a print run of 800,000 copies. The
whole project from initial design brief to delivery of the final printed copies had to
be completed in 19 weeks (Hutchings 2001: 42). In the second version of the
Microsoft Encarta translation, the project involved the localization of approxi-
mately 33,000 articles, 10 million words, 11,000 media elements, 7,600 photos
14 Translation and the global economy
and illustrations, 2,000 audio elements, 1,250 maps/charts, 110 videos and ani-
mations, 1,500 Web links, 3,500 bibliographical entries and 25 articles monthly
for the Yearbook Builder (Kohlmeier 2000: 2).
The rise of the World Wide Web means, of course, that localization is moving
into different areas such as Web and e-commerce localization. Indeed, given that
91 per cent of the world’s secure sites are in English, translation for e-commerce is
likely to continue to expand. The International Data Corporation reported that in
2001 over half of the world’s 147 million Internet users were non-English speak-
ers and they estimated that by 2005 this figure would have risen to two-thirds. In
2003, the non-US portion of the e-commerce market would account for 46 per
cent of a US$1.3 trillion market. The Atlas II project of the IDC predicted that, by
2003, 50 per cent of Web users in Europe, 75 per cent in Latin America and
80 per cent in Japan would show a distinct preference for native language sites
(Myerson 2001: 14). The advent of digital industries centred around e-learning
and other forms of content delivery across the Web has led some commentators to
use the term ‘elocalization’ (Schäler 2001: 22–6). A crucial difference between
traditional localization and Web site localization is that the former is project-based
whereas the latter is [Link] sites by their nature are never one-off
[Link] Bert Esselink notes:

Most professional Web sites contain continuously updated and revised

content, sometimes referred to as streaming content. Most of today’s profes-
sional Web sites are updated frequently, are provided in multiple languages,
and offer a high degree of personalization. The main challenges in maintain-
ing multilingual (or global) Web sites is [sic] internationalizing the site
architecture, balancing global/translated versus local content, automating
translation workflows, and keeping multilingual content in sync with the
source language.
(Esselink 2001a: 16)

The motivations for software and elocalization are expressive of the specific con-
nections between translation and the economy in the global age. Producing a
localized version of a product means that new markets are opened up for an exist-
ing or potential [Link] a domestic market may be stagnant or in decline,
international markets may be buoyant and may also support a higher price level. A
result is not only increased sales, but also as Ricky Thibodeau claims, ‘[a] localized
product will help spread R & D dollars over a wider base, as a localized version can
extend a product’s life cycle’ (Thibodeau 2000: 127). If translation is in what is
often called ‘the critical path’ for the sales of particular products, it is because
time-to-market is increasingly a global as opposed to a local phenomenon. The dis-
semination of information through globalized mass media or over the Web means
 Translation and the global economy 15
that potential customers in different parts of the globe are aware of new models as
soon as they come out, for example, in the United States. Thus, as Suzanne Topping
points out, in the case of digital cameras the crucial sales period is the first few
weeks following product introduction. In the case of foreign sales, the equation is
simple: ‘no translation, no product’ (Topping 2000: 111). The objective then
becomes the simultaneous availability of the product in all the languages of the
product’s target markets. In other words, it goes against the profit rationale of
companies to have the localized versions appearing after the product launch in the
original language. Instantaneous access to information in the original language
generates demand for simultaneous access in the translated languages.

Informational and aesthetic goods

There is a further dimension to translation demand which not only relates to
global information flows but is bound up with the changing nature of the objects
produced in the new economy. Scott Lash and John Urry argue that the objects
created in the post-industrial world are progressively emptied of their material
content. The result is the proliferation of signs rather than material objects and
these signs are of two types:

Either they have a primarily cognitive content and are post-industrial or

informational goods. Or they have primarily an aesthetic content and are
what can be termed postmodern goods. The development of the latter can be
seen not only in the proliferation of objects which possess a substantial aes-
thetic component (such as pop music, cinema, leisure, magazines, video and
so on), but also in the increasing component of sign-value or image embod-
ied in material objects. This aestheticization takes place in the production,
the circulation or the consumption of such goods.
(Lash and Urry 1994: 4)

The aestheticization referred to explains the prodigious rise in advertising budgets

in the last three decades of the twentieth century and the strong emphasis on
value-added design intensity in the production of clothes, shoes, cars, electronic
goods, software and so on in late modernity. The increasing importance of the sign
and the appearance of ‘informational’ and ‘postmodern goods’ has immediate
implications for the translation industry. The centrality of information in the con-
temporary world is reflected in the changing nature of the documentation that
translators are called upon to translate. Cornelia Hofmann and Thorsten Mehnert
claim that the product-relevant information of tomorrow is going to be quite dif-
ferent from what is conventionally understood to be documentation at present.
They note two developments forcing change. First, there is the integration of
16 Translation and the global economy
documentation into the product: ‘User documentation was a separate source of
information in the past, but it is becoming an ever more integrated product com-
ponent’ (Hofmann and Mehnert 2000: 59). So product-based information can be
part of online help in a piece of software or take the form of a ‘wizard’ that solves
users’ problems or helps them to perform a particular task. Second, products
themselves are more and more information-intensive: ‘[p]roducts require an
increasing volume of information for proper performance and functioning’ (ibid.).
Thus, a car with a navigation system will need large amounts of geographical data,
or a pocket scanner which provides elementary translation will contain a consider-
able amount of linguistic information.
If information is often hailed as the basic raw material of the new economy and
significant economic gains are to be made from the production of goods with a
high cognitive content, then it follows that language itself is not only a key factor
in the expression of that information but it is also a crucial means in accessing the
information. Information-density in one language can imply, of course, a gravita-
tion towards that language as people seek to have rapid admission to this valuable
economic raw material (see Crystal 1997). Conversely, speakers of different lan-
guages can increase the pressure on translators and the translation industry to
translate ever-increasing volumes of information more and more quickly. A
dystopian scenario of the information–language nexus would see everyone trans-
lating themselves into the language or languages of the primary suppliers of
information and so dispensing with the externality of translation. Another view,
borne out by the statistics above on preferred use of Web sites in the native lan-
guage and the exponential growth in translation in recent decades, is that
translators are still indispensable intermediaries in the new informational
economy and are likely to remain so precisely because information is so important.
For many subjects in the informational economy, the language of (native) expres-
sion remains the preferred language of (individual) access.
Information alone is certain good and the second category of objects described
by Lash and Urry, the primarily aesthetic or postmodern goods, bring with them
their own translation imperatives. When Robert C. Sprung claims that ‘the most
effective way to make a product truly international is to make it look and feel like
a product in the target country . . . not merely give it a linguistic facelift by trans-
lating the words of its documentation or user-interface’ (Sprung 2000: xiv), there
is a sense in which he is indicating the importance of the aesthetic alongside the
more immediately obvious relevance of the cognitive. The decision to produce a
Japanese version of an English-language e-commerce Web site selling custom-
made golf clubs via the Internet was not simply a question of providing the
Japanese customers with the appropriate information. As Susan Cheng observed,
‘Given the commercial nature of the site, language and presentation were critical.
Almost all text and graphics would be translated in a culturally targeted way that
 Translation and the global economy 17
reinforced the site’s marketing message and merchandising functions’ (Cheng
2000: 30). The stress on translation in a ‘culturally targeted way’ suggests the
primacy of functionally oriented, domesticating strategies in elocalization, though
it is significant that foreignizing elements were retained in the presentation of
particular product names, product descriptions and marketing slogans as these
were seen ‘to have particular American appeal for the Japanese customer’ (ibid.:
31). In this way, the site provides the aesthetic comfort of the familiar with the aes-
thetic appeal of the exotic.
The hybridity of text-types in the translation environment of the informational
economy is a factor that further indicates the changing relationship between trans-
lation and its markets. The Web leads to the breakdown of traditional divisions
between technical and marketing material, each with its own separate type of doc-
umentation and specific means of communicating with clients. Hofmann and
Mehnert note: ‘Information is distributed through intranets/extranets, and the
content from different corporate functions has to be well synchronized and pre-
sented in a coherent fashion’ (Hofmann and Mehnert 2000: 60). This convergence
of previously distinct types of documentation and means of distribution shows that
it is increasingly difficult to separate out purely cognitive goods from purely aes-
thetic ones. Such difficulty is only to be expected if aestheticization increasingly
takes place in the production, circulation and consumption of goods in the new
economy. As we shall see in the discussion of automation and machine translation,
translators may in fact be simply unable to cope with the geometrical expansion in
demand for translated information, but the significant added-value component of
the aesthetic in the production and delivery of goods and services in the informa-
tional economy points to their continued if not increased importance as linguistic
and cultural brokers.

Localization and culture

How does the increased aestheticization of goods, informational or otherwise,
tally with the globalization of their distribution and do translators have to sacrifice
cultural nuance to customer deadlines? Do translators now operate on a planetary
scale and at what cost? The planetary view of translation is succinctly expressed by
Damien Scattergood, Localisation Technology Group Manager for Symantec, who
declared in an interview: ‘Symantec’s Localisation Tools suite is EarthWorks. It’s a
name coined from making our products work worldwide. Earth is our market’
(Localisation Ireland 2000: 10). Symantec’s best-known product is the Norton
AntiVirus software, and rapid response to new viruses is crucial. The response is
not only technical but linguistic. Same-day delivery of US and German products is
a standard requirement. As Scattergood notes,‘We’re pushing back barriers all the
time. Time to market is a big priority. Our tools have a strong automation focus.
18 Translation and the global economy
I’m looking for edges all the time. If our engineer does something twice, I want to
know why, and how our tools can remove the repetition’ (ibid.: 10). Speed,
automation, and elimination of the slowdown factor of repetition are repeated
concerns for the cost-conscious localization sector.
Another localization firm, SimulTrans, speaks about the implementation of
localization programmes, ‘designed to streamline translation process and recycle
as much as 75 per cent of text from previous translations’ (Localisation Ireland
1999: 5). As the volume of business grows, so does the pressure on translators to
accelerate throughput and standardize working processes. This is not to say that
localization does not take cognizance of cultural differences. On the contrary,
much has been written about the need to be sensitive to cultural differences
(Esselink 1998).
In an article on the internationalization of user interface design, Ultan Ó Broin
mentions the need, for example, to avoid abbreviations or language-specific word-
play, to use functional names and locale-neutral colours and to make sure that
country-setting information such as dates, separators and time-formats should not
be hard-coded (Ó Broin 1999: 10–12). Though the features of text we have men-
tioned are often overlooked by software developers and lead to localization
problems later, they are not in themselves particularly difficult to identify, and once
they have been identified they can be integrated relatively painlessly into product
internationalization, that is products designed with a worldwide market in mind.
However, the tendency in literature on globalization to focus on specific, sub-
stitutive features of language and cultural difference can obscure more intractable
problems of cultural dissimilarity. A case study of multimedia localization in the
American firm Compuflex highlighted the difficulties that occur when a trans-
lation paradigm from one area of localization comes into conflict with other more
complex and exacting translation paradigms. In the late 1990s Compuflex came
under increasing competition from other Internet service providers and decided
to produce a full multimedia entertainment service aimed at users in the home.
The US company generated content in-house which was presented in the form of
TV style shows (shows aimed at women, science fiction, news), using the language
and stylistic conventions of US television. Compuflex also decided to localize the
shows for different markets and it was the Irish branch which was responsible for
coordinating the localization of the material. The experience was not a happy one.
As Paschal Preston and Aphra Kerr note:

Initially the company followed established localization routines for software

tools and CD-ROM reference titles and the work was conducted in the US.
However, attempts in the US to localize the TV shows for the French and
German markets proved highly unsatisfactory. National producers rejected
the localized files, which they felt were patronizing and too American. In one
 Translation and the global economy 19
case the audio files for the French market employed actors who spoke French
with US accents.
(Preston and Kerr 2001: 120)

The problems were twofold. Firstly, the primary conception of the global march
of technology and of the role of consumer/users within it was fundamentally mis-
taken. In common with cyberhype and the more utopian academic speculation on
new technology, the vision which is often presented is that of the free-floating,
global consumer roaming through the global digital info-sphere, picking and
choosing items from a planetary menu for private, ahistorical consumption. If IT
allows us to surf to the ends of the earth (Earth is our Market), then it is tech-
nology, not culture, which dictates the image of the end user. In other words,
although there are over 6,000 languages on the planet, there are only two systems
of voltage, three railway gauges and one language for addressing air traffic control.
Technology unites where culture separates. From this perspective, the instrumen-
tal capacity of the IT systems leads to representations of a world with placeless,
instantaneous flows. And, in part, when we consider the speed, quantity and
nature of financial translations on the planet, the vision appears plausible.
However, cultures and places are resistant and, even in their persona as end users
of advanced technology, human beings are very much of a time and place. Cultures
in a sense enact the therapy of distance that is at the heart of the medieval practice
of translatio, and translation in more ways than one becomes a meditation on the
pilgrim’s progress.
The second difficulty in the Compuflex scenario is the confusion between
‘content’ translation and tools translation. The central concern of the American
HQ was to localize at least cost and follow the model established by the localiza-
tion of packaged office software. In this model, as we saw earlier in the case of
Symantec and SimulTrans, the focus is on the economies of automation or near-
automation of the translator’s task. The Content Editor for Compuflex described
the difficulty for project managers in the Dublin office caught between the cultural
needs of continental Europeans and the cultural incomprehension of the US head-
quarters staff. The French were hostile to any sense of American culture being
forced on them and they and their German counterparts had different ideas of
what were priority items on the programmes, what seemed worthless and so on.
The Content Editor claimed that trying to communicate this to headquarters was
difficult because ‘they’re all very technical people . . . you get a bit of a blank wall
all the time, and they just say things like “just dub it out, dub it out and give it to
them”’ (ibid.: 122).
Though head office wanted to impose a standard terminology across languages,
the producers in different European countries wanted more varied, colloquial
usage in the language of the different shows. Again, the economic and technical
20 Translation and the global economy
imperatives of standardization from the core were running counter to notions of
cultural appropriateness on the periphery. The ability to technically eliminate dis-
tance does not so much eliminate distance as displace it. The Dublin translation
project managers found themselves in effect in the position of being therapists of
distance, trying to manage the real, intractable distances which existed between
the centre and the edges. A primarily instrumentalist approach to hardware and
software tools in discussions of translation and localization can lead to a neglect of
more fundamental content/translation issues which will only increase in impor-
tance with the shift to multilingual Web development and the full exploitation of
broadband and cable capacities (see O’Brien 1998: 115–22).

Communication and transmission

The difficulty in debates around translation and culture in the global age is
arguably a failure to distinguish between translation as communication and translation
as transmission. Here, we are drawing on a distinction that Debray makes between
communication and transmission where communication is a part of a much larger
whole called transmission. If communication is primarily about conveying infor-
mation across space in the same spatio-temporal sphere, transmission is about
transporting information through time between different spatio-temporal spheres.
The horizon of transmission is historical and it needs a medium of transmission
(stone, paper, magnetic disk) to make its action effective. However, the impor-
tance of media can lead to their fetishization and thus to the neglect of a
fundamental dimension to transmission, the presence of a social vector, or more
formally, a materialized organization. The social vector is a body such as a school,
university, church, state or family which provides the context for the transmission
of ideas, beliefs or values across time (Debray 2000: 15).
Failure to understand the importance of social vectors leads to the false dawns
of cyberhype. In everything from education to translation, a physical transfer of
information is confused with a social transfer of knowledge. It is the social transfer
which causes communication to become transmission and therefore to be enduring
in its effects. This is one reason for the necessity of translator education, whether
through the guardian-angel system or professional associations or universities.
They provide the structure, transcending the personal and subjective, which causes
knowledge to endure through time as well as to be carried through space. The con-
stituent role of social vectors in transmission also explains why studying translation
in isolation from its socialized conditions of production and reception may explain
how translation works as communication in the immediate but will not tell us
much about how translation works as transmission and, more particularly, how
particular forms of translation leave enduring traces on societies.
One example of the latter might be the particular conjunction of medium
 Translation and the global economy 21
(printing) and materialized organizations (monarchy, church) which led to the
lasting influence in English of the Authorized Version of the Bible (McGrath 2001).
We say lasting but of course historical conditions and assumptions of cultural
literacy change. A difficulty for educators of translators is that progress in syn-
chronicity is often paralleled by a decline in diachronicity. In other words, students
are increasingly adept at using the tools which allow for rapid information
retrieval or the quick despatch of text but deep, historical knowledge of languages
and cultures which takes time and effort is not always valued in a culture of infor-
mational ubiquity. This entails special responsibilities for translation schools which
must make students aware not only of the synchronic possibilities of new tools but
also of the transmissive dimension to translation. As we saw with the Compuflex
example, this dimension is not confined to the high-art practices of literary trans-
lation but informs all areas of content-driven localization.
There is another more contentious dimension to translation practice in our age
which is to do with the physical expression of language in the [Link] American
critic Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies offers a pessimistic prognosis for deep
reading in the electronic age. Part of his pessimism stems from the changed mat-
erial status of the word,‘Nearly weightless though it is, the word printed on a page
is a [Link] configuration of impulses on a screen is not – it is a manifestation, an
indeterminate entity both particle and wave, an ectoplasmic arrival and departure’
(Birkerts 1996: 154–5). Birkerts claims that the mode of communication of the
message has a discernible effect on the status of the message in question and the
quality of its reception:

The word cut into stone carries the implicit weight of the carver’s intention;
it is decoded into sense under the aspect of its imperishability. It has weight,
grandeur . . . it vies with time. The same word, when it appears on the
screen, must be received with a sense of its weightlessness . . . the weight-
lessness of its presentation. The same sign, but not the same.
(ibid.: 155)

It is easy to see in Birkerts’ claims evidence of a cultural pessimism which is peri-

odically retailed by the guardians of high culture. Whether the object of oppro-
brium is cinema, radio, television or the personal computer, spiritual, aesthetic
and cognitive doom is always nigh. Indeed, as we shall see later in the chapter, a
facile technophobia is often based on a wholly reductive view of human cultural
development. However, it is worth noting that certain developments in or
attitudes towards translation may have their origins in a de-materialization of the
word. Reinhard Schäler, describing the rapid growth in the use of machine trans-
lation (MT) systems, claims that increasingly MT users are not concerned with the
quality issues that exercise the minds of professionally trained translators:
22 Translation and the global economy
This is especially true when companies have to deal with short turn-around
cycles and frequent updates of technical texts, and when accuracy and consis-
tency of the translation (features associated with MT output) take precedence
over style, readability and naturalness, all associated with the traditional
values and reference system of the human translators.
(Schäler 1998: 154)

One can contest the argument that quality is not an issue for MT users, as the pro-
fessional association for localizers, the Localization Industry Standards Association
(LISA), has been to the fore in promoting quality issues (Koo and Kinds 2000:
147–57). However, the short turn-around cycles and frequent updates are a
reality. One consequence of this development is that particular kinds of translation
are increasingly being done by machine and being used by non-translators. One
study showed that 80 per cent of the users of the European Commission’s
machine-translation system, Systran, were from outside the Translation Service
(ibid.: 153). If the pressure in an informational and global economy is to get infor-
mation as rapidly as possible, then the ‘gisting’ function becomes paramount in
translation, a tendency which can be encouraged by the ‘weightlessness’ of the
words on the screen with their evanescent existence. A less sophisticated if much-
hyped version of automatic translation is the free, Web-based MT services (see
Chapter 4) which offer to translate text, with often hilariously inept [Link]
is significant is not their unreliability but their availability. That is, the fact that
these services are continuously solicited suggests that there is a lower threshold of
translation acceptability which may be linked not only to the absence of cost but
also to the ephemeral status of the electronic word. In a sense, what human trans-
lators have to do, and this is not the least of the paradoxes of the profession, is to
demonstrate that ‘weightlessness’ is a weighty matter.

The message is the medium

It is ironic, therefore, that it was Nicolas Oresme, a translator, preoccupied by
weighty questions of meaning, who would first give the word communication to
the French language, whence it would migrate to the English language. By com-
munication, Oresme understood the emancipation of the message from the
medium in translation (Bougnoux 1991). Meanings were no longer bound to the
utterances of origin. Centuries later, Marshall McLuhan achieved his own canonic
status through the formulation that the medium is the message. He wanted to
describe the nature of the new mass media and how they were profoundly altering
our perception of reality. Just as printing modified human sensibility, so too had
television in its turn. The mediascape described by McLuhan has, however,
changed significantly in the decades since the publication of his major works. He
 Translation and the global economy 23
described an era of what might be dubbed Fordist television with huge national
audiences watching the same programmes broadcast by a small number of state-
controlled television stations.
For many countries today, in the era of a deregulated broadcasting with any
number of satellite and cable channels available, McLuhan’s audiovisual environ-
ment is more memory than reality. And this has led media analysts to reformulate
McLuhan’s basic concept. Video recorders, 24-hour radio, the Walkman, direct
satellite broadcasting and cable television technologies all result in much more seg-
mented, individualized patterns of media [Link] Françoise Sabbah puts it:

the new media determine a segmented, differentiated audience that, although

massive in terms of numbers, is no longer a mass audience in terms of simul-
taneity and uniformity of the message it receives. The new media are no
longer mass media in the traditional sense of sending a limited number of
messages to a homogeneous mass audience. Because of the multiplicity of
messages and sources, the audience itself becomes more selective.
(Sabbah 1985: 219)

Manuel Castells takes this argument a step further and argues that now the
message is in fact the medium. It is the features of the message which shape the
characteristics of the medium. So if the message is round-the-clock popular music
then this will determine the type of visual formats which are used to present the
programmes just as narrative styles for sports channels will differ from the con-
ventions used in history channels. If the message drives the medium, then
translators have to become as attentive to messages as they are to media. In partic-
ular, this transformation effected by the new media entails a greater, not a lesser,
concentration on aesthetico-semantic contexts to media texts in a global era.
Technical convergence through the diffusion of new technologies produces not
less but more fragmentation of markets and it is in this multiplicity that translators
will find new homes for old skills. Discussion of contemporary translation that
does not take into account the changing relationship between translators and
things, between translation and the technosphere in the informational economy, is
neither possible nor desirable. But we must not ignore the transmissive dimension
if we are to properly situate translators in this new object-world over time.

Translation tools
What then is the relationship between translation and things, or more properly,
between translators and their tools? At one level, the very definition of translation
relies on a particular understanding of how the translating activity relates to tools,
namely, the writing instrument (stylus, quill, pen) and its material support (wood,
24 Translation and the global economy
parchment, paper). The shift from an oral to a writing-based or chirographic
culture entails the differentiation between the activities of translation and inter-
preting, the former being situated in the chirographic world of literacy whereas
the latter is defined primarily by its intrinsic orality (Ong 1988: 5–15). The use of
dictaphones and, more recently, speech recognition software in translation points
to an oral dimension to translation activity, but even in these instances the orality
is heavily mediated not only by the mode of expression of print literacy but by the
further use of tools, whether in the form of recording apparatuses or computers.
The tools of translation in earlier periods are not only the material objects that
allow words to be permanently traced but they are the products of those tracings
which in turn will assist translators in their tasks. By this we mean the word lists,
the lexicons, the dictionaries, the previous translations, the material resources that
will be marshalled by translators to facilitate or improve the translations they
produce. Although in the age of informatics it has become commonplace to speak
of ‘translation tools’, the term is arguably a tautology since translation since its
inception has always implied a privileged relationship to chirographic and later
print and electronic tools. Translation without tools simply does not exist.
If writing is a relatively recent invention, less than 6,000 years old, translation
has shadowed it from its beginnings. The Sumerian–Eblaite vocabularies inscribed
on clay tablets are estimated by archaeologists to be around 4,500 years old
(Dalnoky 1977: 716). Along with King Ptolemy II Philadelphus, Demetrius, one
of Alexandria’s most famous librarians, was particularly anxious to collect all the
books of the known world. To this end, he calculated the library would need
500,000 rolls of parchment (Canfora 1988: 29). It was not enough, however, that
books simply be collected. They were also to be translated if Ptolemy’s scholars
and, by extension, his kingdom were to extract any benefits from their contents.
The translation enterprise included the translation of over two million lines of
Persian verse attributed to Zoroaster (ibid.: 33). Another notable translation
exploit was the translation of the books of the Old Testament into Greek, which is
recounted in the second-century Letter of Aristeas. In the following extract, we are
given a brief description of the commencement of the project and of the average
working day of the 72 translators:

After three days Demetrius took the men with him and crossed the break-
water, seven stades long, to the island [of Pharos]; then he crossed over the
bridge and proceeded to the northerly parts. There he called a meeting in a
mansion built by the seashore, magnificently appointed and in a secluded situ-
ation, and called upon the men to carry out the business of translation, all
necessary appliances having been well provided. And so they proceeded to
carry it out, making all details harmonize by mutual comparisons. The appro-
priate result of the harmonization was reduced to writing under the direction
 Translation and the global economy 25
of Demetrius. The sessions would last until the ninth hour, and afterwards
they would break up to take care of bodily needs, all their requirements being
lavishly supplied.
(Hadas 1973: 119)

The translation activity is presented as bound up with the technical environment

which makes it possible. This environment extends from the built structure of the
mansion where the translators work to the built structure of the library where the
rolls will reside. It includes the unspecified ‘necessary appliances’, the inks, the
writing instruments and the parchment that will allow the ‘harmonization’ to take
material shape under the direction of the Alexandrian librarian. Aristeas reports
that once the translation was completed and accepted, the secular and religious
authorities declared, ‘Inasmuch as the translation has been well and piously made
and is in every respect accurate, it is right that it should remain in its present form
and no revision of any sort take place’ (ibid.: 221). A solemn curse will befall any
who attempt to tamper with the translated text.
The injunction is typically that of a chirographic culture. In oral cultures, mat-
erial is constantly modified as part of the dynamic relationship between the tellers
of tales and their audiences. This is an element of what Ong terms the homeostatic
dimension to orality: ‘oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself
in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have
present relevance’ (Ong 1988: 46). In the account of Aristeas, those who alter the
authorized version of the translation or even cite the text so altered are the objects
of immediate retribution. Theopompus suffers a temporary bout of insanity lasting
30 days and the poet Theodectes is afflicted with a cataract when he tries to intro-
duce biblical material from another translation into one of his plays. The efficacy of
the curse implies the possibility of comparison. In other words, it is only if earlier
or later translations of scripture can be compared with the Pharos translation that
error or heresy can be identified. To do this the text must be stabilized by writing.
It is the tools of the translator’s trade, the tools of a chirographic culture, which
confer iconic status upon particular translations and indeed ultimately upon
named translators, whether they be the 72 named translators in Aristeas’ Letter or
St Jerome.
As we mentioned above, it is not only tools as part of the translation process
which have been of fundamental importance to translators but translation products
in turn are elevated to the status of tool and as such are fed back in a dialectical
fashion into the process itself. It is the Greek translation of the Scriptures that the fourth-
century evangelist Ulfila will use in his Gothic translation of the Bible (Delisle and
Woodsworth 1995: 9). If he seeks to scrupulously follow its word order and
syntax, this is because technically, the tools of writing and manuscript transmission
make this a feasible translation aspiration. Similarly, when the Armenian scholars
26 Translation and the global economy
Mesrop Mashtots and Bishop Dinth are sent in the early part of the fifth century by
the patriarch Sahak Pertev to the court of Emperor Theodosius II in Constantino-
ple, the object is to procure copies of the original Greek translation which are
subsequently used to revise earlier Armenian translations of the Scriptures (Delisle
and Woodsworth 1995: 12). The product of one translation process becomes a tool
in the commencement of another. The necessary intertextuality of any translation
operation implies a technical infrastructure of production and transmission which
has always been coterminous with the act of translation. This technical inter-
dependence is accelerated by the arrival of the printing press, whose success from
a translation point of view lies in its ability to facilitate both the production and the
transmission of texts.
The outcomes are summarized in an emblematic description of a translation
workshop in Dublin in the mid-seventeenth century. The narrator describes the
work routine of the people translating the Old Testament into Irish Gaelic:

And for the fitting of the copy of the translation for the press, he [William
Bedell] never rose from the table after dinner and supper till he had examined
a sheet and compared it with the original Hebrew and the 72 interpreters,
together with Diodati his Italian translation (which he prized very much). His
manner was this: his son Ambrose did usually read a chapter in English, my
lord having one copy of the Irish translation and A[lexander] C[logie] another;
after this he read the first verse out of Irish into Latin, and A.C. the next, and
so to the end; and where was found any mistake of the English phrase or
emphasis by the Irish translator, my lord did immediately amend it.
(Williams 1986: 50)

The ‘necessary appliances’ made available to the protestant divine William Bedell
by the printing press include a Hebrew Bible, the Greek Septuagint, an Italian
biblical translation and the English Authorized Version (in addition to the Latin
Vulgate). The purpose of all this activity is the ‘fitting of the copy of the translation
for the press’, namely the publication for the first time in the Irish vernacular of
the books of the Old Testament (Cronin 1996: 51–9). The technical virtuosity of
the printing press not only greatly aids the dissemination of translations them-
selves but it also results in a greater technical complexity at the point of translation
production. The more translations in different languages there are to consult, the
more translators become incorporated into networks of intertextual influence that
are predicated on the economies of scale of the printing press. Travelling to a
bookseller is after all less onerous than a journey to Constantinople.
Translation tools historically are not just other texts, previous translations or
the technical infrastructure of chirographic culture and print literacy, they also
typically refer to dictionaries and their precursors. It is not our intention here to
 Translation and the global economy 27
give an exhaustive description of the history of the dictionary – which has been
done competently elsewhere (for English see Murray 2001) – but simply to indi-
cate the particular status of the dictionary as tool. Oral cultures do not have
dictionaries, as words are defined in the context of actual habitat and the ongoing
present of the human lifeworld. It is print cultures which ‘have invented dictionar-
ies in which the various meanings of a word as it occurs in datable texts can be
recorded in formal definitions’ (Ong 1988: 46). Prior to the dictionaries of print
cultures there were of course multilingual word glosses and lexicons, some more
detailed than others. What is significant from our point of view is that the trans-
lator working with a primitive manuscript glossary or a multi-volume bilingual
print dictionary has been part of a tool-mediated environment which long pre-
dates the advent of new technology. Indeed, it is only by providing an adequate
understanding of how human beings relate to things and things as tools that we can
begin to understand the proper relation of translators to the technosphere.
Human societies have been variously distinguished from animal societies
throughout history by their capacity to exercise reason or to possess a soul or to
manipulate tools. In the case of tools, the argument is no longer held to be valid in
an absolute sense as certain classes of primates do use tools in particular ways
(Bourg 1996: 126–9).A distinguishing feature of human society is not so much the
existence of society as the existence of culture. As Régis Debray points out, homo
sapiens sapiens appears to be the only species capable of transmitting new modes of
behaviour and original intuitions from one generation to the next. The social orga-
nization of specific groups of primates may be complex but there is no evidence to
suggest that there is a significant advance in cultural sophistication over time. It is
the ability of humans to internalize and learn from experiences they have not per-
sonally witnessed and to benefit from ideas they have not directly produced which
constitutes in a sense their anthropological singularity (Debray 2000: 16–17). The
tools produced by humans become the inert form of living memory that allows
particular forms of knowledge to be transmitted across time. One can only trans-
mit what one can conserve. Crucially, however, this knowledge mutates and the
blades, the flints, the primitive hammers change to incorporate new advances in
the manipulation of these tools. For Dominique Bourg, this cumulative advance in
material complexity is indissociable from the function of language which allows
humans to report on events, behaviours or ideas that are distant in time and place
(Bourg 1996: 125–38). In addition, changes in human use and manufacture of
tools involve not only the adaptive pressures of the present but also the anticipated
needs of the future and the ability to stand outside the immediate lifeworld and
conceive of the world differently.
Foresight and imagination are of course two attributes of human language that
make this change possible. Thus, in human evolution there is an indissociable link
between language and tools that not only does not disappear with the advent of
28 Translation and the global economy
technical complexity but is in fact strengthened by the phenomenon, as Bourg
points out:

la sophistication technologique accroît la dépendance vis-à-vis du langage et

de l’organisation sociale complexe qu’il permet. On peut en effet imaginer la
transmission muette, par simple imitation, de savoir-faire élémentaires
comme l’épluchage d’une patate douce. De telles transmissions sont attestées
chez les primates. Mais lorsqu’on passe à quelque chose de plus complexe,
faisant appel à une séquence relativement longue et précise de gestes comme
par exemple la technique levalloisienne de la taille au silex au paléolithique
inférieur, l’apprentissage sans langage devient difficilement imaginable.2
(Bourg 1996: 124)

We argued earlier that it is the object which allows the subject to emerge and it is
in and through objects that our subjectivity is constructed and persists. Developing
this thesis in the context of the preceding arguments on the fundamental compli-
city between language and the technical in human development, it is possible to
see the construction of the humanity of human beings as a basically exosomatic
phenomenon (Lotka 1945: 188; Bourg 1996: 118). In other words, the technical
environment of human beings is consubstantial with our ability as speaking sub-
jects to conceive of ourselves as human beings or beings of a particular kind in the
biosphere. Anthropogenesis is bound up with technogenesis if only because the
internal is made external through material media that allow human beings to
externalize their memory in a social space (Debray 2000: 53).
Therefore, any attempt to discuss translation and its role in human society and
culture must take into account the essential relationship between techne- and
cultural development. For this reason, conventional moves to separate literary
from non-literary (predominantly scientific, technical and commercial) translation
have a number of unfortunate consequences. First, the exosomatic dimension to
human development is ignored and there is a tendency to privilege more idealist
accounts of human engagements with language and culture. Second, the role of
tools in the practice of literary and religious translation down through the cen-
turies is either marginalized or wholly disregarded. Third, the tendency to view
tools almost exclusively in the domain of new technology leads to predominantly
descriptive readings of their use (what they do) and a subsequent neglect of
the wider implications of their presence in the world of translation (what they
represent).
One of these implications is that irrespective of the domain of translation activ-
ity, translators are engaged with a technosphere, whether that be the chirographic
technosphere of pen and parchment or the digital technosphere of terminal and
Internet connection. The point here is not to promote a purely instrumentalist
 Translation and the global economy 29
view of translation and language or to promote a naive form of technological
determinism but to see current developments in the context of a long translatorial
involvement with technologies external to the human body. If this is the case, then
we can see the relationship between translators and new technology in the infor-
mational society less as a schismatic break with a venerable craft tradition than as a
further stage in the development of an exosomatic dimension to human engage-
ment with translation.

Material organizations
To emphasize the relationship between translators and tools is not to fetishize the
tools per se but to explore the relations that exist. Industry publications may
describe at length the capacities or attributes of new pieces of software and this
will be useful instrumental knowledge for the translator but such writing tells us
little about the connection between translators and the technical environment they
inhabit. In this respect, Debray makes a useful distinction between organized
matter (matière organisée) and material organization (organisation matérialisée). Orga-
nized matter in the form of a building (e.g. a church) can last only if it is supported
by a material organization in the shape of a socially constituted body committed to
transmitting a particular set of values (e.g. an institutional religion). When one
material organization goes into decline, the survival of organized matter, of the
physical object, may be ensured by another material organization (e.g. the state),
vector of a different set of values (national memory, aesthetic pride, economic self-
interest (heritage industry)) (Debray 2000: 29). Translations as organized matter,
text objects, have depended throughout history for their preservation and trans-
mission on the material organizations of church, army, academy, company, state,
supra-national entities, which are socially constituted bodies with the express aim
of enduring beyond the present moment, even if their specific temporalities vary
widely (Delisle and Woodsworth 1995). Concentration on translation objects
alone, whether they be texts or tools, will not tell us a great deal about the role of
translation in society or why particular forms of translation endure and not others.
In a properly integrated approach to translation, it is necessary to consider not
only the general symbolic system (human language), the specific code (the lan-
guage(s) translated), the physical support (stone, papyrus, CD-ROM), the means
of transmission (manuscript, printing, digital communication) but also how trans-
lations are carried through societies over time by particular groups.
A practical example of the sets of relationships between translation, tools and
material organizations can be found in the experience of post-apartheid South
Africa. Under apartheid, the nine African languages spoken by the majority of the
population did not have official status (Wallmach and Kruger 1999: 276). Con-
versely, the 1996 South African Constitution specifies that the Republic of South
30 Translation and the global economy
Africa has 11 official languages. Provision is also made for three minority in-
digenous languages, languages used for religious purposes (Arabic, Hebrew and
Sanskrit),‘heritage’ languages (German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi) and sign language
(Dollerup 2001a: 34). In South Africa itself, the language that is most widely
spoken is Zulu (22.9 per cent), followed by Xhosa (17.9 per cent), Afrikaans
(14.4 per cent), Sepedi (9.2 per cent), English (8.6 per cent), Setswana (8.2 per
cent) and Sesotho (7.7 per cent) (Dollerup 2001a: 35). The commitment to a
multilingual South Africa is a core value of post-apartheid politics, with clear
implications for translation. These implications would have no substantive reality,
however, were it not for a set of material organizations committed to the pre-
servation and development of South Africa’s multilingual heritage. These organiza-
tions are, first, the state itself, which enacts laws to create institutions entrusted
with the development of the Republic’s various languages, second, the institutions
which both formulate and implement language policy in South Africa, and third,
the universities which train translators and carry out research into language and
translation issues specific to South Africa. The second group of organizations
includes the National Language Service (part of the Department of Arts, Culture,
Science and Technology) which draws up language policy for various levels of
government and monitors the implementation of language rights. The group also
includes the Pan South African Language Board, established in 1995, whose main
task is to promote the development of disadvantaged indigenous languages and
sign language and to ensure adequate protection and appropriate respect for the
religious and heritage languages (ibid.: 36). The third group includes universities
such as Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, the University of South Africa
in Pretoria, the University of the Orange Free State in Bloemfontein and the
University of Plotchefstroom, and the researchers working in these universities
(Kruger and Wallmach 1997: 119–26).
When apartheid was in force in South Africa, interpreting took the form of
consecutive and bilateral interpreting, with the sole exception of international
conferences where simultaneous interpreting was used. The advent of a genuinely
democratic parliament in 1994 led to an immediate demand for simultaneous
interpreting in the parliament. Similarly, in 1996 when the South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission was established, the University of the Orange
Free State provided around 35 simultaneous interpreters for the hearings of the
Commission (Dollerup 2001a: 37). It was also decided to gradually extend a
system of simultaneous interpreting to the provincial legislatures in South Africa.
In a sense, the enhanced status of indigenous languages is bound up not only with
their promotion through official bodies and legislation but with their incorpora-
tion into a technical environment, that of simultaneous interpreting systems.
Another example is the combined use of radio and television so that the television
can show the event broadcast in the original language while various radio channels
 Translation and the global economy 31
simultaneously broadcast the event in different languages (Dollerup 2001a: 37–8).
Viewers can either watch the event in the original language or mute the sound and
listen to the language of their choice.
In the South African context the level of sophistication of the technology used is
less important than the connection between symbolic status and technical incorpo-
ration. This connection is often overlooked in accounts of language and translation.
It is customary in the history of languages to conceive of the particular role and
prestige of languages in terms of their ability or willingness to translate canonic
texts into a language. Imperial Rome, Classical France,Tudor England and Roman-
tic Germany accord translation a privileged role in their literary polysystem as a
means of bolstering the position and standing of the vernacular (Delisle and
Woodsworth 1995: 67–97). The emphasis on the nature of the texts translated, be
they literary, religious or scientific, can obscure an equally important dimension to
translation’s engagement with power – the exosomatic dimension. In other words,
it is not simply the enfolding of culturally reputable texts into a language through
translation that accounts for the improved status of a language but it is the extent
to which a language is implicated in a technosphere with distributive and transmis-
sive possibilities. Indeed, it is possible to argue that it is the relationship between
translators and tools rather than the connection between translators and texts per
se which is the decisive factor in the evolution of translation. The canonic status of
certain texts may be contested over time for reasons of ethnicity, race, gender or
class but less likely to change is the centrality of a technology of production and
reception of translated work with related consequences for the languages in play.
Though it is clear that changed political circumstances will shape translation policy
in a country, it is not always made explicit how the use of particular tools is in itself
status-enhancing.
If due cognizance is not always taken of the cultural significance of technology,
this may in part be due to a recurrent dilemma at work in the relationship between
translation and technology, a dilemma which mirrors an older antagonism between
culture and science (Haynes 1994). As we noted earlier, there are over 6,000 lan-
guages in the world but only two systems of voltage and one universal time (Kern
1983). Technology brings together where culture sets apart. Irrespective of loca-
tion, the same model of car, computer or mobile phone will work the same way.
As Debray remarks:

Il n’y a pas pour l’ingénieur ou l’informaticien de lieu saint, ni de frontière

sacrée, ni d’ombilic du monde – automobiles, ordinateurs et centrales élec-
triques sont partout chez eux; leur fonctionnement n’étant pas liés à une
terre, langue, ou religion particulière, ils peuvent se frayer leur voie aux
quatre coins du monde.3
(Debray 2000: 56)
32 Translation and the global economy
Cultures and languages are still largely associated with particular, spatially defined
areas of the globe even if, of course, the international status of certain languages
and the rise of globalized consumerism have challenged the ready equation
between culture, language and place (Clifford 1997). On the one hand, there is
the evolutionary logic of the tool which dictates the standardized, the normative,
the homogenized and the universal, and on the other, the claims of the cultural
which point to the specific, the anomalous, the exceptional and the local. Trans-
lation occupies a very particular space in this set of conflicting aspirations. At one
level, translation’s raison d’être is its implicit ability to universalize, its capacity to
take a text from one spatially bound language and culture and transplant it into a
different language and culture. At another, it is translation which makes readers
even more aware of the specific nature and depth of a particular culture either by
displaying unknown riches in outward translation or by revealing hidden potential
in inward translation. Arguably then, translation partakes of the generalizing drive
of techne- and of the particularizing drive of culture. The result is that its relation-
ship to tools often runs the risk of being doubly misunderstood. For those
committed to a technocratic view of human culture and efficiency, the tendency
will be to underscore the generalizing role of translation and ignore translation’s
commitment to particularity. Translation will be conflated with its tools, so that
the instantaneous, borderless use of translation will be seen as concomitant
with the universality of the application of the tools. On the other hand, for those
who champion cultural difference, the particularizing role of, say, literary trans-
lation can be asserted as being irreducibly distinct from the technophile
universalism of technical and commercial translation, ignoring the fundamental
exosomatic contribution to the development of human culture and sidelining basic
questions of mediation and transmission in the elaboration of specific literary
polysystems.

Multiple modernities
Technology is not always seen as having a monopoly on the uniform, and culture,
in certain manifestations, can be seen as a standardizing force. Stephen Greenblatt,
in a vivid evocation of integration of his family into US culture, asks himself why
his parents never bothered to teach Yiddish to him or to his brother. One reason,
he speculates, is that the extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis meant that
Yiddish had become irredeemably contaminated by the Holocaust. Greenblatt is
not convinced by his own answer, pointing out that descendants of Swedish,
Italian, Russian, Polish, Korean and Japanese immigrants abandoned their lan-
guages despite the fact that their forebears did not perish in concentration camps.
Instead, drawing on the work of Philip Fisher (Fisher 2000), Greenblatt concludes
that it was the extraordinary assimilative force of American enterprise capitalism
 Translation and the global economy 33
that drew the new immigrants into a common language and away from previous
linguistic loyalties:

the material world in which they participated was a national culture whose
immense transforming power over their lives derived precisely from its refusal
of the local and the particular. This refusal was, of course, hugely to the advan-
tage of the new arrivals, because in effect it made everyone an immigrant.
(Greenblatt 2000: 10)

The vision of the United States as a spectacular stage of creative destruction

offered by Greenblatt and Fisher was taken by Marshall Bermann to be the defin-
ing characteristic of modernity itself. Looking in particular at the Faust myth, he
tries to show how modernity and modernization were born out of the enormously
disruptive and transformative powers unleashed by the industrial revolution so
that nothing would ever again be as it was before. In Bermann’s words:

This atmosphere – of agitation and turbulence, psychic dizziness and drunk-

enness, expansion of experiential possibilities and destruction of moral
boundaries and personal bonds, self-enlargement and self-derangement,
phantoms in the street and in the soul – is the atmosphere in which modern
sensibility is born.
(Bermann 1983: 18)

The notion of the weakening of traditional ethnic, religious, linguistic and histori-
cal ties and their replacement by the loose connections of consuming pleasures is
as much a feature of certain representations of modernity as it is of specific repre-
sentations of the effects of globalization (Luttwak 1999).
However, the danger is to assume that there is one particular culture, one kind
of modernity – conveniently Western – and that this modernity will inevitably
spread to the rest of the world. The Israeli scholar Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt con-
tests this diffusionist vision of global development, claiming:

Modernity has indeed spread to most of the world, but did not give rise to a
single civilisation or to one institutional pattern, but to the development of
several modern civilizations, or at least civilizational patterns, i.e. of civiliza-
tions which share common characteristics, but which tend to develop differ-
ent, even cognate ideological and institutional dynamics.
(Eisenstadt 2000: 40)

The result is not one modernity but many, what Eisenstadt calls ‘multiple mod-
ernities’ (ibid.: 38). Indeed, in the West itself, no single model of modernity has
34 Translation and the global economy
prevailed and the modernization of Germany, for example, has been a radically dif-
ferent enterprise from the birth of modernity in Ireland. Castells demonstrates
how the development of business networks in Japan, Korea and China has been
fundamentally inflected by different, inherited forms of social organization and
value systems (Castells 1996: 172–90), and in their study of migration in the
United States and Germany, two British sociologists, Scott Lash and John Urry,
detail the decisive influence of national histories in the construction of modern
society and the economy (Lash and Urry 1994: 171–92). Accepting the thesis of
multiple modernities has obvious implications for translation activity if only as a
means of countering a monoglot diffusionism (English is the Language of the
Future) which masquerades as an absolute truth.
If societies develop differently, at different rates and in different ways, it is, in
part, because the more dizzying visions of global free flows of ideas, commodities
and, particularly, people are negated by the contemporary economic and political
realities. Connie Myerson notes: ‘Globalization does not, and never has, existed
in terms of a single world market with free trade’ (Myerson 2001: 13). Of the
500 largest multinational corporations, as listed by Fortune magazine, 434 operate
within a triad of the European Union, the United States and Japan. Many markets
remain highly regulated and labour movement is notoriously problematic. In
addition, although ‘the Internet is an excellent medium for communications and
entertainment for those people who can afford it, it cannot bring people, goods,
and services together physically’ (ibid.). Therefore, the geographical spread of
globalization and the extent of the penetration of the neo-liberal version –
prominent in localization writing – can be overstated. Hence, not every part of
the planet will experience globalization at the same time or in the same way, so
that within a context of multiple modernities it is more proper to talk not so
much about translation and globalization as about globalization as translation. This
is to suggest that there is no single model of globalization which is adopted willy-
nilly by different nation-states but that each country or community translates
elements of the global and informational economy into local circumstances. The
result is the nationally and regionally differentiated experiences of globalization
across the planet. Translation is not simply a by-product of globalization but is a
constituent, integral part of how the phenomenon both operates and makes
sense of itself. As we have already seen in this chapter, globalization has not
meant the demise of translation as an activity but, on the contrary, late modernity
has witnessed an explosion of demand for translation. However, it is not
simply economic self-interest which is placing translation at the centre of the
globalizing process but other issues which relate more properly to a politics of
recognition.
Globalization as a global movement has generated anti-globalization as a global
protest movement. Michael Bull notes that the ‘concern of anti-globalization
 Translation and the global economy 35
protesters with remote regions of the world, with the lives of people unlike them-
selves, and with species of animals and plants that most have seen only on TV is
predicated on an unparalleled imaginative identification with the other’ (Bull
2001: 7). The ‘unparalleled’ nature of the identification is a matter of scale rather
than essence. Human beings have imaginatively identified with other human beings
before in human history but it is the number of human beings doing this – the scale
of the identification – which has changed. If this trend is set to continue or indeed
to increase, the question remains as to what kind of ‘imaginative identification with
the other’ is possible. In view of the prestige of the visual or what is sometimes
referred to as ‘ocularcentrism’ in the West (Jay 1993), one response might be that
for many Westerners the identification might be predominantly visual. Watching
‘species of animals and plants’ on the television or visually displaying ethnic clothes
by wearing them are forms of identification with the other, where the other is
mute, either because they cannot speak (animals and plants) or because we do not
hear them (‘people unlike themselves’) speak. However, it is difficult to see how
any meaningful politics of recognition can forgo the question of language for very
long. If the imaginative identification with the other is to be something other than
the visual consumption of the exotic, then translation must be made present. It is
only by engaging with the most complex form of symbolic expression at the dis-
posal of human beings, language, that we can begin to get a sense of lives lived from
different perspectives. There are limits, of course, to that identification and it is
those limits which have been at the centre of debate in translation theory for over
2,000 years (Schulte and Biguenet 1992; Robinson 1997b).
It is precisely the long, historical involvement with debates around recognition,
identification, transfer and transformation that makes translation theory as a body
of thought particularly able to take on issues which are vital to the construction of
a politics of recognition and reciprocity. When Rosemary Arrojo argues that ‘a
theory of translation should attempt to empower translators-to-be and raise their
conscience as writers concerning the responsibility they will face in the seminal
role they will play in the establishment of all sorts of relationships between cul-
tures’ (Chesterman and Arrojo 2000: 159), the injunction does not just apply to
student translators. Rather, a theory of translation is too important to be left to
translators alone. If the critique of homogenizing and oppressive forms of global-
ization is made in the name of difference and the right to difference, then it is
imperative that we find a way of thinking about forms of identification that are not
simply projections or assimilations. Translation enables us to do this both through
the practice of translation itself, allowing others to speak and be heard, and
through the theoretical questioning of the practice itself. The self-reflexive sensi-
tivity to the dangers of misunderstanding, distortion and censorship in translation,
present in much contemporary thinking on translation, means that a view of trans-
lation as naive, unmediated, transparent, instrumentalist communication is no
36 Translation and the global economy
longer tenable. Therefore, translation theory and practice must be an integral part
of any genuinely progressive politics of recognition.
A fundamental tenet of anti-globalization thinking is that local problems are
global concerns and that our interconnectedness makes indifference a non-viable
option. Environmental risks know no boundaries and the decisions of the Euro-
pean Central Bank can influence the household budget of a cattle farmer in New
Zealand. One consequence of this globalization of political consciousness is that
the map of political concerns does not always correspond to translation realities.
As Diana Jean Schemo notes with respect to the situation of modern languages in
the US:

With English increasingly becoming the world’s lingua franca, the study of
foreign languages has suffered. Taxpayer pressure on school districts to cut
budgets and focus on the basics of reading and math has short-changed lan-
guage courses, and districts that are interested in teaching foreign languages
report a shortage of qualified teachers. At the same time, the need for lan-
guage proficiency has grown as security threats have fragmented and the
ability to eavesdrop has expanded.
(Language International 2001: 6)

Only 8.2 per cent of American college and university students enrolled for
foreign-language courses in 2000. That same year, nine students majored in Arabic,
140 in Chinese and a handful in Korean (ibid.: 7). The situation in the US is not
dissimilar to the linguistic state of affairs in other English-speaking countries, with
student numbers for most foreign-language courses falling, except in the case of
Spanish (Nuffield 2000). Spanish is also the exception in the US where immigra-
tion from South and Central America is generating interest in the language. More
generally, a decline in foreign-language literacy is accompanied by ever-greater
demands for foreign-language competence. The Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) has found itself increasingly unable to cope with over one million pages of
material to be translated each year and countless hours of conversations to be
intercepted and monitored. Robert O. Slater, the Director of the National Security
Education Program in the US Defense Department, has described the shortage of
translator-linguists as having become a chronic as opposed to an episodic problem
(ibid.).
The dire predictions of informed commentators such as Slater would appear to
have been borne out by the tragic events of 11 September 2001 and the apparent
inability of the intelligence services either to foresee or to forestall the terrorist
attacks on Washington and New York. There is little point in possessing sophisti-
cated surveillance technology if you cannot understand the information you
collect. Nor can you found an effective foreign policy on a linguistically blinkered
 Translation and the global economy 37
view of the world, which since 1989 has become more, not less, linguistically
complex. For example, whereas previously diplomats would have survived in the
Soviet Union with one language, Russian, they would now need to master at least
15 official languages to cover the same territory. The clear implication is that not
to translate (or rather to demand that others translate themselves into English)
may minimize inconvenience but it maximizes risk. The monoglot megastate has
all the vulnerability of an inflexible, non-adaptive system, and as influence
becomes global – superpowers are, one could argue, defined by their ability to
affect the lives of others beyond their own borders – the resistance to that influ-
ence (whether legitimate or criminal) will more often than not be expressed in the
language of the specific place and culture. That, after all, is part of the point, the
defence of specificity against what is perceived to be an alien, threatening hegem-
ony. An irony, with tragic consequences, is that those opposed to the global reach
of a superpower may have a keener sense of the global significance of local lives
than those who wield significant economic, political and military power. As
Michael Bull observes,‘If Americans fail to understand why their country is hated,
it is often because they barely comprehend the extent of its influence. No one
travels halfway around the world to kill themselves amid a people with whom they
feel no connection. Even in the Arabian desert, America is uncomfortably close’
(Bull 2001: 7). Failure to acknowledge the necessary translation fact of inter-
national politics and security not only limits the efficacy of defence and foreign
policies but, more worryingly, generates a politics of non-reciprocity where the
translated react with the ultimatum of untranslatability. Letting the guns do the
talking is one sure way of putting translators out of a job.

Down to earth
When guns do the talking, it is often in defence of local ‘blood and soil’. The
power of identity can see the lower-case intransigence of ‘earth’ (soil/roots/
place) opposed to globalizing perspectives of Earth our Market. However, if we
interrogate the metaphor itself, its ambiguities reveal the specific importance of
translation in late modernity in overcoming seemingly irreconcilable local/global
tensions. One of the most influential commentators on the natural history of Latin
America in the nineteenth century was Charles Darwin who wrote about the con-
tinent in his Geological Observations on South America (Darwin 1846). But it is his last
work, published in 1881, the year before his death, which is of interest here. The
work was entitled The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with
Observations on Their Habits (Darwin 1881). What Darwin demonstrated in this
work was that the humble earthworm was a prodigiously active creature. Estimat-
ing that there were approximately 53,767 worms per acre, he showed that through
their continuous digestion of the soil worms were effectively breaking it up,
38 Translation and the global economy
ploughing it and thus making it available for new growth. In addition, because the
worms cannot swallow coarse particles like lime or pottery or bones, they cover
the surface with fine earth, thus protecting objects underground from exposure to
the elements. As a later commentator, Adam Phillips, puts it, the worms ‘preserve
the past, and create the conditions for future growth’ (Phillips 1999: 56). Cru-
cially, it is destruction in the form of trituration, digestion, that makes new life
possible, that discloses new possibilities in the tired earth.
Like Freud’s forays into the mind, Darwin’s achievement was to make visible
work which normally goes on unnoticed. In his notes from underground, he
showed how human agriculture was doomed without the concealed labour of the
lowly, the hidden and the marginalized. Moving from the natural ecosystem to the
cultural ecosystem, it is time cultural critics turned their eyes to what lies beneath
the ground of cultures, the soil which nourishes their continued vitality. Descend-
ing from heaven to earth, we find in countless recorded cultures the ceaseless,
ongoing process of transformation and conservation which characterizes the invis-
ible, unacknowledged work of the legions of translators working on the planet.
They are ritually accused of destruction, of distorting or betraying the original,
but it is surely the creative destruction of invention and renewal. Translation
without change is not translation but mere citation, leading only to the barren
fields of subjection. So translators both ground a culture in their role as architects
of vernacular languages and cultures and they creatively undermine and challenge
these very cultures in their capacity as underground agents. They conserve the liter-
ature and culture of the past through the new translations that are demanded by
each age in order for texts to continue their dialogue with the present. And they
bring foreign elements, extraneous ideas and fresh images into cultures which,
without the kick start of otherness, remain stalled in an eternity of mediocrity.
This does not mean, however, that the foreign elements do not generate their
own unease. When the Italian–English translator and author Tim Parks wrote an
article for The NewYork Review of Books on the difficulties of producing difference in
translated texts, the title of his piece was ‘Perils of Translation’ (Parks 2000:
53–4). One of these perils for Parks was dependency on the foreign. The more a
translator gets to know the source culture and language, the less able s/he
becomes to render this difference in another language. The dependence of
acculturation makes the independence of translation increasingly uncertain. But
that independence itself is often characterized as unbecoming dependency. A clear
example of translation perceived as promoting a dependent culture was the criti-
cal reaction of Irish-language writers to the state-sponsored Irish-language
translation scheme for literary works in the late 1920s and 1930s. The translation
scheme was seen to be promoting a derivative culture, dependent on foreign liter-
ary products (mainly in English), cultivating cultural cringe rather than native
creativity and autonomy (Cronin 1996: 156–61). The scheme was indeed disad-
 Translation and the global economy 39
vantaged by the absence of any support systems for creative writers in Irish but the
accusation that translation is the literary equivalent of the cover version has tainted
the acceptability of translation in many periods and cultures. But is dependency
necessarily a negative condition? Alasdair MacIntyre makes the following observa-
tion in his work Dependent Rational Animals:

We human beings are vulnerable to many kinds of affliction and most of us

are at some time afflicted by serious ills. How we cope is only in small part
up to us. It is most often to others that we owe our survival, let alone our
flourishing, as we encounter bodily illness and injury, inadequate nutrition,
mental defect and disturbance, and human aggression and neglect.
(MacIntyre 1999: 1)

For MacIntyre, the history of thought from Plato to Moore has been curiously
uninterested in the connection between human affliction and our dependence on
others, and he claims that ‘when the ill, the injured and the otherwise disabled are
presented in the pages of moral philosophy books, it is almost always exclusively as
possible subjects of benevolence by moral agents who are themselves presented as
though they were continuously rational, healthy and untroubled’ (ibid.: 3).
The denial of dependency leads to the fetish of autonomy and an obsessive
concern with unconditional freedoms. If dependency and dependants are erased
from the philosophical record, this may also explain the well-documented invisi-
bility of translation and translators (Venuti 1995). To acknowledge the fact of
translation is to suggest subjection, indebtedness. Legends of origin conceal the
origin of legends. In the seventh century, the majority population of Alexandria
gradually changed from being Greek-speaking Christians to being Arabic-speaking
Muslims. As the Alexandrians translated themselves, they also translated their
texts, beginning with administration and philosophy and going on to concentrate
on mathematical and scientific works. From the late eighth century onwards, the
centre of translation activity moves to Baghdad, the seat of power established by
the caliph al-Mansur in 766. The translation was dynamic and creative so that
when the work of Diophantus, a third-century Alexandrian mathematician, was
re-translated after the discovery of algebra, algebra dominated the style, language
and interpretation of the translation (Noël 1985). The translation of the Arabic
texts into Latin would be a powerful contribution to the development of late
medieval mathematics but it is precisely the contribution of these translations
which is increasingly obscured in the Renaissance as Western Europe sets about
the construction of Ancient Greece as Early Europe. When Regiomantanus
claimed in 1463, ten years after the fall of Constantinople, that a manuscript of
Diophantus existed containing evidence of algebra, the Arab contribution to math-
ematical development was being carefully concealed (Cifoletti 1996: 123–44).
40 Translation and the global economy
Thus, Jean Borrel in his Logista, published in Lyons in 1559, can summarily dismiss
the Arabs and the abacus schools as ‘ignorant propagators’ and assert that the main
elements of algebra already existed in the Tenth Book of Euclid (O’Reilly 2000).
The dependence of Western mathematics on Arab scholarship and translation is
elided in favour of an unbroken continuity from Greek beginnings.
Modern historians of mathematics see the dependence as enabling and the trans-
lation enterprise as central to the shift in scientific thought in the twelfth century
and beyond. Indeed, we might go further and argue that translation generally – and
literary translation is no exception – shows the ethical value of dependency. Here it
is important to distinguish between dependency and domination. In his work on
La Dépendance, Albert Memmi presents the relationship between the dominant and
the dominated as one where the dominated have no choice: their subjugation is not
based on their consent. Conversely, in the relationship between the dependent and
their providers (Memmi’s term is pourvoyeur), the relationship may be an unequal
one but it does involve the consent of the dependent who see benefits in sustained
contact (Memmi 1979: 28–32). The term ‘dependency’ has a dangerous ambiguity,
the sense of a relationship that is sought and shunned, desired and condemned.
By creating a certain dependent relationship to the source language and culture,
literary translation suggests that culturally there is no independence without depen-
dence and that the great unfettered Doer and Maker of the liberal imagination may
be not so much transcending dependence as concealing it. Translation reveals our
multiple dependencies and the connectedness underlying the consoling fictions of
absolute autonomy. It may indeed be the sum of our debts that constitutes our true
wealth as peoples.
Geoff Mulgan, a British thinker and social commentator, has written about the
particular dilemma which faces us in our new millennium:

Our problem is that freedom to behave as we would wish, without regard for
our effects on others, runs directly counter to the other striking fact of the
contemporary world: our growing dependence on other people. The world
may never have been freer, but it has also never been so interdependent and
interconnected. Only a small proportion of the world’s population could now
be self-sufficient.
(Mulgan 1998: 1)

Mulgan uses an old English word, ‘connexity’, to describe the novel situation of a
world which is characterized less by sovereignty and separateness than by multiple
connectedness. The human difficulty is in not allowing the impulse to freedom to
destroy the capacity for interdependence. In this respect, the only worthwhile
independence in an age of connexity is indeed one that acknowledges not so much
dependence as interdependence. Moore’s Law, namely that computing power
 Translation and the global economy 41
doubles every 18 months, is generally well known. Less well known is what
Mulgan calls Kao’s Law – after the Chinese-American thinker, John Kao, who
made the claim that:‘the power of creativity rises exponentially with the diversity
and divergence of those connected into a network: in other words its capacity to
innovate or create depends on dissonant and complementary ways of thinking, not
on consensus’ (Mulgan 1998: 31).
Like most Anglophone thinkers on globalization, Mulgan does not mention
either language or translation. And yet translation is all about making connections,
linking one culture and language to another, setting up the conditions for an open-
ended exchange of goods, technologies and [Link] translation history tells us
is that independence has often crucially been born of a dependence on the trans-
lation either of earlier emblematic texts from the culture(s) or language(s) of
a people or of new ideas from a different philosophical or political tradition.
Cultural independence is almost invariably then a matter of translatorial inter-
dependence. And it is because they connect more and more places and people to
the cultural network that translators are important. Kao’s Law also explains why
translators need not only to connect others but also to connect to each other,
whether in conferences or through international associations to other translators
from different languages and cultures. Our cultural health and survival relies as
much on our mutual connectedness as our physical well-being relies on safeguard-
ing the planet together. But in our closeness, translation also reminds us that there
is a therapeutic value in distance. In the next chapter we will consider how new
ways of looking at translation must be found if we are to make sense of the chang-
ing forms of proximity and distance in the contemporary global age.
 Sue Ellen Wright and Leland D. Wright, jr, ed.s,
Scientific and Technical Translation
(Amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 1993)

"Retooling" as an Adaptive Skill

for Translators
BEN TEAGUE

Sci/tech translators may dream of serving one market sector,

doing translations on a narrowing range of subjects (and hence
progressively easier ones), becoming more and more valuable to
fewer and fewer clients (and choosing, among those, the least
vexing), and cocooning themselves in a blanket of job security.
Those lemonade springs and peppermint trees remain just a
dream for most. Independents must specialize but not too narrow­
ly, work hard to keep offering high-quality services, seek new
clients to replace old ones lost, and face daily uncertainty about
work load and income.
Translators manage these conflicts in a variety of ways. Some
market their services with great energy, a few set up as bureaus
for purposes of load-leveling, others accept work on any "sci/tech"
subject (or any subject whatever), and those with a low tolerance
for ambiguity look for more stable in-house jobs or leave the field
altogether.
Into this pattern of coping mechanisms, every translator must
find a place to fit learning processes. Few perceive the knowledge
they began with—whether of business practices or of aerospace
engineering—as sufficient for a productive career. Clever trans­
lators who have discovered the secret of success in this or that
endeavor face overflow audiences when they promise to disclose
it at conferences.
162 □ Retooling as an Adaptive Skill for Translators

I would be presumptuous to expect an S.R.O. crowd, and

indeed I cannot claim to have a secret to disclose. But a systematic
account of one translator's experience in learning to handle new
material may find an audience among colleagues whose changing
client lists demand that they display ever new kinds of subject
knowledge.

Becoming (an) Expert

No translator can be an expert on all subjects; every translator
must be an expert on a few. Most recognize that they must adapt
to changing demands by changing their profile. They need to offer
expertise in a limited range of fields, but not always the same fields,
A translator, for example, who has spent years working on chemi­
cal engineering texts may move to a new situation (lose a client,
gain a client, attempt to enter a new part of the market) where
chemical engineering accounts for few assignments or none.
I will briefly define "expert" and relate some factors that enter
into the decisions whether to attempt a learning project and how
to judge its success, but neither of those points is central to this
paper. Here is what is central: By applying the method I will propose,
a working sci/tech translator can learn enough about a new subject to
perform good translations. I should add the disclaimer that the
method has nothing to do with "cramming" for a single assign­
ment in an unfamiliar area.
How well must the translator understand the subject of the
text? Some might say not at all; "just write down what the origi­
nal says." We need not spend much time on that view, for each
of us has seen translations produced to this standard. A better
answer: The translator must understand the subject well enough
to use references effectively, imitate the best writing of specialists,
detect nonsense, and with all this produce words enough to make
a profit.
The decision to set out on a program of self-instruction should
take account of benefits as well as risks. Benefits will include the
prospect of clients and income, but it would fly in the face of
experience to regard every dollar promised as a dollar in the bank.
 BENTEAGUE □ 163

Only experience will tell how much weight to attach to promises.

Risks may seem negligible at first glance, but any investment (of
time in study, of money in resources) carries the risk of waste,
and every translator recognizes how one bad job can injure a
hard-won reputation. Again, experience will guide the assessment
of risk.
The decision depends on another factor that may be even
harder to evaluate: The outlook for success. A background of
study or work in physics, for example, suggests that the translator
can quickly and easily work up optics but may have trouble
learning enough law to do an agency contract.

A Short Course in Welding

Recently I had a chance to do a series of translations on weld­
ing processes. Because I have the experience fresh in mind as I
write this, I draw most of my account from it. The steps I fol­
lowed to get through the first job (Fig. 1) can serve as a paradigm
for the whole method I propose.

• Identify the topic, read "orientation" texts

• Start translating
• Compile lists of specialist references and
other sources
• Edit the lists, consult sources and begin
developing terminology
• Pause for concentrated research
• Evaluate the finished translation
• Perfect the reference lists and terminology
)

Figure 1. Outline of the proposed method (static version)

I do not claim any basis in theory or educational principles for

this system. Indeed, some readers will object to the order of
164 □ Retooling as an Adaptive Skill for Translators

steps. But translating early in the process has economic, psycho­

logical a n d cognitive advantages: It represents (or at least sim­
ulates) progress toward the final bill, it gives a sense of accom­
plishment that turning pages or dialing the telephone does not,
a n d it serves as a guide for later steps, as I will relate presently.
The user of my translations is an organization with a big re­
search program that deals with all kinds of welding, so that in the
e n d I h a d to cover more areas than will be evident in the follow­
ing s u m m a r y of the field.

To join two parts, one applies heat to the joint, adds filler
metal to fill the gap between parts and unite with the melted
portions of the base metal, and provides shielding (usually an inert
atmosphere) to promote desired behavior and suppress undesired
processes. Heat is supplied by a torch or gun, which may be
guided by hand or mechanically.
In oxyfuel gas welding, the torch delivers and controls flows of
oxygen and a fuel gas such as acetylene from cylinders; the gases
burn at the welding tip. Filler metal takes the form of a rod. In
oxyfuel gas cutting, a preheat flame brings the metal to such a
temperature that it actually burns (releasing more heat) in the
high-velocity stream of cutting oxygen, which expels molten metal
and oxides from the kerf. The cutting tip has apertures for both
preheat flame and cutting oxygen.
In gas metal-arc welding, one of many arc welding processes,
the base metal is heated by an arc set up between a wire elec­
trode, also serving as filler metal, and the work. The welding
power source supplies a controlled electric voltage and current.
Wire is fed from a spool through the gun; a shielding gas such as
argon, also delivered through the gun, domes over the arc and
the molten weld pool, preventing oxygen in the atmosphere from
interfering with the process.
A good weld features complete fusion (from the surface of the
base metal all the way down to the root), a more-or-less small
heat-affected zone in which the metallurgical properties of the base
metal may be altered, and neat appearance and constant width
of the bead or the fillet. Desirable qualities in a welder include
some knowledge of metallurgy, good welding safety practices, and
presumably a clear conscience.
 BENTEAGUE □ 165

Identifying the Topic

I started by scouring my library for welding fundamentals. As
usual, the first places I looked were handbooks: Marks, Kirk-
Othmer and others (see "References"). These publications are good
for orientation because they give short, linear treatments of many
subjects and do not cheat on terms as general books may (New
Columbia uses the noun "bond" where specialists say "weld").
In this orientation and first reading stage, I learned basic points
that I had formerly scanted because they were not central to other
assignments. I noted concerns in weld design (e.g., butt weld,
strength) and technique (plate-edge preparation, forehand welding),
miscellaneous terms (penetration, braze welding), and a reference for
future use (Metals Handbook). I began to see how welding would
shape up as a primary topic and how my client's interests fit with
the literature I was discovering.
The arrival of the documents enabled me to check the topic
definition, which turned out wrong: The first translation was to
be about cutting, not welding. Having begun on welding, how­
ever, I found it easy to shift over to cutting, since the operations
and equipment are quite similar. (Many references, including the
Welding Handbook, treat cutting processes as a separate topic, but
the chapters on cutting make continual reference to those on
welding.)

Making a First Stab

I now began translating the first document. My colleagues may
protest that making what amounts to an expendable first transla­
tion is inefficient. And so it is. The work will turn out rough and
full of holes where dictionaries and references do not give instant
answers. The translator may later manage to save a few para­
graphs out of this attempt, but only at a high cost in labor.
In my view, the deciding factor is that new facts are easier to
understand if they come as the answers to questions than if an author
has silently chosen which ones to present and in what form.
166 □ Retooling as an Adaptive Skill for Translators

Reading handbooks and even specialist literature may lead to

some questions, but these will not compare—in number, specifici­
ty or urgency—with the ones that arise from trying to produce a
draft translation.
The first try, covering a few hundred or perhaps a couple of
thousand words, should result in as many pages of questions and
notes as of translation. In this way it serves its purposes of feed­
ing information back to the learning process and guiding the
selection and use of references.
This step does not accord with the structure or the logic of
academic courses, but the situation I am describing is not that of
a scholar. If time permitted, one might better take courses, or at
least set aside a few weeks for study and reflection; but sci/tech
translators will say, in chorus, that time does not permit.

Preparing a Campaign Plan

With the background reading done and a rough start made on
the translation, I looked ahead at the next two steps. Before
completing the job, I would have to work up a comprehensive list
of references (and possibly acquire some of them), and I would
have to "tune" the list and begin consulting sources and develop­
ing a terminology base. While Fig. 1 shows no translation going
on during stages three and four, this was in fact the time when
I did most of the work. The interaction between study and trans­
lation in this period was faster and more intense than in the
preceding one.
My client gave me three useful items: an annual report, a
pointer to the Welding Handbook, and a glossary. The report made
a good quick read but led nowhere. The handbook proved the key
reference; it discussed many aspects of welding processes, in­
cluded numbers of definitive terms, and provided long stretches
of parallel texts.
With these materials and some bilingual dictionaries, I had
both the long and the short forms of my list: Welding Handbook (I
bought two volumes); Metals Handbook (fortunately in a nearby
reference room); Kleiber (on my shelf already); and the glossary.
 BEN TEAGUE □ 167

Other jobs have turned out differently. I began a similar project

with a list of three dozen books; examined every one, short-listed
four, and ordered the fearfully expensive leader; found even the
long list inadequate; and eventually added two or three more. It
just depends.
Every reader of this volume has been, or should have been,
avidly reading about terminology as a pursuit related to transla­
tion but partly independent of it (the ATA Chronicle has carried a
long series of Sue Ellen Wright's articles on this subject). The
glossary supplied for this series of jobs gave me a new outlook on
"standalone" terminology. The long (ca. 3500 entries) and care­
fully compiled list did not afford nearly the help my client and I
expected it to, for two reasons: First, because the glossary, in the
form of an MTX™ "LxtFile," came without documentation, so that
it was not possible to distiguish among the three great classes of
bilingual equivalents (unarguably correct; client's shop terms;
made up). The records contained markers and what I took to be
authenticating notes, but without a key or legend they were all
meaningless. Second, for the very reason that the work should
have had such immense value: It was made before the translation
began and incorporated no effort of mine,
This point merits a little further discussion. A trained termi-
nologist with access to a wealth of resources should, I expected,
produce a set of ultra-reliable equivalents. On examining the
work, I was forced to re-evaluate my expectation. Many of the
terms presented were acceptable; they checked against original-
English publications ("arc starting" does correspond to German
Ziinden).
Others, however, seemed "off," as if they had been created in
a vacuum—as they had in a sense, if the terminologist needed a
quick equivalent and had no translation on which to base it. An
example: Rückstosskraft, equated to "repelling force"; in arc weld­
ing, this is called "anode reaction force" (Welding Handbook).
Still others led me into arguments with myself. The lone
equivalent for Auftragschweissen was "hardfacing." The German
word denotes any process in which filler metal is added to the
surface of a part. The Welding Handbook describes four: "cladding,"
"hardfacing," "buildup" and "buttering." The document for
168 □ Retooling as an Adaptive Skill for Translators

translation did not unambiguously refer to just one of these pro­

cesses—all similar in technique and equipment—and to use
"hardfacing" alone would have misled the user of the translation.
If an outsider's suggestion will not be impertinent, I offer this
one to terminology workers: Let bilingual terminology grow from
translations (and translators' research), not the other way around.
And to my colleagues, an insider's suggestion: Use precompiled
word lists, even client-sanctioned ones, with the same reserva­
tions you hold about dictionaries. Good as they have become, and
much value as they add to documents, terminologists have not
escaped the constraints that we have always known apply to lexi­
cographers.

The Research Crunch

With the first assignment three-quarters done, I stopped trans­
lating and went to the library.
In a paper some time ago (Teague) I suggested organizing "a
list of questions and a thermos of coffee" for this step, but most
libraries now restrict users to the first. If everything up to this
point has been in an Apollonian vein, Research Day is Dionysian
time. The translator has now exhausted obvious sources of infor­
mation and must look in nonobvious places. Everything from
Aachener Blatter für assortierte Gebiete to Zhurnal nesvyazannykh tern
is fair game. Books on welding had not yielded what I needed to
know about ship-breaking, fabrication by "shape cutting," etc. But
this is not a paper about methodical library research, to say noth­
ing of lucky hits, so I will not dwell on what information I sought
and where I found it.

Evaluating the Finished Work

When this project began, I could name two kinds of welding
("acetylene" and "arc") and tell base metal from filler. Weeks later
I had the nerve to send out a translation on oxyfuel cutting. The
reader may ask what secret power techniques I used to decide
when the job was ready to go.
 BEN TEAGUE □ 169

If the factors in deciding to start the self-instruction were hard

to describe, the criteria for judging the first translation are terribly
difficult to apply. While a veteran may have little hesitation to do
it alone, I suggest that a beginning translator can best perform
this task in company: with the help of a revisor or an experienced
colleague.
This is not to say that the assessment is a subjective one. The
tests are as objective as any standards applied to translation. But
a list of things to check does not make a welding inspector—that
takes experience and practiced judgment—and such a list does not
make a translation inspector either.
Still, there is a list. Here are the points I checked in my first
welding translation:

■ Is it complete and presentable? (All paragraphs, equations,

tables; neat margins; no thumbprints.)

■ Does it use correct language? (Subject-verb agreement;

"register"; terminology.)

■ Does it feature an authentic style? (Emulation of highest

quality of first-language writing on the same topic.)

■ Is the text consistent with itself? (Freedom from contradic­

tions between sections.)

■ Does the translation accord with first-language references?

(Freedom from contradictions and terminological discrep­
ancies between translation and, say, Welding Handbook.)

■ When the translation seems wrong, is it wrong because the

author was? (Freedom from awkwardness in response to
difficult writing.)

Most translators will like to have a second opinion on the first

assignment. There are two ways to obtain one: Cultivate a
specialist, and badger the client for an assessment. It may be
cheaper to depend on the client, but it is no doubt
170 □ Retooling as an Adaptive Skill for Translators

better—especially for the long term—to procure the help of an

expert. Many skilled translators routinely hire a hydrologist, a
medical technologist, or what-have-you to review translations on
new and even familiar subjects. In my welding project, the nature
of the relationship (with the techies, not the clerical staff) and the
ease of contact led me to work fairly closely with the client for
purposes of evaluation.

Wrapping Up

The learning process cannot end when the job goes out the
door. More assignments on the same topic will follow, and the
translator needs to make sure that the study done, resources
collected, and research approaches discovered will pay off again
and again. The last step in my procedure, then, is one of perfect­
ing the records.
To wind up the welding project, I reviewed my bibliographic
notes and examined the revised drafts to be sure all terminology
changes and finds had made it into the glossary files. I then made
a quick run through my own glossary to check that all new entries
had text locations and supporting context. Finally, I looked at the
job just finished and the next ones in the stack, noting how
information from the first would figure in the others.
This account may have suggested a static relationship between
steps: this, then this, then this. That simplified version (Fig. 1)
gives way, in fact, to the dynamic, closed-loop approach outlined
in Fig. 2. What is more, the method lends itself to a world of
variations. I have already described how two steps collapsed into
one in the welding project; other translators may happen on jobs
where the entire first stab proves usable, or on monster assign­
ments that require multiple Research Days.
The technique I have proposed—a way of devising an ad hoc
curriculum and discipline for self-instruction—has proven useful
in areas ranging from abstract mathematics to concrete structures.
 BEN TEAGUE □ 171

Identify topic, read orientation texts

First Identify Edit list

stab references of refs.

Translate

Research Day

Translate

Evaluate work Perfect the lists

Figure 2. Outline of the proposed method (dynamic version)

The case described in this paper, my course of study in welding,

was routine in some ways (closeness of subject to work I had
done before) and unique in others (client's large glossary).
What was most typical, however, was a point I have not
stressed: This is hard work. Most translators found studying
difficult when they were undergraduates, and for many it has
become more so in the time since. Nor have I discovered how to
computerize the task.
Learning remains a crucial skill for translators nonetheless.
None of us lives on that Big Rock Candy Mountain where
Monday's knowledge will get us all the way through Friday. I
hope my colleagues will find some value in the approach
described here for coping with the need to adapt.
172 □ Retooling as an Adaptive Skill for Translators

REFERENCES

ASM International. Metals Handbook, 9th edition. Vol. 7, Welding,

Brazing and Soldering. Metals Park, Ohio:.ASM, 1983.
American Welding Society. Welding Handbook, 7th edition. Vol. 1,
Fundamentals of Welding. Miami: AWS, 1976, rev. 1981. Vol. 2,
Welding Processes—Arc and Gas Welding and Cutting, Brazing, and
Soldering. Miami: AWS, 1978.
Kirk-Othmer Concise Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1985.
Kleiber, A.W. Fachwörterbuch Schweissen, Schneiden und verwandte Ver-
fahren [Dictionary, Welding, Cutting and Allied Processes]. Vol. 2,
German-English. Düsseldorf: Deutscher Verlag für Schweisstechnik
(DVS) GmbH, 1987.
Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers. 8th edition. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1978.
New Columbia Encyclopedia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.
Teague, Ben. "Auto-didacticism as a way of life." In ITI Conference 3
Proceedings, edited by C. Picken, pp. 67-71. London: ASLIB, 1989.
Wright, Sue Ellen. "Design for Terminology Management, " ATA Chron­
icle, 19.6 (1990): 14-16; 19.7 (1990): 13-14; 19.7/8 (1990): 13-17 +,
19.10 (1990): 18-19 and 19.11 (1990): 31.
663256
research-article2016
JLSXXX10.1177/0261927X16663256Journal of Language and Social PsychologyKrieger and Gallois

Article
Journal of Language and Social Psychology
1­–11
Translating Science: Using © The Author(s) 2016
DOI: 10.1177/0261927X16663256
the Science of Language to [Link]

Explicate the Language of

Science

Janice L. Krieger1 and Cindy Gallois2

Abstract
The articles in this special issue highlight the ways in which science communication,
and in particular translational communication, implicates the nuances of language.
This issue is the report of the Task Force on STEM (science, technology, engineering,
mathematics) language set up by the International Association of Language and Social
Psychology. The articles raise issues about the multiple stakeholders in science and
their characteristic language and concepts, in contexts as diverse as health, energy
production, forensic science, and science education. They point to the consequences
of getting communication wrong, and to the important role of linguistics and language
and social psychology in understanding this process. The articles point to a research
agenda for language and social psychology researchers in this increasingly important
and salient area, as we address major problems in society through the sciences.

Keywords
science communication, science translation, language and social psychology, intergroup
communication, communication accommodation, language brokers

This special issue constitutes the report of the Task Force on STEM (science, technol-
ogy, engineering, mathematics) language, set up in 2014 by the International
Association of Language and Social Psychology to examine the role that language and
social psychology (LASP) could and should play in understanding science

1University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

2The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

Corresponding Author:
Janice L. Krieger, STEM Translational Communication Center, College of Journalism and
Communications, University of Florida, 2024 Weimer Hall, P.O. Box 118400, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA.
Email: janicekrieger@[Link]

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

2 Journal of Language and Social Psychology 

communication. This field is burgeoning because it addresses central issues for both
science and for communication, in the context of wicked problems for the modern
world (see Rice & Giles, IN PRESS). Science communication as an area of study is
eclectic; we concentrate on the special role that language plays, and the ways in which
it can usefully be approached through LASP.
In this special issue, therefore, we aim to create an intellectual space for explor-
ing the connections between two distinct but complementary academic pursuits. On
the one hand, we consider the language of science. The language of science refers to
communication designed for highly expert audiences, intended to convey technical
information about the state of research across the STEM and medical fields. Using
the language of science, although it is essential for certain occupational tasks, is
often criticized in the public sphere for being inaccessible to nonexperts, disempow-
ering them, and therefore failing to have a helpful influence on decision making.
This critique has led to a flourishing antiscience movement, including skepticism
about the human influence on climate change (e.g., Hornsey, Fielding, McStay,
Reser, & Bradley, 2016; Lewandowsky et al., 2015), antivaccination campaigns
(Blume, 2006), and the like. Scientists themselves have reacted with consternation,
highlighting the damage such movements can do to the progress of their fields and
indeed to the fate of the environment and human health. Some people (e.g.,
Lewandowsky et al., 2015) have attributed political conservatism, conspiracy theo-
ries, and extreme motivations to the skeptics, although others have characterized
them in less negative terms (e.g., Blume, 2006; Hornsey et al., 2016). In general, this
situation has foregrounded the intergroup communication between scientists and
nonscientists. One consequence has been greatly increased interest in science com-
munication, as the plethora of journals (e.g., Sage’s Science Communication), text-
books, university courses, and research centers shows. Another has been an
increasing focus on the translation of science (see Translation of Science and the
Language of Science section), including everything from bench-to-bed pathways for
new drugs to the role of communication and media in the public take-up of science
and new technology; several authors in this special issue are employed in such cen-
ters or teach these courses.
On the other hand, there is a wealth of theory and research in the science of lan-
guage, of which LASP is a key exponent. This arena encompasses literatures ranging
from applied linguistics to social psychological perspectives on how humans commu-
nicate and create shared meaning. Language scientists examine in detail the ways in
which words and nonverbal behavior signal social and personal identities, improve or
exacerbate intergroup tensions, and position speakers in interaction relative to each
other, audiences, events, and contexts. The science of language is itself often criticized
for being pedantic, with little practical application to complex situations of high social
import. However, this field is uniquely positioned to shed new light on the language of
science, its antecedents, and its consequences.
To that end, this special issue has assembled a unique collection of articles that
draw on various facets of the science of language to push theoretical boundaries or
empirically demonstrate how certain types of communication enhance or detract from

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

Krieger and Gallois 3

the goals scientists hope to achieve through their work. The topics of the seven articles
range across the STEM and medical fields. Three of them (Neil, Krieger, Kalyanaraman,
& George, IN PRESS; Strekalova et al., IN PRESS; Wray, IN PRESS) deal with
various aspects of health care. Two (Gallois, Ashworth, Leach, & Moffat, IN PRESS;
de Vries, IN PRESS) concern language around climate change and energy production.
One (Howes & Kemp, IN PRESS) explores the complex arena of forensic science,
and one (Brooks, IN PRESS) addresses directly the issue of science education for
nonscientists. Their approaches also vary, from linguistics and applied linguistics
through to cognitive social psychology. All of them, however, point to the potential of
language scholars to aid in understanding and improving communication between sci-
entists and others.
One reason this special issue is needed is that research collaborations among lan-
guage scholars and experts in the STEM and medical fields has been rare (albeit more
common in the current climate of critique of science). Consequently, advances in
effective intergroup communication in these domains has been slow. For this reason,
we use the term “language of science” in a broad sense. We believe that one of the
barriers to the advancement of this general area of study has been an artificial bifurca-
tion of scholars based on topical interests, reflecting the fragmentation of fields in
science and health more generally. For example, the field of communication is often
divided into speech communities that self-identify as “health communication” or “sci-
ence communication.” The former is dominated by research on improving patient
decision making in the domain of public health, while the latter is dominated by stud-
ies on human decision making related to environmental and energy concerns or the
introduction of new methods, theory, and technology. From a disciplinary perspective,
however, these two areas of communication share a core interest in how technical
information is translated for various stakeholder groups. Therefore, the special issue
includes articles that span these traditional boundaries to generate insights with appli-
cations beyond a particular health or science topic.

Translation of Science and the Language of Science

One of the key similarities between health and science communication is their interest
in translation, and specifically in translational communication. The purpose of this
area is to focus on presentation of scientific evidence in a language and format that
improves accessibility to and comprehension by an intended audience in a given con-
text. Translational communication addresses the ongoing struggle to balance accuracy
and comprehensibility of information being used to address pressing social issues. In
many countries, science and health policy makers have developed elaborate ways of
consulting with the general public (the voters in democracies) before they go forward.
Methods like citizens’ juries (e.g., Gooberman-Hill, Horwood, & Calnan, 2008), along
with more traditional polls and surveys, are employed to assess public opinion and aid
in decision making. These methods stand or fall on the extent to which the underlying,
often very complex, science has been translated adequately and appropriately for these
interlocutors.

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

4 Journal of Language and Social Psychology 

Deficit Model of Communication

The most common conceptualization of the science communication process, which
has persisted until the present day, is a deficit (or one-way) model of communication
(Bubela et al., 2009; see Rice & Giles, IN PRESS). The deficit model assumes that
problems in human decision making are due to a lack of information. Thus, the role of
a scientific expert is simply to reduce this information deficit through disseminating
scientific information more and better. For example, Australia’s chief scientist until
2016, Professor Ian Chubb, passionately advocated for improved STEM education
and science literacy among the general public as the best way to enhance the produc-
tion and uptake of science in society (e.g., Office of the Chief Scientist, 2014). In his
view, the problem for scientists in getting their messages across lies in inadequate
education of people in general. This attitude is common among scientists worldwide.
One consequence is messages from scientists, in the media and elsewhere, that rely on
untested assumptions about the importance of clarity. When scientists interact primar-
ily with other scientists in their own area of expertise, it is nearly impossible for them
to accurately identify what aspects of information will be difficult for those outside
their domain to understand.
Those taking the deficit perspective also tend to make the untested (and often
unstated) assumption that the mere existence of a deficit is enough to intrinsically
motivate nonscientists to pay attention to information, acquire the required skills to
comprehend the information, and adjust their preexisting attitudes and beliefs to con-
form with scientists’ interpretation of the data. When these things do not happen,
stakeholders may be blamed as being antiscience or anti-intellectual (cf. Lewandowsky
et al., 2015). In this way, rather than accept the potential limitations of one’s own com-
munication, perceived value placed on science becomes a marker of group identity. In
an example from public health, the term clinical trial (or randomized clinical trial can
be interpreted by members of the lay public to mean that new treatments are being
tested through “trial and error” (Krieger, 2014). To scientists, a “trial” is a formal sci-
entific study design; to members of the lay public, the term “trial” is more commonly
used to mean an informal test run (e.g., a trial sample of a product). The pervasive use
of the term trial in medical settings, coupled with the different connotations doctors
and patients associate with this term, may help us understand why participation rates
in randomized clinical trials are so low. The slippage in language use between scien-
tists and laypeople goes unnoticed and unaddressed; at worst, the public is blamed for
being too conservative or antiscience. Every article in this special issue addresses this
problem in one way or another, from the need to identify stakeholders carefully and
accommodate to their language (Gallois et al., IN PRESS), to subtle issues around
framing messages (Neil et al., IN PRESS; de Vries, IN PRESS), through to the mul-
tiplicity of meanings in the same domain among different groups of stakeholders
(Howes & Kemp, IN PRESS; Wray, IN PRESS), and the influence of identity on how
people communicate about science (Brooks, IN PRESS; Strekalova et al., IN PRESS).
This deficit approach undergirds many science communication efforts that are con-
ducted under the auspices of raising awareness or educational campaigns, but that

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

Krieger and Gallois 5

almost always have a social influence goal. Those social influence goals are typically
implicitly or explicitly intended to encourage certain stakeholder groups to engage in
a particular behavior, such as quitting smoking or purchasing carbon offsets. These
goals are obvious even in the theoretical basis for research. The Transtheoretical
Model (e.g., Prochaska & Velicer, 1997) is one such example, where the desirability of
change is implicit; the locus of the problem is simply an individual’s readiness to make
the change. Another example is the significant resources that many governmental and
other organizations continue to expend in efforts to disseminate scientific findings to
various stakeholder groups, without consideration of the information needs of those
audiences.

Dialogic Model of Communication

The general lack of success emanating from the deficit model of communication in
key areas like health promotion and acceptance of new technology has led to other
perspectives on science communication, such as a dialogic approach (Pieczka &
Escobar, 2013; Rice & Giles, IN PRESS). A fundamental assumption of this approach
is that meaning is negotiated through communication. In theory, this means that rather
than viewing one communicator as a “sender” and another as a “receiver,” all partici-
pants in communication are considered as simultaneously sending and receiving mes-
sages. At the same time, scholars in the science of language have long been focused on
issues of communication competence and the importance of creating shared meaning
between interlocutors. In this view, each interaction partner has unique needs, and all
must make adjustments in a given interaction to achieve shared meaning. In practice,
this means that science communication efforts are intertwined with efforts to maxi-
mize the participation of stakeholders, establish ongoing channels for meaningful
feedback, and develop policies and procedures for decision making that reflect diverse
domains of expertise.
There are a number of examples of ongoing efforts that embrace this dialogic
approach (see, e.g., Rice & Giles, IN PRESS). One is the encouragement by funding
organizations to encourage scientists to use more community-based participatory
research techniques. Community-based participatory research attempts to incorpo-
rate stakeholder perceptions of what research priorities should be in communities and
identify the best way to design those studies (see, e.g., Gallois et al., IN PRESS). A
fascinating and well-developed case of this process is OMERACT (Outcome
Measures in Rheumatology: [Link] This independent interna-
tional group of researchers, clinicians, and patients has as its explicit aim to include
patients’ perspectives in all aspects of its research and practice; all of its many publi-
cations include both medical researchers (and practicing doctors) and patients as
authors or reference groups.
Another such example is the growing interest in citizen scientist programs (e.g.,
Hand, 2010). Citizen science essentially consists of public participation in research,
but the extent to which the public participates is quite variable. Perhaps the most com-
mon form of participation is citizens who are trained to collect data as part of a research

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

6 Journal of Language and Social Psychology 

project. For example, Florida LAKEWATCH is a program that relies on trained com-
munity volunteers to monitor the water quality for 1,100 lakes, 175 coastal sites, 120
rivers, and 5 natural springs throughout the state of Florida (Hoyer, Bigham, Bachmann,
& Canfield, 2014). Collecting research and regulatory quality data throughout an
entire region is massive effort; these data were made possible by effectively connect-
ing the need for data with the passion of community members for protecting their natu-
ral environment. Citizen scientists can also play an important role in the design of
research, meeting with scientists to help identify which scientific problems will be
addressed, and providing feedback on different potential strategies for addressing
those problems. This process has generally been successful in OMERACT, but there
have been some unintended consequences for patients who have moved too far toward
the scientist identity (de Wit, Abma, Koelewijn-can Loon, Collins, & Kirwan, 2013).
Finally, there is a growing emphasis on encouraging more interactive methods of sci-
ence communication, such as opportunities for stakeholders to ask questions of experts
and receive immediate answers. One example is the Science community on Reddit, a
social media website that allows individuals to post messages using an online bulletin
board system. This online community of over 8 million users sponsors an “Ask Me
Anything” session, where a scientist answers posted questions in real time.
In short, accepting one-way models of communication as the appropriate status quo
is problematic. The path toward more dialogic forms of science communication is
neither easy nor clear, however. The articles in this special issue make a significant
contribution toward using the science of language to examine the overall practices and
processes of communication in scientific contexts. In doing so, we seek to correct
common misperceptions about science communication. One key question is this: Who
are the communicators or stakeholders in science communication? Another fundamen-
tal component of communication addressed by these articles concerns the ways in
which interlocutors enact their identity in science communication situations. We con-
sider the contexts of science communication, and the ways that language is influenced
by them and influences them. Finally, each article points to research that can and
should be done by scholars in LASP, with a view to improving both scientific research
and science communication.

Stakeholders in Science Communication

It is commonly assumed that the main stakeholders in science communication are sci-
entists and members of the lay public. Several articles in this special issue problematize
this assumption, by describing the range of stakeholders involved in various science
communication contexts and the complexities associated with identifying the unique
concerns and perspectives of each group (see Giles & Maass, 2016, for detailed discus-
sions of intergroup language). Howes and Kemp (IN PRESS) explore interprofessional
communication and how scientific findings are used by nonscientists, who may be
expert in other fields, in the decision-making process. In the case of communication
about forensic science, potential stakeholders include forensic scientists themselves,
police, lawyers, judges, and jurors. Each of these groups has its own language

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

Krieger and Gallois 7

and jargon, and its own communicative goals. For instance, forensic scientists have
ambiguity embedded in every aspect of their language, whereas the other groups look
for “straight answers” in the evidence they present. The authors describe the range of
cognitive biases that can complicate the accurate exchange of information in these con-
texts. Specifically, they argue that the justice system should reconsider how shared
meaning can be negotiated through dialogue and participation.
Gallois et al. (IN PRESS) discuss the interplay of scientists, for-profit companies,
and the local communities affected by environmental operations, in the context of com-
panies negotiating a social license to operate a project. This article illuminates not only
who the stakeholders are but the variations in their concerns. For example, community
objections to commercial environmental operations may not only be concerned about
the environmental implications of the work, as is commonly assumed. While this is a
very real concern for some, the perspectives of communities are complex and include
both economic (e.g., workers not patronizing local businesses) and social concerns
(e.g., workers not being permitted to engage in community recreational activities).

Identity Negotiation and Science Communication

Intergroup communication involves the complex and dynamic interplay of multiple
identities that may or may not be salient in a particular context (cf. Giles, 2016; Giles
& Maass, 2016). For example, there has been much attention in recent years to the role
of stereotypes as an influencing factor in the low numbers of women and minorities in
STEM careers and in senior appointments in academic medicine (Reuben, Sapienza,
& Zingales, 2014). The concern is that current homogeneity in the scientific system is
self-perpetuating, and that if women and minorities do not see others with social group
identities similar to their own, they will not view these careers as viable. The data in
the article by Brooks (IN PRESS) provide support for this idea, but also extend it.
Students in this sample believed that careers in science are associated with particular
social groups. However, the stereotypical scientist was also associated with a number
of prototypical characteristics that these students found socially unattractive, such as
boring, isolated, and uncreative. Thus, efforts to change the “face” of science, and to
communicate this change, are likely to fall short. Instead, we need to carefully con-
sider what enactment of a science identity entails, and present the very diverse charac-
teristics that lead to success in scientific fields.
Brooks (IN PRESS) also points to the vital need to systematically address science
communication in the formal training of students. For example, communication pro-
grams could offer courses for scientists that provide exposure to some of the core
considerations associated with crafting effective messages (see also Rice & Giles, IN
PRESS). Encouraging students across disciplines to work together could also set the
stage for future successful interactions in which communication scholars and scien-
tists in STEM and medicine learn to collaborate to answer important questions about
how best to communicate socially relevant information. In doing this, however, it is
important for students to maintain strong and positive discipline identities, so that they
can cross these boundaries with confidence.

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

8 Journal of Language and Social Psychology 

Fitting the Language to the Context

The process of translational communication is often mischaracterized as “dumbing
down” complex or technical information for lay audiences. In part, this mischaracter-
ization has been fueled by the plain language movement (e.g., Asprey, 2010). The
original purpose of plain language practices (often via legislation) was to encourage
communication accommodation. This means that the written materials produced by
governmental agencies and other organizations were encouraged to match the com-
munication needs of the intended audience in terms of syntax, vocabulary, and content.
The spirit of this movement was to promote shared meaning. Unfortunately, the imple-
mentation of the movement was reduced to ensuring that materials were written at an
appropriate reading level. As a result, an appreciation for the literacy and numeracy
skills of the intended audience, along with considerations of where and how informa-
tion would be accessed, were replaced with more straightforward rules about avoiding
multisyllabic words, using simple grammar, and so forth.
Theoretical and empirical thinking in this special issue demonstrates the danger in
this approach. Specifically, two articles examine the complexities associated with
message framing. de Vries (IN PRESS) describes a model outlining the unintended
boomerang effect of positively framing messages about energy technology. This work
extends research in the language of persuasion, demonstrating that the most persuasive
arguments are two-sided with refutation (Allen, 1991). Yet many environmental argu-
ments are built on a compliance-gaining paradigm, and as such, they rely on one-sided
messages that highlight only the positive aspects of a given technology. As research in
other contexts suggests, audiences who are exposed to information that contradicts the
positive messages over time react against the feeling of being manipulated.
In the context of health promotion, Neil et al. (IN PRESS) also address questions of
how issues of science should best be framed. In particular, this article grapples with the
best way to communicate to stakeholders when scientific understanding of an issue has
shifted. Perhaps one of the best known examples of this problem is how to use popula-
tion-level epidemiological data to inform individual-level decisions about health
screening. As epidemiological surveillance data become more sophisticated, screening
recommendations shift to promote adequate screening without overutilization of medi-
cal services (which is not only costly but can be burdensome to patients). Neil et al.
show that even minute linguistic features can shift audience responses to scientific
communication. In their study, people responded more favorably when screening rec-
ommendations were framed as “new,” as compared with “changed.” They argue that
the latter may evoke perceptions of science as being capricious and unsystematic. These
results underscore the importance of continuing to investigate how to best use language
to demonstrate that science is consistently evolving and how it does (or does not) ben-
efit the public (see Rice & Giles, IN PRESS, for a detailed consideration).

Translating Science: Language and Knowledge Brokers

One solution to the complex problems in science communication has been to describe
a role for knowledge brokers, especially in interdisciplinary contexts. For example,

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

Krieger and Gallois 9

Riedlinger, Gallois, McKay, and Pittam (2004) found that, when members of an inter-
disciplinary group had the communicative skills to cross the boundaries of their col-
leagues, they could enhance communication and productivity in complex and
geographically dispersed scientific organizations. This kind of finding raises questions
about who these knowledge brokers might be, and what skills they should have. In her
article, Wray (IN PRESS) discusses this process in the context of communication
about dementia and communication with people who have dementia. She notes the
significant slippage in the meaning and use of terms and concepts related to dementia,
and the linguistic and social reasons for the changes in discourse. She describes in
some detail the consequences for comprehension and for social life of this slippage.
Wray concludes that linguists, as specialists in the nuances of language, may be the
best brokers for scientific teams (Wray calls them linguistic brokers). This idea of a
broker outside the science, with special skills in language, presents a very intriguing
prospect, and it will be interesting to see how it develops across the large gap between
science and the humanities.
In some cases, science-related pursuits are (or should be) only one of the goals
being pursued in a given interaction. In medical contexts, health care providers are
often driven by a goal to extract information from patients and come to a medical
diagnosis as quickly and efficiently as possible. Strekalova et al. (IN PRESS) demon-
strate the importance of attending to other goals that might be equally important in
those interactions. They argue that nurses are appropriate knowledge brokers, given
their hierarchical status between patients and doctors (and other medical specialists),
and their core goal to provide the best care for patients. A key skill to fulfill this role is
empathy, or the capacity to see the patient’s point of view and to accommodate to it.
They present an interesting way to measure empathy and draw out some of the conse-
quences of using it or not.

Conclusion: LASP and Science Translation

This brings us to one of the main points of the special issue: Translating science is an
exercise in communication accommodation (see Giles, 2016; Rice & Giles, IN
PRESS). Translational communication is often described only as a process of simpli-
fying technical information for nonexpert audiences. While language modification is
often a necessity, true translation requires a much more sophisticated consideration of
communication processes. A key component of this process is understanding the infor-
mation needs of the different audiences who benefit from understanding the state of
science. Scientists have often been found wanting in their capacity to adapt their com-
munication to these various audiences, which has had negative consequences in atti-
tudes toward their work, uptake of new technology and findings, and access to funds
and other resources. Our goal is to underscore how understanding and addressing the
challenges inherent in adapting complex scientific information in a manner that
accommodates to various audiences presents a unique and fruitful domain for inter-
group communication and language researchers. The articles in this special issue focus
on the unintended outcomes of systematic underaccommodation in the realms of pub-
lic and personal health, the environment, the justice system, and science education.

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

10 Journal of Language and Social Psychology 

Importantly, the conceptual and contextual problems addressed herein are not exhaus-
tive. Instead, these articles are exemplars of the types of conceptual communication
issues that appear across many scientific contexts and they imply a research agenda.
We hope that readers enjoy these articles, and that the articles pique their imaginations
and provoke interest in following up. The issues raised here are too important to
ignore.

Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article by the editor as well as
the contributions of all the authors in this special issue.

Authors’ Note
This article was prepared as part of the authors’ research at the Universities of Florida and
Queensland.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

References
Allen, M. (1991). Meta-analysis comparing the persuasiveness of one-sided and two-sided mes-
sages. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 55, 390-404.
Asprey, M. (2010). Plain language for lawyers (4th ed.). Leichhardt, New South Wales,
Australia: Federation Press.
Blume, S. (2006). Anti-vaccination movements and their interpretations. Social Science &
Medicine, 62, 628-642.
Bubela, T., Nisbet, C., Borchelt, R., Brunger, F., Critchley, C., Einsiedel, E., . . . Caulfield, T.
(2009). Science communication reconsidered. Nature Biotechnology, 27, 514-518.
de Wit, M., Abma, T., Koelewijn-can Loon, M., Collins, S., & Kirwan, J. (2013). Involving
patient research partners has a significant impact on outcomes research: A responsive
evaluation of the international OMERACT conferences. British Medical Journal Open, 3,
e002241. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2012-002241
Giles, H. (Ed.). (2016). Communication accommodation theory: Negotiating personal relation-
ships and social identities across contexts. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Giles, H., & Maass, A. (Eds.). (2016). Advances in intergroup communication. New York, NY:
Peter Lang.
Gooberman-Hill, R., Horwood, J., & Calnan, M. (2008). Citizens’ juries in planning research
priorities: Process, engagement and outcome. Health Expectations, 11, 272-281.
Hand, E. (2010). Citizen science: People power. Nature, 466, 685-687.

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

Krieger and Gallois 11

Hornsey, M. J., Fielding, K. S., McStay, R., Reser, J. P., & Bradley, G. L. (2016). Are people high
in skepticism about anthropogenic climate change necessarily resistant to influence? Some
cause for optimism. Environment & Behavior, 48, 905-928. doi:10.1177/0013916515574085
Hoyer, M. V., Bigham, D. L., Bachmann, R. W., & Canfield, D. E., Jr. (2014). Florida
LAKEWATCH: Citizen scientists protecting Florida’s aquatic systems. Florida Scientist,
77, 184-197.
Krieger, J. (2014). Last resort or roll of the die? Exploring the role of metaphors in cancer
clinical trials education among medically underserved populations. Journal of Health
Communication, 19, 1161-1177.
Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Oberauerd, K., Brophye, S., Lloyd, E. A, & Marriott, M. (2015).
Recurrent fury: Conspiratorial discourse in the blogosphere triggered by research on the
role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial. Journal of Social and Political Psychology,
3, 142-178.
Office of the Chief Scientist. (2014, March). Ensuring the right skills for our future (Media
release). Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia: Australian Government.
Pieczka, M., & Escobar, O. (2013). Dialogue and science: Innovation in policy-making and the
discourse of public engagement in the UK. Science and Public Policy, 40, 113-126.
Prochaska, J. O., & Velicer, W. F. (1997). The transtheoretical model of health behavior change.
Health Promotion, 12, 6-7.
Reuben, E., Sapienza, P., & Zingales, L. (2014). How stereotypes impair women’s careers in
science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 4403-4408.
Riedlinger, M., Gallois, C., McKay, S., & Pittam, J. (2004). Impact of social group processes
and functional diversity on communication in networked organizations. Journal of Applied
Communication Research, 32, 55-79.

Author Biographies
Janice L. Krieger is an associate professor at the University of Florida College of Journalism
and Communications and director of the STEM Translational Communication Center. Her
research program focuses on translational communication in health and science decision-mak-
ing contexts.
Cindy Gallois is professor of psychology and communication at the University of Queensland,
and a Fellow of International Communication Association, International Association of
Language and Social Psychology, and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Her
research focuses on intergroup communication in health, organizational, and intercultural con-
texts, and particularly communication accommodation.

Downloaded from [Link] at CORNELL UNIV on August 21, 2016

498202
13
PUS22810.1177/0963662513498202Public Understanding of ScienceBucchi

P U S
Review essay

Public Understanding of Science

Style in science communication 22(8) 904­–915

© The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
[Link]/[Link]
DOI: 10.1177/0963662513498202
[Link]

Massimiano Bucchi
Università di Trento, Italy

Abstract
There is little doubt that during the past few decades science communication efforts aimed at non-expert
audiences have increased in quantity and intensity on a global scale. Public engagement and outreach activities
have now become a routine – when not a prominent – feature for several research institutions in Europe.
However, it would be difficult for both scholars and those involved in science communication to agree on
the impact of these activities, on the long-term implications of the ‘science communication movement’ and
on the indicators we should develop and employ in order to assess impact. The paper argues that quality is
a relevant issue and challenge for contemporary science communication. Style is relevant to addressing that
challenge, insofar as it relates to discussions about how to strengthen the quality of science communication,
suggesting a different perspective other than the traditional normative/prescriptive framework. The notion
of style also fruitfully connects the debate on science communication with a rich tradition of studies in the
history and sociology of science.

Keywords
quality, science communication, science in culture, science in society, style

Le quali opere sí perfettamente finí Andrea, che piú desiderare non si potrebbe,
se nate non che lavorate fossero; cosí sono elleno di nettezza, di bellezza e
di grazia ben finite e ben condotte. In quelle si scorge la osservanzia
e le misure dell’arte …

(Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti,

pittori architetti e scultori italiani,
da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, 1568)1

You’ve got the style it takes

(John Cale and Lou Reed, 1990)

Corresponding author:
Massimiano Bucchi, Science and Technology in Society Unit, Department of Sociology, Università di Trento, via Verdi 26,
Trento, 38122, Italy.
Email: [Link]@[Link]

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

Bucchi 905

1. Introduction
There is hardly any doubt that during the past few decades, science communication efforts aimed
at non-expert audiences have increased in quantity and intensity on a global scale. Public engage-
ment and outreach activities have now become a routine, or even prominent, feature for several
research institutions in Europe and elsewhere. Financial and human resources are devoted to these
activities, and researchers themselves are increasingly and even institutionally encouraged to pur-
sue this ‘third mission’ alongside more traditional research and teaching duties.2 However, both
scholars and those involved in science communication (including policy makers and institutions)
would find it difficult to agree on the impact of these activities, on the long-term implications of
the ‘science communication movement’ and on which indicators should be developed and employed
in order to assess quality.3 In other words, to tell the difference between ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘average’
public communication of science as we do for other activities. As recent studies clearly showed for
the European context, while research and teaching functions of scientific institutions can count on
established – albeit from time to time still discussed – indicators, public engagement functions are
often still performed as a sort of ‘goodwill exercise’ (Bauer and Jensen, 2011; Bucchi and Neresini,
2011). Despite increasing general emphasis on public engagement and remarkable performances
by some institutions, a culture of public engagement still seems to be lacking among most research
institutions in Europe. By this I mean an organisational culture in which these activities are appro-
priately recognised, evaluated and rewarded as part and parcel of the organisation’s routine activi-
ties and identity as well as a relevant element of the broader institutional landscape in which the
organisation operates; a culture in which public engagement would become an element to be taken
into account when relating to funders and policy makers or when assessing and benchmarking
institutions’ performances vis-à-vis other organisations in the same area. In this light, having access
to indicators and standards of performance might provide substantial support for those institutions
and policy actors that wish to take seriously the challenge of public engagement and societal dia-
logue. Public communication of science should now be mature enough to pass from a ‘heroic
phase’, in which ‘everything goes’ for the sake of communicating science, to a phase in which
quality is the central concern for all parties involved.
The ‘quality challenge’ becomes particularly relevant in relation to processes that could be sum-
marised as ‘the crisis of mediators’. This crisis is not specific to science communication, but is
particularly relevant to this field. Owing to several factors, which include the increasingly central
role of digital media and the ever stronger public relations push by research institutions, traditional
mediators of science communication such as newspapers, magazines, television/radio shows and
science museums and centres are undermined in their traditional centrality as filters and guarantors
of the quality of information (see e.g. Goepfert, 2007; Brumfield, 2009).
To draw an analogy with what has become a commonplace definition of the evolution of the
Internet, one can refer to this contemporary configuration as ‘Science Communication 2.0’, and
thereby to the previous configuration of science communication as ‘Science Communication 1.0’
(Table 1). In Science Communication 1.0, the problem of quality was solved by the public by sub-
stantially resorting to information ‘brands’ and to the channel’s reputation. By and large, readers,
viewers and visitors could confidently assume that content printed in the science sections of the
New York Times or Il Corriere della Sera, or broadcast by the BBC or displayed in a major science
exhibition would be a high-quality extract of findings and ideas filtering from the scientific com-
munity. In Science Communication 2.0, end-users have access to an unprecedented amount and
variety of materials, including ‘direct to consumer’ materials provided by research institutions –
e.g. videos, interviews with scientists, selected news. But above all, it is the traditional sequence of
the communicative process (specialist discussion/didactic exposition/public communication or

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

906 Public Understanding of Science 22(8)

Table 1. Main analytical differences between Science Communication 1.0 and Science Communication 2.0.

Science Communication 1.0 Science Communication 2.0

Dominant communication model Mediated, filtered Direct to consumer

Key actors Mediators, sometimes scientists Research institutions, scientists,

(journalists, professional digital media corporations
communicators, popularisation
channels, science museums)

Relation between specialist and Vertical, sequential Horizontal, simultaneous,

public communication levels overlapping
Quality assurance devices Editorial brand, channel reputation ?

The two labels (Science Communication 1.0 and 2.0) should be clearly intended as ideal types for analytical purposes.
In practice, one should obviously account for several nuances, exceptions and communicative situations that combine
features of both types. See also note 4.

‘popularisation’) that has been disrupted.4 The didactic and public exposition of science is no lon-
ger, as in Kuhn’s theory, a mere static and petrified page, written by the winners in the struggle to
establish a new scientific paradigm. Even science museums, the places par excellence of ‘fossil-
ised’ science, increasingly hold exhibitions on current and controversial science issues.5 More
importantly, users increasingly have access to science in its making and to highly controversial
debates among specialists. Some of the implications of this new scenario have been spectacularly
highlighted by recent cases like Climategate in 2009, when email exchanges among climate change
researchers became available on the web, exposing in public internal communication dynamics
that traditionally were confined to the ‘backstage’ of knowledge production processes;6 or in the
discussion of the discovery of the so-called ‘fast neutrinos’ in 2012 – a controversy among special-
ists unfolding in real time before the eyes of the public.

2. What does quality mean in contemporary science

communication?
If the factors outlined above help clarify the relevance of the quality challenge, it is much more
complex to establish what quality means in science communication; or more pragmatically, how
we tell the difference between good, bad and average science communication.
The field – and the topic of science communication in general – has long been dominated by a
normative impulse. Guidelines and training courses have been made available in many countries to
instruct science journalists (and later, scientists) on the ‘dos and don’ts’ of communicating science.
These provide suggestions and sometimes even recipes either for better serving the aims of the
research community or for exploiting media operational rules and routines. During the 1970s,
Kantrowitz’s suggestion of an institution of scientific judgment – a science court designed to filter
and certify the quality of scientific expertise for the benefit of policy makers – received presidential
support in the US as well as severe criticism from scholars and commentators (Kantrowitz, 1967;
Jurs, 2010). Various other attempts and calls to regulate science communication have failed for
several reasons, including democratic concerns.
Scholars studying the contemporary, broader dynamics of science in society are familiar with
the two key – and often overlapping – arrangements that societies have used historically to deal
with the results and products of science and technology and their implications.

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

Bucchi 907

The first is the regulatory framework; i.e. state legislation and authorities’ defining ‘what should
be done and what should not be done’. The second is the moral dimension, sometimes (too) sim-
plistically identified with the ethics of specific professions – the idea being that control of what
should and should not be done is dictated by the conscience of scientists and journalists. Both
arrangements face significant limits and difficulties in our era and in the context of Science
Communication 2.0.
The regulatory arrangement is challenged by science and technology innovations that have been
defined – particularly with regard to the life sciences – as ‘mobile and private’ (e.g. genetic tests),
making the usual nation-based regulatory tools and controls increasingly permeable. Likewise, the
achievement of a moral consensus also appears less and less viable in the context of increasingly
pluralistic and fragmented societies (see e.g. Nowotny and Testa, 2011).
Moreover, one of the distinctive features of contemporary communication technologies and
environments is to substantially displace traditional concepts of legal and moral responsibility.
Who is responsible for the contents, collective discussion and shared material on the web? The
authors, those who upload it, viewers and readers, or those who provide links to it?7
There is, however, at least one other dimension through which we can potentially solve, in some
circumstances, the issue of what should be done and should not be done, namely the aesthetic dimen-
sion. To use a trivial example, in Italy there is no law, nor any other compelling moral arrangement
forbidding cappuccino after lunch, but every Italian knows this should not be done. This relates, in a
more general and conceptual sense, to style, that is the ability to perform this function of selection –
thereby defining quality – in ways other than through policy obligation or moral duties.

3. Style and taste:The ethics and aesthetics of science

communication
Nowadays, style is pre-eminently regarded as something that has to do with artistic expression,
fashion, and personal taste. However, style has also been extensively studied in relation to the his-
tory and sociology of the sciences. The classic work of Alistair Crombie (1994) identified six
dominant styles of scientific inquiry and demonstration throughout the history of science, seeing
them in distinctive connection with the broader cultural context; different “national scientific
styles” have also been identified by scholars studying the historical development of science policy
and research organisation in different countries and cultures (Jamison, 1987; Pyenson, 2003).
In his seminal analysis of the historical and social transformations of science theories and their
public communication which was a source of inspiration for Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm,
Ludwik Fleck emphasised the central role of styles of thought (Denkstil) as a socially reinforced
and compelling “mood”, constraining perception and orienting action, through which a community
(“thought collective”, Denkkollektiv according to Fleck’s terminology) identifies problems of
interest and appropriate research methods, together with “a technical and literary style characteris-
tic of the given system of knowledge” (Fleck, [1935] 1979: 99). Communication between different
levels – specialist and popular – of the same thought collectives8 leads to corroboration and
enhancement of “thought currency”. Since an individual quite often belongs to multiple thought
collectives at the same time, this results in inter-collective communication across different domains
and contributes to the shaping of scientific visions. The biography of Galileo offers beautiful
examples in this respect, when he applied his competence in drawing and chiaroscuro to interpret
his observations of the Moon’s surface, or when he apparently solved the problem of dividing time
into equal units for his experiments on the acceleration of falling bodies by resorting, as the son of
a renowned musician, to musical rhythm (Bredekamp, 2007; Drake, 1975). For similar reasons,

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

908 Public Understanding of Science 22(8)

Galileo was inclined to describe orbits in circular form, elliptical orbits being in profound contrast
with his humanistic training and aesthetic taste (Panofsky, 1956).
In the field of art, studies have shown the normative and perceptually binding force of decora-
tive styles and patterns characterising different historical and cultural contexts (Gombrich, 1979).
During the Italian Renaissance, the term virtuoso (from the Latin virtus, meaning power or capabil-
ity) identified the moral spur of both “rational artists” and early natural philosophers as “a program
for relating man to the world as perceiver and knower and agent in the context of his integral moral,
social, and cosmological existence […] a common style in the mastery of self, or nature, and of
mankind alike by the rational anticipation of effects” (Crombie, [1986] 1996: 90). This style was
perfectly embodied by Galileo and other key figures of the scientific revolution.
By focusing on the concept of style and its importance for science communication – and more
generally, for the history of science and its interactions with social domains – I wish to suggest that
we should look at the theme of quality not only as a technical problem (i.e. finding appropriate
indicators of performance and impact). Rather, I suggest the need for a broader vision of science
communication that reflects a vision of science as an integral part of contemporary culture. From
this point of view, science communication is not meant to be just a ‘technical fix’ to impose social
consensus, based on a narrow interpretation – albeit currently dominant in several policy contexts,
including the EU’s – of science as a mere driving force of technological innovation and economic
development.9
One perhaps simplistic way to describe my proposal is as an invitation to integrate common
discussions of the ‘ethics of science communication’ with no less crucial discussion of the ‘aesthet-
ics of science communication’. Another, perhaps more comprehensive way of presenting my argu-
ment would be as a call for a more humanistic – and indeed more humane – vision of science
communication that moves away from the limits of its technocratic, functional definitions.10 In his
“Discours sur le style” read when he became a member of the Académie Française in 1753 – a
lecture that became standard reading for French pupils for almost a century – the naturalist George-
Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon argued that only style made scientific knowledge distinctively
human and durable despite the quick obsolescence of its content. “Les choses [les connaissances,
les faits et les découvertes] sont hors de l’homme, le style est l’homme même” (Buffon, [1753]
2007: 427). In Bruno Latour’s terms, style could thus be described as bridging human and non-
human actors in the weaving of knowledge production and communication (see e.g. Latour, 1987).
These perspectives suggest it is valuable to explore sources of analogy in other cultural domains
and to reflect on the topic of style in science communication. One is the literary domain, to which
Buffon also referred in his speech. The last, incomplete, writing by Italian writer and critic Italo
Calvino is his series of Norton lectures that he was supposed to read at the University of Harvard.
They deal with (again!) six different qualities of writing – it should be noted that Calvino also
refers to them as values, capturing both their aesthetic and ethical role – and thus with style. The
six qualities/values are: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency.11
Although I clearly do not have the space here to analyse all of them in detail, such qualities appear,
in principle at least, suitable for application to contemporary science communication scenarios.
Calvino himself explicitly made the connection between some of the qualities/values and the role
of science in contemporary society and culture.

I look to science to nourish my visions in which all heaviness disappears. Today every branch of science
seems intent on demonstrating that the world is supported by the most minute entities, such as the messages
of DNA, the impulses of neurons, and quarks, and neutrinos wandering through space since the beginning
of time … (Calvino, 1988: 8)

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

Bucchi 909

The then still emerging world of digital communication appears to Calvino the domain of light and
dematerialised communication, of “weightless bits and electronic impulses” replacing “rolling
mills and molten steels”. Then he proceeds to draw examples of lightness from a classical master-
piece, an intersection of science and literature, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, “the poem of physical
matter”, “the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solid-
ity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is matter is made up of invisible particles”
(Calvino, 1988: 8).12
When dealing with the quality of quickness, Calvino cites Galileo in praise of the imme-
diacy and power of communication enabled by the “stupendous invention” of alphabetical
writing.

But above all stupendous inventions, what eminence of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to
communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, no matter how far distant in place and time? Of
speaking with those who are in India, of speaking with those who are not yet born and will not be born for
a thousand or ten thousand years? And with what facility? All by the various arrangements of twenty little
characters on a page! (Galileo, Dialogo dei massimi sistemi, cited in Calvino, 1988: 44)

This quality emphasises the relevance of communication as one of the revolutionary key values on
which modern science was founded. By recognising knowledge as valuable only insofar as it was
communicated, in sharp contrast with previous traditions cherishing knowledge as exoteric, sci-
ence enabled and fostered communication across different nations and cultures at a time of great
divisions and contrasts (Rossi, 1997; Bucchi, 2004b). This quality also highlights the importance
and value of communicating knowledge across different levels and diverse forums, this process
having been described by several studies as potentially significantly interacting – especially in
certain circumstances – with core knowledge production processes themselves (Fleck, 1979;
Bucchi, 1998, 2004a, 2008):

the value I want to recommend is precisely this: in an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread
media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous
surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they
are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of
written language. (Calvino, 1988: 45)

This recognition of communication as an interactive transformative process rather than as a pure

transportation of content across communicative contexts invites us to explore the correspondent of
style, i.e. taste. Taste has to do with the recognition and appreciation of style, the ability and com-
petence to discern among different styles and in general to appreciate and recognise quality.
Particularly since the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, another Italian term, buongusto (‘good
taste’) became a powerful guidance for European elites in gastronomy as well as in culture at large,
incorporating and summarising new scientific knowledge, moral expectations and taste. In the
entry “Goût” of the Encyclopédie, Voltaire makes an explicit parallel between gastronomic taste
and aesthetic judgement, between gourmet/homme du goût and connoisseur (Encyclopédie, 1751–
1765: 761).13
One of the founders of modern biology, Francesco Redi, after describing an experiment on fal-
low deer brain in his laboratory notebooks, decided to challenge the widespread conviction in the
Medici court that:

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

910 Public Understanding of Science 22(8)

fallow-deer brain was a terrible meat, almost hard to eat, as well as noxious to the health of mankind; so
that there was not a single gentleman in the court that, whether for civilisation or fear, dared bring a deer’s
brain on his table […] but they seeming to me beautiful and well made brains, and of good substance, I
took the risk, despite my servant being ashamed of taking this Lutheran villainy in the kitchen […] to have
a solemn pan of it cooked in virgin fat, that came to my table piping hot and well roasted and I frankly
enjoyed it, and found, with reiterated, true and certain experience, that deer brain is a noble thing, very
savoury and healthy and much better than the pig or veal brain, not to mention the dolphin brain, which to
me is the finest of all brains, considering that one can eat them during Lent and other compulsory fasts.
(Redi, [1689] 1809–1811: 194)

Taste for science and taste for food are here remarkably conjoined on both cognitive and aesthetic
grounds. The deer brain appears to Redi beautiful, well made and of good substance; so it cannot
be but good to eat, palatable and nourishing. Taste becomes an ethical and aesthetic guidance, a
behavioural guide as well as a reasonable application of the new scientific knowledge. Reason and
taste, experiment and ‘essay’ are intertwined here; the deer brain, object of scientific enquiry and
gluttony, slides from the experimental table to the pan. Palate and taste become knowledge instru-
ments no less sensitive and reliable than the experimental apparatus through which nature is usu-
ally interrogated.

4. “Good, clean and fair”

Nowadays, relevant analogies with the food domain can be inspired by another globally influen-
tial – although more recent – cultural movement, Slow Food, which heralded a new attitude to
food, advocating eating “good, clean and fair” (Petrini, 2007).14 Although this is of course not yet
true in many parts of the world, one could argue that a reflection on the quality of science com-
munication is just as mature as the reflection on food in a society which has increasingly satisfied
its hunger for science communication and now has the possibility to focus on the quality and
meaning of that food.
Thus, XXIst century public communication of science should – or at least could – be good,
meaning having a special attention and care for quality. It should not praise and approve any sci-
ence communication effort just for the sake of its aims or goodwill, but apply scrupulous scrutiny
just as to any other performance and domain. It should reward best practice and openly and frankly
criticise poor practice.
Public communication of science should be fair. ‘Fairness’ also has a strong historical and lin-
guistic connection with quality, its root in many Northern European languages recalling aesthetic
harmony as well as equity, beauty and capability to please, moral purity and lack of bias. Related
verbs in Dutch and German (vegen, fegen) refer to adorning, decorating and cleaning (Scarry,
1999). Science communication should be fair not only to institutions and actors promoting com-
munication efforts, but to all parties involved, particularly in an era in which the distinctions
between users, suppliers, mediators and even producers of information are increasingly blurred.
One lesson from the crisis of the deficit model and traditional approaches is that fairness in the
process is no less important a criterion than content accuracy when discussing and evaluating the
‘success’ and implications of science communication. Finally, fairness may be interpreted as the
openness to criticism and reflexivity. If science aims to become an integral part of contemporary
culture, for example like art or sport, then it should eventually be amenable to criticism, selective
incorporation and even misinterpretation just as those other areas are.

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

Bucchi 911

Public communication of science should be clean (again, as we have seen, cleanliness is etymo-
logically connected with fairness), not necessarily meaning devoid of bias and subjective interests.
New communicative scenarios have multiplied the number and variety of providers of science
communication, who inevitably bring in their own aims and strategies. Yet, transparency and will-
ingness to problematise one’s own definition of science communication – as well as the rationale
underlying it – are among the keys to avoiding increased generalised public distrust and sense of
confusion in a time of proliferating, polyphonic and often controversial communication. Science
Communication 2.0 requires, most of all, a more active and competent user, capable of discerning
quality, although in her/his own terms.15 This probably calls, even more so than in the past, on
public institutions to provide stronger educational infrastructures rather than to invest in short-
term, short-sighted communication efforts.

5. Concluding remarks and future research agenda

To summarise, I have argued that quality is a key issue and challenge for contemporary science
communication; that style is relevant to addressing that challenge, also insofar as it relates to dis-
cussions about strengthening the quality of science communication, suggesting a different perspec-
tive other than the traditional normative or prescriptive framework. The notion of style also
fruitfully connects the debate on science communication with a rich tradition of studies in the
history and sociology of science.
Several questions remain, of course, open for further reflection, research and discussion, for
example the question of diversity of styles. This theme can be analysed both in a diachronic per-
spective (how do science communication styles change across time? How do such changes interact
with broader research, policy, cultural and social contexts?) as well as in a synchronic, intercultural
perspective (do diverse styles or sub-styles of science communication respond to diverse tastes, in
terms of local contexts or global ‘taste subcultures’?) Also, how can differences in style respond to
different communicative occasions and situations, particularly in the increasingly fragmented land-
scape of Science Communication 2.0?
Within this landscape, probably one of the most substantial challenges remains that of identify-
ing quality in science communication in new ways. If traditional, Science Communication 1.0
patterns delegating quality recognition to trustworthy communicative brands appear insufficient,
when not plainly displaced by new communicative contexts, it is nevertheless difficult to see how
horizontal, user-based quality endorsements that have become commonplace in several digital con-
texts (e.g. travel or commerce) could be straightforwardly applied to the complex, multilayered
dynamics of contemporary science communication.
It would probably be misleading to expect a single, straightforward response to that chal-
lenge. Regulatory and ‘quality ensuring’ arrangements traditionally invoked in the past for sci-
ence communication largely sought uniformity and standardisation of practices, mostly by
anchoring and flattening quality to a single or chief requisite or criterion, such as accuracy in
‘transporting the message’, adherence to scientific sources, independence of mediators. One of
the advantages of the perspective explored here is precisely that the notion of style allows us to
deal with the issue of quality in science communication without necessarily imposing unifor-
mity. This resonates significantly with recent discussions challenging the expectation of eventu-
ally finding the ‘best’ and most appropriate, ‘one size fits all’ model of science/public interaction.
Such discussions suggest we should resist the temptation to see different analytical models of
interactions among experts and the public as a chronological sequence of stages in which the
emerging forms obscure the previous ones (Bucchi, 2008; Irwin, 2008). Focusing on style(s)

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

912 Public Understanding of Science 22(8)

helps us to account for the continuing coexistence of different patterns of science communication
that may coalesce depending on specific conditions and on the issues at stake. This should lead
us to reappraise, for example, national differences in terms other than being more or less distant
from an abstractly defined golden standard.16
In this light, the perspective outlined here is also more sensitive to the interaction between com-
municative styles and their contexts and more broadly to a notion of science communication as an
integral part of culture rather than just functionally serving economic or policy targets (such as
innovation or development). In other words, style(s) may work, in science communication, as
shared quality binding device(s) – with variable degrees of contingency and stability – while at the
same time accounting for rich diversity in communication practices and formats.

Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Martin W. Bauer, Sara Candy, Susan Howard, Renato G. Mazzolini, Brian Trench and
two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments on preliminary versions of this essay. Some of
the themes presented here were initially developed for the opening lecture of the XIIth world conference of
Public Communication of Science and Technology, Florence, 18–20 April 2012.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
1. “These works were wrought so perfectly by Andrea that nothing more could be desired, since they were
so well executed and finished, and with such purity, beauty, and grace, that they reveal the true consider-
ation and proportion of art”. Giorgio Vasari ([1568] 1912–1915), “Andrea Sansovino”, in Lives of the
Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors & Architects, translated by Gaston du C. de Vere, London: Macmillan
and The Medici Society.
2. See for instance Miller et al. (2002) and the European Charter for Researchers (2005).
3. For some reflections on the state of the field, see Miller (2001), Bauer and Howard (2012) and the chap-
ters in Bucchi and Trench (2008).
4. For an extended theoretical and empirical discussion of science communication processes, see Bucchi
(1998, 2008) and Shinn and Whitley (1985). Fleck’s (1979) classic work on communicative trajectories
of scientific knowledge is also relevant here. Obviously, there were particular situations in the past in
terms of specialist debate reaching out to the public – for example in the cases of particularly acute con-
troversies or issues that involved crossing or questioning disciplinary boundaries – for examples see
Clemens (1994) and Bucchi (1998).
5. An early reflection on controversial exhibitions involving science issues is in Gieryn (1998).
6. The concept of backstage was introduced by Goffman (1959); for an application with regard to science
communication contexts, see Bucchi (1998) and Trench (2012). For a recent overview and analysis of the
Climategate case, see Grundmann (2013).
7. For a general reflection in the context of digital science communication, see Trench (2008).
8. Fleck defines “thought collectives” (Denkkollektiv) as “the communal carrier of the thought style”, describing
the concept as “functional, rather than substantial, and may be compared to the concept of field of force in
physics”. Thought collectives can be “transient and accidental” or more stable, forming around particularly
organised social groups; this latter being the case of contemporary science communities according to Fleck
(1979: 102–103). For a philosophical analysis of “styles of scientific reasoning” see also Hacking (1992).
9. See for example the documents regarding the European Commission strategy “Horizon 2020”, or those
outlining the role of science communication in that context (European Commission, 2012).

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

Bucchi 913

10. Bruno Latour (2010) has introduced the concept of “scientific humanities” (humanités scientifiques) as
an opportunity to consider “the whole performance, and not just one of its acts” (p. 24) – namely, to rep-
resent the multidimensional nature and heterogeneous networks characterising science and technology in
contemporary societies.
11. Calvino only completed the first five lectures; of the sixth one, we know only the topic.
12. On Lucretius’ influence on modern science, see for example Beretta and Citti (2008).
13. On ‘buongusto’ see for example Montanari (2009), Camporesi (1990), Sermain (1999) and Mangione
(2003). For an extensive study of interactions and metaphorical exchanges between science and cooking,
see Bucchi (2013).
14. Founded in 1986 in Italy, the Slow Food movement has become an international network with branches
in several countries and an estimated 100,000 associate members.
15. It would be interesting to explore potential analogies between this triplet of science communication quali-
ties (‘good, fair, and clean’) and the three key means of persuasions or proofs that classical rhetoric identi-
fies within the faculty of invention, i.e. ‘logos, ethos and pathos’, with logos referring to arguments, ethos
to qualities of the communicator (credibility, trustworthiness), pathos to emotions and expectations in the
audience that can be mobilised. See Bauer and Glaveanu (2011), Barthes (1970). That relatively few
systematic studies of rhetoric are available in the context of public communication of science is probably
a further indication of how the field emphasised a focus on objectives and audiences, largely taking for
granted the question of the most appropriate communicative means and strategies to reach such objec-
tives and audiences; and thereby limitedly addressing the issue of the quality of such strategies. Relevant
exceptions include Gross (1994), and Leach (2008). For a critique of the very concept of communication
with regard to science see Bucchi (2004a).
16. It would be also worth further exploring science communication styles in the context of broader styles for
handling science in society issues, e.g. “civic epistemologies” (Jasanoff, 2005).

References
Barthes R (1970) L’ancienne rhétorique. Communications 16: 172–223.
Bauer MW and Glaveanu VP (2011) Communication as rhetoric and argumentation. In: Hook DW, Franks B,
and Bauer MW (eds) The Social Psychology of Communication. London: Palgrave, pp. 209–228.
Bauer MW and Howard S (2012) Public Understanding of Science: A peer-review journal for turbulent times.
Public Understanding of Science 21(3): 258–267.
Bauer MW and Jensen P (2011) The mobilization of scientists for public engagement. Public Understanding
of Science 20(1): 3–11.
Beretta M and Citti F (eds) (2008) Lucrezio, la natura e la scienza. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki.
Bredekamp H (2007) Galilei der Künstler. Der Mond, die Sonne, die Hand. Berlin: Akademie.
Brumfield G (2009) Breaking the convention. Nature 459: 1050–1051.
Bucchi M (1998) Science and the Media: Alternative Routes in Scientific Communication. London: Rout-
ledge.
Bucchi M (2004a) Can genetics help us rethink communication? Public communication of science as a “dou-
ble helix”. New Genetics and Society 23(3): 269–283.
Bucchi M (2004b) Science in Society: An Introduction to Social Studies of Science. London: Routledge.
Bucchi M (2008) Of deficits, deviations and dialogues: Theories of public communication of science. In:
Bucchi M and Trench B (eds) Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology. London:
Routledge, pp. 57–76.
Bucchi M (2013) Il Pollo di Newton. La scienza in cucina. Parma: Guanda.
Bucchi M and Neresini F (2011) Which indicators for the new public engagement activities? An exploratory
study of European research institutions. Public Understanding of Science 20(1): 64–79.
Bucchi M and Trench B (eds) (2008) Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Buffon GL ([1753] 2007) Discours sur le style. In: Buffon GL, Œuvres. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 421–428.

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

914 Public Understanding of Science 22(8)

Calvino I (1988) Six Memos for the Next Millennium: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Camporesi P (1990) Il brodo indiano (English trans. Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment.
New York: Wiley, 1994).
Clemens ES (1994) The impact hypothesis and popular science: Conditions and consequences of interdisci-
plinary debate. In: Glen W (ed.) The Mass-Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, pp. 92–120.
Crombie A ([1986] 1996) Experimental science and the rational artist in early modern Europe. In: Crombie A,
Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought. London: Hambledon, pp. 89–114.
Crombie A (1994) Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition, 3 vols. London: Duckworth.
Drake S (1975) The role of music in Galileo’s experiments. Scientific American 232: 98–104.
Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1765) Paris: Briasson,
David, Le Breton, Durand; Neuchâtel: S. Faulche.
European Charter for Researchers (2005) Available at: [Link]
europeanCharter
European Commission (2012) Communicating EU Research & Innovation: A Guide for Project Partici-
pants. Available at: [Link]
General+Documentation/Guidance+documents+for+FP7/Communication/Coomunicating-Research-
120925-WEB_en.pdf
Fleck L (1935) Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftliche Tatsache (English trans. Genesis and
Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
Gieryn T (1998) Balancing acts: Science, Enola Gay and history wars at the Smithsonian. In: Macdonald S
(ed.) The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 197–227.
Goepfert W (2007) The strength of PR and the weakness of science journalism. In: Bauer M and Bucchi M
(eds) Journalism, Science and Society. London: Routledge, pp. 215–225.
Goffman E (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday.
Gombrich EH (1979) The Sense of Order: A Study of the Psychology of Decorative Art. New York: Cornell
University Press.
Gross A (1994) The roles of rhetoric in the public understanding of science. Public Understanding of Science
3(1): 3–23.
Grundmann R (2013) Climategate and the scientific ethos. Science, Technology and Human Values 38(1):
67–93.
Hacking I (1992) Style for historians and philosophers. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 23:
1–20.
Irwin A (2008) Risk, science and public communication: Third-order thinking about scientific culture. In:
Bucchi M and Trench B (eds) Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology. London:
Routledge, pp. 199–212.
Jamison A (1987) National styles of science and technology: A comparative model. Sociological Inquiry 57:
144–158.
Jasanoff S (2005) Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Jurs AW (2010) Science court: Past proposals, current considerations, and a suggested structure. Virginia
Journal of Law and Technology 15(1): 1–42.
Kantrowitz A (1967) Proposal for an institution for scientific judgment. Science 156(3776): 763–764.
Latour B (1987) Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour B (2010) Cogitamus. Six lettres sur les humanités scientifiques. Paris: La Decouverte.
Leach J (2008) Following scientists into the future: Future-oriented rhetoric and the $1000 Genome
Project. In: Mellor F (ed.) Science and its Publics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
127–144.
Mangione D (2003) Retorica, critica e ragione del gusto. In: Spila C (ed.) La sapida eloquenza. Retorica del
cibo e cibo retorico. Roma: Bulzoni, pp. 21–34.

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

Bucchi 915

Miller S (2001) Public understanding of science at the crossroads. Public Understanding of Science 10(1):
115–120.
Miller S, Caro P, Koulaidis V, de Semir V, Staveloz W and Vargas R (2002) Benchmarking the Promotion of
RTD Culture and Public Understanding of Science. Report from the EC Expert Group. European Commission.
Available at: [Link]
Montanari M (2009) Dal gusto gastronomico al buon gusto intellettuale. Castelli di Yale X: 41–50.
Nowotny H and Testa G (2011) Naked Genes: Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Panofsky E (1956) Galileo as a critic of the arts: Aesthetic attitude and scientific thought. Isis 47(1): 3–15.
Petrini C (2007) Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair. New York: Rizzoli
International Publications.
Pyenson L (2003) National culture and styles. In: Heilbron JL (ed.) The Oxford Companion to the History of
Modern Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 557–559.
Redi F ([1689] 1809–1811) Opere (IX voll.) Milano: Tipografia de’ Classici Italiani.
Rossi P (1997) La nascita della scienza moderna (English trans. The Birth of Modern Science, Malden:
Blackwell, 2001).
Scarry E (1999) On Beauty and on Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sermain JP (1999) Le code du bon goût (1727–1750). In: Fumaroli M (ed.) Histoire de la rhétorique dans
l’Europe moderne. Paris: PUF, pp. 879–993.
Shinn T and Whitley R (eds) (1985) Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularisation. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Trench B (2008) Internet: Turning science communication inside-out? In: Bucchi M and Trench B (eds)
Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology. London: Routledge, pp. 185–197.
Trench B (2012) Scientists’ blogs: Glimpses behind the scenes. In: Rödder S, Franzen M, and Weingart
P (eds) The Sciences’ Media Connection: Public Communication and its Repercussions. Dordrecht:
Springer, pp. 273–289.

Author biography
Massimiano Bucchi is Professor of Science and Technology in Society and of Science Communication at the
University of Trento, Italy and has been visiting professor in several academic and research institutions in
Asia, Europe and North America. His publications include Science in Society (London: Routledge, 2004),
Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology (ed. with B. Trench, London: Routledge,
2008), Beyond Technocracy: Citizens, Politics, Technoscience (New York: Springer, 2009, published also
in Chinese) and essays in journals such as Nature, Science and Public Understanding of Science. He has
received much recognition for his work, including the Mullins Prize awarded by the Society for Social Studies
of Science (1997) and the Merck-Serono special jury award for science books (2007).

Downloaded from [Link] at UNIV OF CO HEALTH SCIENCE CTR on April 9, 2015

 David R. Gruber and Lynda Walsh,
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science
(Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010)

15
Iterative language pedagogy
for science writing
Discovering the language of
architectural engineering

Maria Freddi

Background
Ever since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the establishment of
Rhetoric of Science as a field of enquiry, the view that science is not objective, neutral prac-
tice has been accepted even by scientists. 1 As linguists and rhetoricians keep highlighting the
crucial role of language in scientific concept formation, negotiation, and transmission, the idea
that there exists a ‘language of science’ with its own vocabulary and grammar has in time been
replaced with the notion of a ‘discourse of science’, stressing the ideological, far from neutral
purport of scientific communication.2 A discourse of science is inevitably bound up with a
community of practitioners, their beliefs and value-​systems, informing how scientific enquiry
is conducted. Scientific discourse has been shown to be inherently linked to argumentation for
the establishment and dissemination of knowledge within and outside academia. The perspec-
tive generally adopted is that ‘science requires cooperation, negotiation, interpretation, and
persuasive activity that manifest in the language of its texts, laboratory practices, and public
interactions’.3 Moreover, theories of spoken and written communicative genres have shown
that language use of scientific undertakings is situated and context-​dependent, with commu-
nication being highly structured and staged in accord with shared ways of establishing and
disseminating knowledge, to which practicing scientists tend to conform rather than challenge.
In sum, scientific communication is both texts and practices, both knowledge building and
knowers’ engagement with it.4
In developing a language pedagogy for science communications, therefore, hereafter
referred to as Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), linguists have recently suggested a multi-
disciplinary, or ‘multidimensional’5 approach that draws from as many analytical tools as pos-
sible to enculturate apprentices into the language of science and the conventions of scientific
discourse. Text-​based approaches such as Systemic Functional Grammar6 have been made to
dialogue with critical approaches like Academic Literacies and sociological theories of know-
ledge construction;7 rhetoric of science has been integrated with qualitative genre studies8

191
Maria Freddi

and genre theory with automated analyses of large quantities of texts in the wake of Corpus
Linguistics as expounded in John Sinclair’s pioneering work.9
Following the trend of proposing complementary analyses and reaching across sub-​
disciplines, an eclectic mixed-​methods approach to text and discourse is herein proposed that
draws from Corpus Linguistics, Genre Analysis, and Rhetorical Studies, making some peda-
gogical suggestions on the language and science binomial. After reviewing the state-​of-​the-​art
in LSP and the way in which its language theorisations apply to innovative pedagogies and
literacy development, a proposed LSP pedagogy will be illustrated. I first demonstrate the use
of various concordances that can assist students with writing, vocabulary, and grammar devel-
opment and LSP teachers with task design. Web and specialised corpus tools will be integrated
with Genre and Discourse Analysis to show how students can analyse frequent phraseology of
scientific discourse associated with certain moves and functions of the different genres of sci-
entific communication. Subsequently, a case study examines one genre of architectural engin-
eering, namely, the project description, completing the pedagogical illustration. Given the key
role acquired by English as the lingua franca of global scientific communication, the emphasis
is on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), but the
methodology is meant to apply to other languages as well.

Features of the language of science

Since the birth of the modern experimental method in the seventeenth century, the century
of Galileo’s and Newton’s discoveries, science writing has become increasingly lexically
dense, verbally condensed, and removed from everyday common-​sense phrasing of the phe-
nomena observed in nature. As shown by Michael Halliday, a gradual process of abstraction
and metaphorisation has been mirrored in the linguistic process of nominalisation, i.e., the
tendency to transform simple verbs describing processes and events, as they occur in the outer
world, into complex nouns defining abstract entities and theories with their specificities and
internal classifications (e.g., gravitation, motion, evolution, natural selection, to name just a
few famous theories in the history of modern science). This process has led to what Halliday
termed the sophisticated ‘Attic style’ we see at work in contemporary scientific writing, espe-
cially in specialised genres that make heavy use of jargon.10 This style is evident in any random
sample of research papers published in accredited academic journals, showing titles such as ‘On
sensitivity analysis based optimization of the production yields for MMIC space applications’
(published in the Journal of Engineering Design in 2003), or ‘Deficiency of microRNA miR-​
34a expands cell fate potential in pluripotent stem cells’ (appeared in Science in 2017), where
most of the words are specialised nouns (many of which are acronyms), each nested into the
next one and recursively entering into complex semantic and logical relations (e.g., sensitivity
analysis based optimization, MMIC space applications, deficiency of microRNA miR-​34a),
with prepositional phrases sometimes adding to the complexity and recursion of the nominal
structure on the right (cell fate potential in pluripotent stem cells).
From the perspective of literacy development, this constitutes a burden in terms of both the
processing and producing of texts, in that quite a lot of unpacking is necessary to understand
the meaning of texts thus compressed, while advanced information-​packing skills are required
to write a research article based on the same lexical density. The demand becomes even greater
for academic writers for whom English is not the first language.11 This has recently been
shown by empirical research conducted by Jean Parkinson and Jill Musgrave on the develop-
ment of noun phrase complexity in the academic writing of international graduate students.
Analysing writings in a range of disciplines, the two researchers found that noun modifiers and

192
 Iterative language pedagogy

post-​nominal prepositional phrases come quite late in the developmental framework. In fact,
only at advanced Master’s level in their datasets did the frequency with which writers used
nouns, participial adjectives, and prepositional phrases as pre-​and post-​modifiers compare to
those of published academic writing, suggesting the need for language-​focused instruction.12
Nominal complexity and technical jargon, though central to ESP/​EAP development, is not
the only feature of a ‘compressed discourse style’. 13 Other linguists have explored academic
writing in depth and highlighted how the grammar needed has features of both syntactic com-
plexity and idiomaticity, whereby syntax is often fixed or semi-​fixed, and chunks of discourse
are often employed by expert writers to develop their claims in a structured and predictable way
depending on the purpose of communication, 14 on the different disciplinary field preferences,15
and ‘epistemic cultures’.16
A further level of difficulty is the combination of lexical and grammatical complexity
having to do with how scientist-​writers arrange and structure information at a sentence level to
make their arguments at a textual level. Sentence-​level organisation of information translates
as word order in simple sentences and ordering of clauses in sentences that are more com-
plex. Text-​level organisation, however, has to do with the distribution of information across
sentences and paragraphs and topicalisation, i.e., the choice of clause and paragraph topic
and the management of the information flow. ESP/​EAP teachers who assess writing often
find that this constitutes an issue for non-​expert writers who need to report on and discuss
their research findings and find it difficult to assign information saliency and newsworthiness
when organising statements in a coherent whole. 17 Finally, effective scientific communication
also involves mastery of different registers, depending on the status of the participants in the
communicative event, along a cline of increasing vs. decreasing specialisation, i.e., expert-​
to-​expert, expert-​to-​novice, and expert-​to-​general public. From an educational perspective,
this diversification calls for exposure to different genres and registers for learners to develop
awareness of the rhetorical dimensions of audience and purpose. 18
Corpus Linguistics, with its emphasis on comparative empirical analyses of large amounts
of text in machine readable form, has opened up unforeseen possibilities not just for scaling
up the description of the linguistic features of science, but also for the pedagogical LSP
applications. From a descriptive perspective, it has shown that language is patterned, that sys-
tematic language variation is driven by context, and that frequency matters as an indicator of
shared usage. To this extent, Corpus Linguistics offers an opportunity of unprecedented scale
for observing and understanding the texts as well as the practices of a discourse community.
From the standpoint of language pedagogy and thanks to the increasing power and accessi-
bility of technology, it has the potential of fostering learner autonomy and lifelong learning, if
employed outside the classroom and in professional contexts.19

Corpus tools for analysing scientific texts

The Web as corpus

What all corpus tools have in common is the computer concordancing of a set of texts. A con-
cordance is simply ‘a collection of the occurrences of a word-​form, each in its own textual
environment’.20 Concordances, therefore, provide students with instant access to authentic
examples, indirectly boosting exposure to specialised vocabulary in context (e.g., biological
diversity, hydro-​electric power plant, pluripotent stem cells, urban community), and can be
used to find frequent patterns of discourse use, either internal to a genre or part-​genre or to a
specialised rhetorical move (for example, the Introduction section of a research article as in

193
Maria Freddi

John Swales’ model.)21 In Ken Hyland’s words, analyses of concordances ‘provide informa-
tion about users’ preferred meanings by displaying repeated co-​occurrence of words, allowing
us to see the characteristic associations and connections that they have, and how they take on
specific meanings for particular individuals and in given communities’.22 Although strictly
not a corpus put together for linguistic analysis, the World Wide Web can be taken as a large
repository of texts one can query for word forms to answer vocabulary and grammar questions,
retrieving search results (or hits) in a form which is very similar to a concordance, i.e., an index
of word forms in context.
A first very general tool based on this idea is an application of the Web as Corpus para-
digm.23 This consists in exploiting commercial search engines, using the filters of the advanced
search options together with Boolean operators to narrow searches to academic websites or
genre-​specific portals. So, for example, restricting the search to .edu and .[Link] roughly cor-
responds to querying the web as a repository of American and British academic discourse.
This, together with the wildcard *, to search for an unspecified word in a certain position
within a phrase, allows to check for common collocates of some target term or expression,
e.g., cell, temperature, client brief, design project, or test frequent phraseology in specific sub-​
domains of the Web, such as causes a shift in *, have a * impact on, a * increase in * at, the
latter searches aimed at retrieving adjectives commonly found to occur with nouns impact and
increase and nouns likely to follow the prepositions on, and in.24 If we look at the top search
results for the phrase ‘a * increase in * at’ (the double scare quotes stand for ‘exact phrase
match’) restricted to the subsection of the web corresponding to British academic sites only,
we see some common adjectives that collocate with increase (listed here in alphabetical order),
e.g., clear, dramatic, larger, greater, massive, pronounced, rapid, significant, slight, small,
steady, steep, 30%, three-​fold, etc., many of which express some kind of measurement; to the
left of the noun, we find scientific entities that tell us of the scope of the increase, e.g., blood
flow, blood pressure, density, temperature, thermal diffusivity, diagnoses, noise, etc., pointing
to different disciplinary specialisms. Similarly, depending on the nouns following at, the pre-
position might acquire a temporal (e.g., at the end of the last ice age), spatial (at the ankle, at
this site), or conditional meaning (at low concentrations, at low temperatures) specifying the
experimental conditions.
Similarly, one could test extended collocations and multiword expressions that are frequent
phrases of academic discourse (as can be seen, as a result of, it should be noted that, etc.).25 For
example, a search for as can be seen *, narrowed first by British and then American academic
websites, has returned the expression most of the times followed by a comma, when occurring
in sentence-​initial position, and otherwise followed by the prepositions in or from with an
apparent preference for the latter in American English. These kinds of searches, narrowed fur-
ther by known portals for the distribution of academic and content-​specific publications (e.g.,
PubMed for medical publications, [Link] for architectural projects) might be used to
confirm or disconfirm the phraseology of the landscape of what can be loosely called scientific
English.26
In like manner, preferred grammar patterns could be tested, as occurring in specific sections
of research genres in a given field, such as the abstract of a research article in Health and
Life Sciences. Taking Swales’ rhetorical models of the abstract and the research article, the
Introduction-​Materials & Methods-​Results-​Discussion (IMRD) model and the Create a
Research Space (CARS) model for Introductions,27 one can test usages of the passive (we have
analyzed vs. results have been analyzed) or verb tense preferences. One can then see how these
associate with specific sections of the research article, e.g., Methods, Results and Discussion,
or with moves and steps within a section.

194
 Iterative language pedagogy

Verb tenses corresponding to specific moves may be exemplified through the query ‘study
* conducted’, searched for in the PubMed portal of medical journals ([Link]/​
pubmed). Because medical abstracts accompanying the articles are usually structured, i.e.,
organised into paragraphs with headings corresponding to the various sections, 28 one can easily
associate the tense to the corresponding rhetorical move. The search for the string ‘study *
conducted’ returned the simple past in the Design and Methods section (e.g., this /​a cross sec-
tional /​a time and motion /​two types of study /​… was /​were conducted), the present simple
(is conducted) to introduce the aim of the research in the Introduction section, and the present
perfect also in the Introduction when mapping the territory, reviewing the literature, and to jus-
tify the research question (e.g., However, no randomized controlled study has been conducted
on… /​No large study has been conducted…). Further, one can click on each individual search
result to access the full text and get a fuller view of the original context.
Overall, the point is that the use of academic language chunks is primarily genre-​driven,
therefore searching for them in a collection of medical journal articles such as those in PubMed,
all prefaced by an abstract, is a useful aid to writing and self-​editing processes in the discip-
lines. With advanced searches like the ones exemplified, the scientist-​writer manages to control
the dynamic nature of the Web, while exploiting it as a sizeable repository of attested language,
one that is likely to be much bigger than any other more specialised language resource, notably
corpora collected by linguists for the purposes of linguistic analyses. However, it is useful to
also look briefly at some of these more targeted resources as they can be queried for free by
users through Web-​based interfaces (concordancing software).

Specialised corpora
The British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
are general reference corpora that represent a wide cross-​section of a language, respectively con-
temporary British and American English.29 However, they can be used as a source of domain-​
specific sub-​corpora of scientific publications. Others, such as the Michigan Corpus of Academic
Spoken English (MICASE), which samples American spoken academic discourse, and the
Michigan Corpus of Upper-​Level Student Papers (MICUSP), a collection of American students’
genres, together with their British counterparts, the British Academic Spoken English corpus
(BASE) and the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE), are specialised corpora with
samples of authentic academic English discourse collected by linguists to aid the description
of the many genres and registers of specialist communication, from the full range of academic
disciplines. Variously organised into broad disciplinary macro-​areas (academic divisions) –​arts
and humanities, social sciences (including education), life and medical sciences, and physical
sciences (the latter including computer science and engineering) –​ these specialised corpora
prove valuable for students and LSP practitioners alike, wanting to look at the language of related
field areas for the training of oral presentation skills as well as academic writing.30
There are differences in user interfaces and the kinds of queries that can be run in the
various inbuilt corpora. While the MICASE31 and MICUSP32 have their own search interface
and filtering options, the BASE and BAWE are freely searchable through the query interface
called the Sketch Engine.33 Despite the differences, however, they all allow for the fast retrieval
of the typical phraseology of disciplinary discourse and for generating concordances of a par-
ticular word or pattern. Users are advised to refer to online help material and documentation
for the technicalities. In the interest of space, the following paragraphs illustrate how to use the
COCA for lexico-​grammatical improvement through a set of activities done with the concord-
ancing software, which can be replicated in self-​directed settings.

195
Maria Freddi

Upon opening the COCA search window, one discovers many different search possibilities,
namely List, Chart, Collocates, Compare, and KWIC. The List option allows the user to search
for single words like results and returns information about the frequency of the search term in
the overall corpus. Access to the term’s context is obtained by clicking on the word itself, i.e.,
the user sees the concordance lines for all instances of the search word.
When interested in the specialised usage of a given word, the Chart option is quite useful in
that it helps identify registers a word might be preferably associated with, pointing to semantic
specialisation. By charting the distribution of the word results, one immediately sees that this
word is more common in academic discourse than in any other sub-​corpus of the COCA. Its
trend over time can also be observed, namely, the absence of any dramatic change, rather a
slight gradual increase after the 2000s (Figure 15.1).
The Collocates function displays searches for frequently co-​occurring words within a fixed
span of words on either side of the search term. Having identified the section Academic as
the one where results occurs most significantly, it is useful to then search for collocates of the
search term exclusively extracted from the Academic sub-​corpus by clicking on the Sections
menu and choosing Academic. The Collocates function also allows restricting the search to a
given grammatical category in the surrounding co-​text of the search word (for example, verbs
immediately following results comprising, by frequency, are/​were, indicated/​indicate, suggest,
showed/​show, revealed, have, may, obtained, and can).
With the Compare option, one can compare the collocates of two synonymous words,
within a fixed span, to see how they differ in meaning and usage, e.g., one can contrast results
and findings, to find that while the former co-​occurs with found and achieved, both past tenses,
the latter co-​occurs with a different set of verbs almost always in the present tense, with relate
as most significant collocate. By clicking on the figure for each collocate of interest, the user
is taken to the list of concordances with the collocate pair lined up in the centre of the screen
with a certain amount of context on either side (the Key Word in Context, or KWIC, view).
The search could also be restricted to one discipline within the Academic sub-​corpus,
e.g., Science and Technology, depending on the field one is writing about, in order to single
out the significant collocates for that field. For example, searching for results in Science and
Technology, one finds the sequence results indicate as the most recurring one. A user can then
study the various contexts of production in which it has been used by published scientists by
returning to the KWIC view and considering mark-​up information about the source and setting
of communication, identifying connections between linguistic patterning and contexts of use
(Figure 15.2).
Finally, the KWIC option allows the user to directly retrieve concordances of a given search
term by sorting them and displaying the search result in the usual KWIC format to highlight the
pattern the word enters (as in Figure 15.2). Also, the KWIC view can be expanded by clicking
for more context for the researcher to get the full source information and consider the original
utterance where a concordance line comes from.

Combining the rhetorical and corpus approach to analyse science

discourse
To make the corpus methods illustrated so far even more applicable, in this section, the COCA
query interface is combined with a qualitative analysis of a piece of scientific writing by a PhD
candidate who submitted an abstract for a grant proposal. The model used for the qualitative
analysis is based on Swales’ definition of moves as discoursal or rhetorical units performing
coherent communicative functions in texts.34 The corpus is employed with the purpose of going

196
 newgenrtpdf
Figure 15.1 Screenshot of the Chart option of results in COCA
 newgenrtpdf
Figure 15.2 Concordances of results indicate in the Science and Technology subsection of COCA Academic
 Iterative language pedagogy

beyond the individual text, to explore the language that is systematically associated with each
move and can usefully be recycled by the scientist-​writer in similar communicative contexts.
That is, places where the language seems stilted, out of place, or insufficient are checked with
corpus tools, which serve as resources for evaluation and new language generation. Although
the time factor might constrain the search and analysis of results, the example is aimed at illus-
trating a viable method that can be pursued to assist writing.
The starting point for the analysis and self-​editing is the general statement made at the
beginning of the Introduction section, corresponding to Swales’ Move 1 ‘establishing the terri-
tory’.35 The abstract on marine biology reads as follows:

Marine biological invasions are considered a major threat at global scale for ecosystem
biodiversity and health. In the Mediterranean Sea, researches on marine bioinvasions are
scattered and the role of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in preserving native biodiversity
is poorly known. It has been suggested that more diverse communities, like those from
‘natural’ areas, are more resistant to biological invasions (‘biotic resistance’ hypothesis),
due to a lower presence of niches available for the colonization by non-​indigenous species
(NIS). This project aims to assess: 1) the fouling NIS composition in the ‘Cinque Terre’
MPA in comparison with human-​impacted sites (ports) in the Gulf of La Spezia, Italy;
2) the resistance of communities established in MPAs when exposed to the NIS coloniza-
tion. Experimental settling plates will be submerged in four sites to collect and analyse
fouling communities. The results will provide an important experimental contribution to
an ongoing debate at international level about the factors favouring the spread of marine
NIS and about possible mitigation measures.36

From the perspective of science communication and genre conventions, the abstract is
compliant with the moves and steps of summarising research for a grant proposal, and it
is successful in presenting the aims and innovativeness of the project and expected impact
of research results. However, in terms of writing flow, an editor might notice a few things
that could be improved with the aid of corpus-​derived linguistic information. Discovering if
the qualitative assessment aligns with the subject area’s genre conventions can be done by
breaking down each sentence into chunks, smaller meaning making units that are typical of
scientific writing; these chunks are worth checking against a larger collection of published
language of the same genre. To demonstrate, I will take the first sentence as an illustration of
this point: Marine biological invasions are considered a major threat at global scale for eco-
system biodiversity and health.
The chunking principle is based upon Sinclair’s Idiom Principle whereby ‘the choice of
one word affects the choice of others in its vicinity’. 37 When applied to writing, this principle
translates as a propensity not to separate what ought to be kept together because of a mutually
informative, conditioning effect. Although to some degree the native speaker has an intuition
of this idiomatic tendency, when it comes to disciplinary knowledge and written scientific lan-
guage, the process is reflective for the native and non-​native speaker alike. As such, knowing
what and how to write is continuously evolving in the individual who can, therefore, benefit
from revision and guided editing.
In the example, the sentence can be broken down into the sequence corresponding to the
object of investigation (and organised syntactically into a noun phrase) marine biological
invasions, then, are considered, a passive voice verb phrase frequently used in scientific dis-
course to give a definition or introduce a problem, and finally the noun phrase lexicalising
what the problem consists in, a major threat for ecosystem biodiversity and health. With the

199
Maria Freddi

sentence so segmented, the only piece of information left is where this is the case (i.e., on a
global scale, not just locally). Compared to the original wording, what we notice is that the
writer has split chunks of information that should be kept together, as we are made to ask
‘major threat to what?’ In other words, why separate threat from its scope with an intervening
phrase that is more peripheral to the whole concept of threat? A suitable source of evidence
for the sequencing ‘a major threat *’ (with the wildcard capturing different prepositions) is the
Health and Life Sciences subsection of COCA Academic. This search has prompted another
search for the alternative prepositions a major threat to vs. a major threat for. A search for both
in the whole Academic without any restriction as to the subsection yields 58 occurrences of the
former and only 2 of the latter.
To continue the exploration of the pattern, one can see what verbs occur before a major
threat to, to see if forms of be considered appear at all. In the overall COCA, considered
appears three times, two of which as a passive form be considered and in published academic
journals (one of these is a journal called Bioscience) and once in the News (with reference to
politics). More interestingly, the verb that is found in the company of a major threat the most
is pose (e.g., poses a major threat to biodiversity /​pose a major threat to plants and animal
diversity).
The same kind of procedure can be run on global scale in the surrounding text of a major
threat to and recursively check global scale as a sequence. The items that complete threat to
global in the corpus include security, agricultural capacity, food production capacity, stability.
Global scale does not appear in the same immediate co-​text as major threat to (–4 words to the
left to + 4 words to the right of the search expression), but rather it is lexicalised as a modifier
of the scope of threat. As a result of the analysis, one could change the original wording into
Marine biological invasions are considered a major threat to global ecosystem biodiversity
and health, with global becoming a pre-​modifier. This phrasing has the advantage of being
more idiomatic, chunking the sentence into two noun phrases joined by the verb considered.
However, by turning on a global scale into a pre-​modifier, the noun phrase is lengthened to the
detriment of readability.
As a further step, and time permitting, it might be worth searching for global scale in the
Academic section together with the prepositions commonly found to precede global scale.
The search yields on as the most frequent one with 159 occurrences, followed by at with just
31 instances. A further look into the contexts in which these are used, via the Concordances,
starting from at, returns a number of very similar instances from the journal Bioscience, e.g., to
improve the condition of oyster reefs at a global scale /​ Microbiological contamination is the
largest cause of waterborne disease at a global scale, and also from the journal Environmental
Health. Interestingly, one notices that at the global scale is more frequent than at a global scale
in Academic and almost always occurs either at the end of the sentence, or at the beginning and
separated by a comma. This offers further evidence to moving the phrase to the end without
breaking the noun phrase. A quick look at the concordances for ‘on * global scale’ shows that
this preposition attracts the indefinite article a rather than the definite article. What has been
observed about the position within the sentence of the expression at the global scale holds true
also for this phrasing, reflecting how word order works in simple sentences, where the default
ordering is Subject followed by Verb followed by Object (or Complement if the verb is the
copula) followed by Adverb (SVO/​A). It is therefore advisable to move the spatial information
to the end of the sentence without an element interrupting the flow of discourse, to get: Marine
biological invasions are considered a major threat to ecosystem biodiversity and health on a
global scale.

200
 Iterative language pedagogy

In brief, I hope that it is clear how this process is iterative and incremental, how it works
through recursive cycles of exploratory data-​driven analyses. It draws on corpus tools, bringing
them into the process of answering the user’s own questions and intuitions, and combines this
with a qualitative analysis of the genre.

An iterative corpus method case study: writing for architects

Among the hard sciences, some specialisms more than others have become the focus of lin-
guistic and rhetorical analyses of genres of communication, notably Physics, Health and Life
Sciences, and even pure Mathematics.38 By contrast, the language of engineering and technology
has only sporadically been the object of descriptions with applied pedagogical purposes.39
Within the engineering specialisations, Construction Engineering, and both Architectural and
Civil Engineering, apart from a few isolated exceptions,40 are just starting to be addressed as
having their own discourse and language specificities worthy of systematic description.41
In this section I will report on a case study resulting from my own teaching engagement
over the past five years with Master’s students in architectural engineering in their final year
of study, whose research and professional genres differ from the genres of communication of
other science and engineering students. According to Susan Conrad, such language differences
have been a long-​standing problem in engineering education, leading to a lack of preparation
for writing in the workplace.42
A crucial genre of architectural engineering discourse is the Project Description. The pro-
ject description is a short narrative of what the design project is about, explaining the design
concept, the aim of the project, and the main design principles driving it. Project descriptions
are usually integrated with images of completed buildings, which designers often publish on
their websites to present their work to fellow architects and engineers as well as the broader
public (potential clients, critics, public officials and administration, the general public). Project
descriptions therefore serve an important promotional function while addressing multiple
audiences of both specialists and non-​specialists. Architectural engineering students can be
trained to put together well-​written project descriptions as the opening part of a project report,
a genre that they are likely to have to write for their design studio or design thesis. There the
design concept is succinctly described in words that help the reader understand the major
design goals and the choices that have been made to get to the project’s realisation.
In Swalesian terms, project descriptions can be treated as a part-​genre, much like the
Introduction sections to the full research article, where individual moves can be identified
and practised to improve engineering writing. Indeed, a genre analysis of some exemplars
conducted by Tom Spector and Rebecca Damron has highlighted its quasi-​fixed structure: pro-
ject descriptions begin with a general statement containing the design premise, then get into
more specific details substantiating the premise, and finish with a summative sentence bringing
the description back to the initial general design statement. 43 It is worth considering how
this generic shape is instantiated in real cases and matched by recurrent language to draw
the students’ attention, so that they can reuse some common phrases in their own project
descriptions. Again, Corpus Linguistics can help by highlighting patterns across a number of
similar texts having the same generic purpose in common.
The case study reported here consisted in compiling a small DIY corpus of published project
descriptions taken from the websites of a variety of design practices and studios, including so-​
called star architects (among whom Sir Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind);
other websites of architectural firms that have been working internationally are also included,

201
Maria Freddi

as they are likely to be known among specialists. The corpus, thus compiled, comprises 100
descriptions by 20 different architects and is around 40,000 tokens in size, lending itself to
both a qualitative analysis of genre moves and a quantitative exploration of the language fre-
quently employed, notably frequent collocates, repeated phraseological sequences, grammat-
ical structures that students of architectural engineering need to master (such as prepositional
phrases and relative clauses in complex noun phrases), and useful expressions that can describe
a completed project and promote one’s work at the same time. Both the qualitative and quanti-
tative analyses can be aided by freeware corpus software such as AntConc 44 that allows for the
creation of wordlists and concordances, and calculates collocates, clusters, and n-​grams and
other recurrent language patterns in a way similar to that already seen above for larger ready-​
made corpora such as the COCA. Small specialised corpora compiled ad hoc by learners lend
themselves to a context-​sensitive analysis, are more manageable in virtue of their small size,
and the original context of use of the constituting texts is more readily analysable.45
Learners can therefore start their explorations of the language of this genre guided by their
teachers first, then enabled to work autonomously with the corpus and actively engaging with
genre writing later. They can start from observations of the wordlist, i.e., the list of all different
types of words in a corpus with the number of times they each occur (tokens). This features
some terms as more prominent than others, e.g., building, and entering in larger sequences of
words repeated across texts (collocates). Among the expressions that can be brought to the
learners’ attention because of their frequency are extended noun phrases with building as main
element and modified to the left to describe size (typically number of floors), materials, and
location, e.g., the five-​storey brick building /​ the new four-​storey front building /​ the two-​storey
middle building. Spatial organisation is another aspect that features prominently in the project
descriptions and should be noted in the qualitative-​quantitative process where the user moves
iteratively between text and corpus tools. In this case, spatial organisation is reflected in lan-
guage revolving around cardinal points such as the large room on the west side of the building /​
to the west of the building /​ on the south and west sides of the house /​ between … and the south-​
west façade /​on the west edge of the complex … and featuring the preposition on as salient.
Even frequent grammatical words, like prepositions, that do not usually interest linguistic
analyses of specialised genres might be of interest here as they acquire a discourse-​specific
function: the preposition as, one of the most frequent grammatical words in the corpus, is found
to co-​occur with verbs added, adopted, re-​aligned, built, introducing the role and function of a
design element or space. The cluster conceived as is the expression typically used to describe
the major design concept, and function/​serve as to describe the allocation of functions, spatial
organisation, and architectural interventions. One also sees more abstract language with as that
is used to describe the user’s perception and experience of built spaces, e.g., appears as two dis-
tinct structures /​ legible as contemporary elements. Other frequent prepositions in the corpus of
project descriptions are for, with, and from. By reading the concordances of each, one sees for
often co-​occurring with the verb allow to describe a design solution (e.g., to allow for maximum
daylight to enter units at all levels), with space to describe planned functions and occupant
types (space for… children /​students /​visitors /​temporary exhibitions /​lectures, concerts and
dinners), with used (used for gatherings /​staging /​storage), and with suitable with a similar
meaning (suitable for exhibiting very large works /​welcoming large numbers of visitors).
Depending on whether the collocates precede or follow with, the meaning of the preposition
changes. When collocating with space and building or other nouns for spaces (library, kitchen,
room, etc.) to the left and with the indefinite article a/​an to the right, it takes the adverbial
meaning of accompaniment to describe the architectural composition (e.g., space with a lush
garden /​a press kiosk /​galley kitchen /​the addition of… /​building with an existing timber

202
 Iterative language pedagogy

beamed ceiling… /​a kitchen with a double-​height central space), while when collocating with
verbs of the design process, it takes an instrumental meaning (e.g., reconstructed with /​finished
with /​designed with). The last preposition to consider is from, which is often found in the pairs
constructed from and created from indicating the materials and building technique.
Another useful way to proceed is to look for frequent sequences of words and then read the
corpus data by utilising the n-​gram function, which searches for sequences of words of varying
length frequently repeated across a number of texts in the corpus. This helps identify chunks
that are typical of the genre. For example, 4-​grams, i.e., sequences of 4 words, repeated across
a wide range of texts, include the centre of the, the core of the, at the heart of, at the top of,
having either concrete or figurative meaning when found to describe the design concept (see
the Podium forms the center of the compound /​ public space is at the core of the library’s design
/​has a kitchen at the heart of the structure /​with sustainability at the heart of its design…).
Looking at the concordances of another word among those with the highest frequency, that,
we discover that it is the relative pronoun introducing a relative clause, a sentence structure
appearing prominently in the project description. Relative clauses have a descriptive function;
they are used to add details to the architectural description and to convey the design criterion,
e.g., to form a diagrid structure that cantilevers from the central concrete portal frame /​
demountable system of apartments that are perfectly designed for brownfield sites.
With AntConc Concordance plotting function, learners can also see at which point in the
individual text a searched item occurs, and associate its appearance with the rhetorical function
of the genre. A useful search that points to organisation of information across moves is non-​
finite participial or gerundial clauses that preface the main design statement, which thus assumes
maximal information focus (e.g., Located in downtown Portland, the new Karl Miller Center
is uniquely integrated with the city’s rich network of public open spaces and diverse urban
uses). Here wildcard searches for words ending in *ed or *ing returned many such prefaces in
sentence-​initial position (see also Located in a former gin distillery dating from 1910…), which
also often appear as the first sentence of the project description. This kind of language reflects
the genre-​specific convention that the design premise should establish the context out of which
the project arises, responding to features of the site and to functional requirements.
In brief, learners can be encouraged to compile a small ad hoc corpus of the genre that they are
interested in and download on their PCs freeware software like the AntConc to explore the data in a
more focused and applicable way than the large ready-​made corpora allow for. As shown by other
studies promoting advanced literacy for students in the science and engineering professions, 46
students can learn a lot about their engineering language by engaging in these linguistic activities.

Conclusions
Concordances offer a unique way of reading authentic examples and having instant access to large
quantities of data quickly and effortlessly. The concordance lines are useful to make observations
on the usage of certain terms in their natural context of occurrence (collocations and phrase-
ology) and usage shared by a community of speakers-​practitioners, as a corpus is a collection of
texts, not just a single text; as such, a corpus is not limited to individual idiosyncrasies or styl-
istic preferences, but rather represents a discourse. Using a corpus participates in a data-​driven
approach to learning; when combined with rhetorical and genre approaches to specialised texts,
which emphasise a writer’s knowledge and intuitions about audience and purpose as those relate
to language formations, corpus tools can be used to study phenomena in context.
In this chapter, I have argued for a pedagogy of language and science grounded in direct
experience of the conventions of scientific communications, exemplified here through writing

203
Maria Freddi

for research purposes, and in the use of corpora as a tool for autonomous apprenticeship and
literacy development. The corpus approach allows for the identification of patterns across large
datasets, while the rhetorical and genre approaches help to relate the communicative purpose of
an individual act of communication with the language patterns serving that purpose. Together
they boost awareness of how language can be used strategically for effective communication in
the sciences. Taking an iterative approach, switching between the qualitative and quantitative
views, overcomes the limitations inherent in each taken individually. If, on one hand, rhetorical
analysis highlights the constraints and opportunities of communication depending on aim and
audience (peers or general public) making up the context, corpus consultation, on the other,
provides practical information on the linguistic mechanics needed to communicate specialised
knowledge. Together they provide training in a way of thinking that is thinking both like a
humanist and like a scientist, or perhaps better put, like a critical and strategic researcher.
Three ways of using corpora have been exemplified. The first is an application of the Web
as Corpus paradigm, whereby contextualised language data from the web is mined by the
scientist-​writer using the various filtering options of commercial search engines to answer
vocabulary and grammar questions. The second involves existing specialised corpora of sci-
entific discourse of diverse kinds, genre-​or domain-​specific, e.g., the Academic subsections of
large general corpora for published research, to gain insights as to what is done by publishing
scholars in terms of science writing, and by apprentices in science (e.g., Master’s students of
science). Third, with small DIY corpora like the case study on project descriptions, the corpus
compiler is also the researcher, who therefore has a good degree of familiarity with the corpus
texts and context and might gain deeper insights into patterns of language use in the particular
setting sampled.
From the standpoint of educators in LSP, these approaches and resources offer insights into
the different levels of expertise of the authors sampled. Thus, comparisons across corpora of
data reflecting different seniority could reveal trends in students’ genre acquisition, literacy
development, and the acquisition of disciplinary expertise, and offer a means to the gradual
enculturation of novices into the discourse of science. They may also help develop a fuller
understanding of the needs and practices of the community under study, thus aiding syllabus
and course design and materials development. Likewise, they are useful for insights into par-
ticular genres (e.g., the project description, the abstract), in juxtaposition with broader notions
of conventional scientific or academic writing. Moreover, small specialised corpora can be
seen as ‘distilled expert knowledge’ that the LSP teacher can resort to alongside of or instead
of asking subject field experts for advice on language that is used in a given field.47
The electronic format and unrestricted availability of corpus tools make them suitable for
self-​study; in this regard, the corpus tools are one of ‘the myriad of opportunities learners
now have to access English, mostly electronically’ and should be taken into account by peda-
gogy that aims to develop learner autonomy. 48 In particular, the mixed-​methods approach
proposed here is in line with cutting-​edge writing instruction in the disciplines, which tends to
be integrative rather than exclusivist. It follows in the path of work harnessing different tools
and approaches, such as Susan Conrad’s civil engineering writing project, which is corpus-​
informed and at the same time makes use of ‘intensive interviews of engineering students and
professionals to gain insight into individuals’ writing practices and beliefs’. 49 In like manner,
the method follows Hafner and Miller’s proposal for ESP course design, which suggests a
‘multidimensional model’ of language and science literacy, integrating genre, project-​based,
and collaborative learning with a technology-​driven pedagogy.50 It is therefore hoped that an
eclectic approach like the iterative one outlined in this chapter offers new opportunities for
academic enculturation to the modern global science practitioner.

204
 Iterative language pedagogy

Notes
1 Fundamental readings in the Rhetoric of Science include: Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in
Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Leah Ceccarelli, Shaping Science with Rhetoric:
The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrödinger, and Wilson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
Alan Gross, Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2006).
2 Particularly work done by Michael Halliday in the late 1980s and 1990s, including Michael
A. K. Halliday and Jim R. Martin, Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power (London:
Falmer, 1993). Also note: specialised and academic discourses have subsequently been explored
extensively by Ken Hyland, Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing
(Harlow: Longman, 2000); Vijay Bhatia, Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-​Based View (London:
Continuum, 2004); and John Swales, Research Genres: Explorations and Applications (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
3 David R. Gruber and Lynda C. Olman, ‘Introduction’, this volume.
4 Swales, Research Genres. Also: Caroline Coffin and James P. Donohue, ‘English for Academic
Purposes: Contributions from Systemic Functional Linguistics and Academic Literacies’, Journal of
English for Academic Purposes 11, no. 1 (2012): 1–​3; and Coffin and Donohue, ‘Academic Literacies
and Systemic Functional Linguistics: How do they relate?’, Journal of English for Academic Purposes
11, no. 1 (2012): 64–​75.
5 As in Christoph Hafner and Lindsay Miller, English in the Disciplines: A Multidimensional Model for
ESP Course Design (London: Routledge, 2019).
6 Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen, Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar
(London: Routledge, 2013).
7 E.g., Mary J. Schleppegrell and Maria Cecilia Colombi, Developing Advanced Literacy in First
and Second Languages (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002); Jay Lemke, ‘Multimedia semiotics: Genres
for Science Education and Scientific Literacy’, in Developing Advanced Literacy in First and
Second Languages, ed. Mary J. Schleppegrell and Maria Cecilia Colombi (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum,
2002), 21–​44; Karl Maton, Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education
(London: Routledge, 2014).
8 E.g., David R. Gruber, ‘Re-​presenting Academic Writing to Popular Audiences: Using Digital
Infographics and Timelines’, in Creativity and Discovery in the University Writing Class, ed. Alice
Chik, Tracey Costley, and Martha C. Pennington (London: Equinox, 2015), 297–​322. Also see
Lindsay Miller, ‘English for Science and Technology’, in The Routledge Handbook of Language and
Professional Communication, ed. Vijay Bhatia and Stephen Bremner (London: Routledge, 2014),
304–​20.
9 Collected in 2004. See John McH Sinclair, Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse
(London: Routledge, 2004). Several studies take an integrative approach to scientific discourse: Thomas
Upton and Ulla Connor, ‘Using Computerized Corpus Analysis to Investigate the Text-​Linguistic
Discourse Moves of a Genre’, English for Specific Purposes 20, no. 4 (2001): 313–​29; Maggie
Charles, ‘Reconciling Top-​Down and Bottom-​Up Approaches to Graduate Writing: Using a Corpus to
Teach Rhetorical Functions’, Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6, no. 4 (October 2007): 289–​
302; Maggie Charles, ‘Using Hands-​On Concordancing to Teach Rhetorical Functions: Evaluation
and Implications for EAP Writing Classes’, in New Trends in Corpora and Language Learning, ed.
Ana Frankenberg-​Garcia, Lynne Flowerdew, and Guy Aston (London: Continuum, 2011), 26–​43;
Marina Bondi and Giuliana Diani, ‘Linguistica dei corpora e EAP: Lingua, pratiche comunicative e
contesto d’uso’, Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata 1–​2 (2009): 251–​69; Michael
Handford, ‘What Can a Corpus Tell Us about Specialist Genres?’, in The Routledge Handbook of
Corpus Linguistics, ed. Anne O’Keeffe and Michael McCarthy (London: Routledge, 2010), 255–​
69; Alex Boulton, Shirley Carter-​Thomas, and Elizabeth Rowley-​Jolivet (eds.), Corpus-​Informed
Research and Learning in ESP: Issues and Applications (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John
Benjamins, 2012); Giuliana Diani, ‘Text and Corpus Work, EAP writing and Language Learners’,
in Academic Writing in a Second or Foreign Language, ed. Ramona Tang (London: Continuum,
2012), 45–​66; for a large-​scale writing project for civil engineering practitioners and undergraduate
students, see Susan Conrad, ‘Integrating Corpus Linguistics into Writing Studies: An Example from
Engineering’, in College Writing: From the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar to Tomorrow, ed. Christiane
K. Donahue (forthcoming).

205
Maria Freddi

10 Michael Halliday, The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, vol. 5: The Language of Science, ed.
Jonathan J. Webster (London: Continuum, 2004), 102ff.
11 John Swales and Christine B. Feak, Academic Writing for Graduate Students: A Course for Non-​
Native Speakers of English, 3rd edn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).
12 Jean Parkinson and Jill Musgrave, ‘Development of Noun Phrase Complexity in the Writing of English
for Academic Purposes Students’, Journal of English for Academic Purposes 14 (June 2014): 58.
13 As defined in Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray, Grammatical Complexity in Academic
English: Linguistic Change in Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
14 E.g., Jean Parkinson, ‘The Discussion Section as Argument: The Language Used to Prove Knowledge
Claims’, English for Specific Purposes 30, no. 3 (2011): 164–​75; Biber and Gray, Grammatical
Complexity; Hilary Nesi, ‘Corpus Studies in EAP’, in The Routledge Handbook of Academic
Discourse, ed. Ken Hyland and Philip Shaw (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 206–​17.
15 Averil Coxhead, ‘What Can Corpora Tell Us about English for Academic Purposes?’, in Routledge
Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ed. O’Keeffe and McCarthy, 458–​70.
16 Karin Knorr-​Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
17 An original study on this topic in engineering report writing is Bernard McKenna, ‘How Engineers
Write: An Empirical Study of Engineering Report Writing’, Applied Linguistics 18, no. 2 (1997):
189–​211.
18 Patrick Dias et al., Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts (New York
and London: Routledge, 2000); Miller, ‘English for Science and Technology’.
19 See, for example, Lynn Flowerdew, ‘Using Corpora for Writing Instruction’, in Routledge Handbook
of Corpus Linguistics, ed. O’Keeffe and McCarthy, 453–​4; Maggie Charles, ‘Getting the Corpus
Habit: EAP Students’ Long-​Term Use of Personal Corpora’, English for Specific Purposes 35 (July
2014): 30–​40; Miller, ‘English for Science and Technology’.
20 John McH Sinclair, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 32.
21 See John Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
22 Ken Hyland, ‘Corpora and Written Academic English’, in The Cambridge Handbook of English
Corpus Linguistics, ed. Douglas Biber and Randi Reppen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015), 301.
23 See Maristella Gatto, The Web as Corpus: Theory and Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) for a
comprehensive overview and some useful guided activities.
24 Suggested ibid., 103.
25 All these formulas are highlighted by Hyland, ‘As Can Be Seen: Lexical Bundles and Disciplinary
Variation’, English for Specific Purposes 27, no. 1 (2008): 4–​21.
26 The whole issue of pattern validation is addressed diffusively by Gatto, Web as Corpus, especially
chap. 3.
27 Swales, Genre Analysis, especially chaps. 7 and 8; and Swales, Research Genres, chap. 7.
28 Adrian Wallwork, English for Writing Research Papers (New York: Springer, 2011), 179.
29 For the BNC, see The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition), 2007, distributed by
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, on behalf of the BNC Consortium, [Link].
uk; for the COCA, see Mark Davies, The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560
Million Words, 1990–​Present, 2008–​,[Link]-​[Link]/​coca.
30 Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner, Genres Across the Disciplines: Student Writing in Higher Education
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) offer a very detailed description of the materials
developed based on BASE and BAWE.
31 [Link]
32 [Link]
33 [Link]
34 Swales, Research Genres, 228.
35 Swales, Genre Analysis, 141.
36 I kindly acknowledge Marco Tamburini, PhD candidate in Marine Biology at the University of Pavia,
for granting permission to reproduce the abstract in this book. The abstract was one of the writing
assignments during a short module on ‘Writing in English for Scientists’ that I gave to PhD students
in STEM in the academic year 2018–​19, as part of the scientific communications course organised

206
 Iterative language pedagogy

annually by the Collegio Nuovo, Fondazione Sandra ed Enea Mattei, and University of Pavia Doctoral
School.
37 Sinclair, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, chap. 8.
38 Kay O’Halloran, Mathematical Discourse: Language, Symbolism and Visual Images (London:
Continuum, 2008).
39 See McKenna, ‘How Engineers Write’; and Olga Mudraya, ‘Engineering English: A Lexical
Frequency Instructional Model’, English for Specific Purposes 25, no. 2 (2006): 235–​56.
40 Peter Medway, ‘Language, Learning and “Communication” in an Architects’ Office’, English in
Education 28, no. 2 (1994): 3–​14. Also see Peter Medway, ‘Virtual and Material Buildings: Construction
and Constructivism in Architecture and Writing’, Written Communication 13, no. 4 (1996): 473–​514.
41 John Swales et al., ‘Between Critique and Accommodation: Reflections on an EAP Course for Masters
of Architecture Students’, English for Specific Purposes 20, no. 4 (2001): 439–​58; Michael Handford
and Petr Matous, ‘Lexicogrammar in the International Construction Industry: A Corpus-​Based Case
Study of Japanese-​Hong-​Kongese On-​Site Interactions in English’, English for Specific Purposes
30, no. 2 (2011): 87–​100; Michael Handford, ‘Communication in the Construction Industry’, in
Routledge Handbook of Language and Professional Communication, ed. Batia and Bremner, 363–​81;
A. Gilmore and N. Millar, ‘The Language of Civil Engineering Research Articles: A Corpus-​Based
Approach’, English for Specific Purposes 51 (2018): 1–​17; Conrad, ‘Integrating Corpus Linguistics’.
42 Conrad, ‘Integrating Corpus Linguistics’.
43 Tom Spector and Rebecca Damron, How Architects Write, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge,
2017), chap. 4.
44 Lawrence Anthony, AntConc (version 3.5.8), [Link]/​software.
45 Almut Koester, ‘Building Small Specialised Corpora’, in Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics,
ed. O’ Keeffe and McCarthy, 66–​79.
46 Notably, Flowerdew, ‘Using Corpora’; Charles, ‘Getting the Corpus Habit’; Meilin Chen and John
Flowerdew, ‘Introducing Data-​Driven Learning to PhD Students for Research Writing Purposes:
A Territory-​Wide Project in Hong Kong’, English for Specific Purposes 50 (April 2018): 97–​112;
Conrad, ‘Integrating Corpus Linguistics’.
47 Lynne Bowker and Jennifer Pearson, Working with Specialized Language: A Practical Guide to Using
Corpora. (London: Routledge, 2002), 19.
48 Miller ‘English for Science and Technology’, 313.
49 Conrad, ‘Integrating Corpus Linguistics’.
50 See Miller, ‘English for Science and Technology’, 313–​14; and Hafner and Miller, English in the
Disciplines.

207
 Alice Bell and Jon Turney, 'Popular Science Books:
From Public Education to Science Bestsellers', Routledge
Handbook of Public Communication of Science and
Technology, edited by Massimiano Bucchi and Brian Trench
(Abindgon and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 15-26.

2
Popular science books
From public education to science bestsellers
Alice Bell and Jon Turney

Introduction
The term popular science – in its broadest sense – is a piece of science communication which
assumes interest, but no particular expertise, on the part of the [Link], it is often a publish-
ing tag, printed on the backs of books or emblazoned across the tops of booksellers’ shelves. But
popular science has a long history with broader applications. Historians of science with an inter-
est in popular science (e.g. Fyfe and Lightman 2007) have been keen to extend research from the
study of books to include lectures, songs, museums, part-works, magazines, radio and television.
In terms of changes in practice, increasingly we see blogging having an impact on books and
other print forms, though there have long been books spinning-off (or working cross-platform)
with television programmes, exhibitions and lecture series. There is also a growing use of comic
art as a form of popular science.
Even if we limit ourselves to books, popular science is rather difficult to pin down. This is
probably partly because what we call science and popular are ambiguous entities themselves. From
a historical perspective, Topham (2007) suggests the term emerged out of a mix of agendas
surrounding the development of cheaper educational publishing and more popular forms of
journalism in the early nineteenth century. It was by no means a term of singular meaning or
origins. As Myers (2003) suggests, popular science is perhaps largely defined by what it is not. It
is not the scientific talk that scientists engage in with each other. Neither, many would argue, is
it fiction, though many will explore the boundaries of fiction with such work. Nor does popular
science include, for many, guides to technology, health advice, arguments over the politics of cli-
mate change, nature writing, educational manuals or works one might find in the Mind, Body
and Spirit sections of bookshops (though some would argue we should extend our definition
to include at least some of these categories too). As Mellor (2003) puts it, simply by virtue of
their content and their labelling as popular science, books may help build a sense of which ideas
and activities count as science. This is perhaps one of the reasons popular science can be such a
politically contentious topic, implicated in controversies over what is or is not science; although,
as we shall see, there is a politics to its existence between expertise and the public too.
This chapter1 starts with a brief overview of models of popular science before moving on
to sketch a brief history of popular science publishing. We finish by outlining some of the ways

15
Alice Bell and Jon Turney

in which people have sought to understand the content of the form with some questions for
further analysis.

The popular in popular science

It is worth questioning what is meant by the popular in popular science. This is partly a
basic matter of considering the first principles of our study, but it also serves as a prompt to
question the nature of assumed audiences in popular science. It seems that popular science
books need not be popular in the sense of commanding large audiences; many items remain
understandably – sometimes proudly – niche in scope. The term then perhaps refers more to
intent, though we might debate the reach and validity of such intent. We can also consider
how such intents vary within subgenres and types of popular science book. For example,
children’s science books reflect a range of ideas about the assumed relationship between
young people and science (Bell 2008).
Questions of pitching to an appropriate level are often applied, where higher level is assumed
to mean more technical, closer in some way to the actual science, and lower level, less technical
and more distant from the science. Another metaphorical way of looking at it may be to consider
the degree of dilution of the science. The term dumbing down gets used too, and this is perhaps
where the value judgements involved in the process start to become more apparent. As is often
the case in science communication, the implication is that popularisation is a generous act on the
part of science, done for the benefit of the public; but we might equally argue popular science is
more a performance to serve the status of the writer and characters in the book, not the readers
who, it should also be remembered, are expected to remain quiet consumers of the text.
Many see popular science as the epitome of top-down deficit-model thinking, labelling
publics as simply the recipients of knowledge. By implying the need for a separate category of
popular science for the laity and working from an assumption that science flows from experts
to publics, the very existence of popular science helps articulate a boundary between those who
can articulate true, reliable knowledge and those who consume it. Hilgartner (1990: 534) puts it
neatly when he suggests much popular science acts to endow the scientific establishment with
‘the epistemic equivalent of the right to print money’. This paper on the ‘dominant view’ of
popular science remains rightfully a classic in analysis of the form. Popular science has become
unfashionable in many areas of more recent (post-PUS) science communication practice and
analysis, though, perhaps for the same reason, it is still highly regarded by sectors of the scientific
establishment.
We might thus read the traditional model of popular science as a courteous translation, less a
matter of enabling public interaction with science and more about keeping the public at arm’s
length. Popular science takes the more esoteric academic science, tied up in paywalled journals
and complex jargon, and offers it to the public via metaphor, analogy or similar, packaged in
mass-market paperbacks which are more accessible. But, rather like decontextualised hands-on
presentations in museums, it delivers a largely read-only experience of science; one that, on the
surface, offers science to the people but also keeps them out. A good example of this is provided
by physicist Russell Stannard’s series of Uncle Albert books for children. Inspired by George
Gamow’s use of fiction to explain modern physics as well as a sense – drawn from studying
educational psychology – that young people need to learn through some sort of hands-on
experience, Stannard (1999) uses fictional approaches based on fact to build worlds of the very
fast (relativity), the very big (black holes) and the very small (quantum physics). Fictional and
non-fictional elements are clearly demarcated by Stannard, who aims to provide the reader with
a hands-on experience by proxy through the main protagonist who is allowed to travel around

16
 Popular science books: public education to bestsellers

such new and exciting spaces via the magic thought bubble of her ‘Uncle Albert’. A more
extended example of this approach can be found in the Magic School Bus series, and arguably
metaphors and analogy do something similar in much popular science [Link] may paint a
clear expository picture of what science tells us about the world, but in doing so they often lose
a sense of how such ideas came about or allow readers a chance to intervene or debate them.
However, we should be careful of a too-simple critique of popular science. Explanatory
text might well seem rather one-way, but it should also be seen as part of a network of many
other opportunities to connect with science and, therefore, not necessarily that problematic in
itself as long as a more diverse ecosystem of public engagement is maintained, as suggested by
Lewenstein’s (1995) web model of communication. Moreover, most texts will do many things
at once and make compromises along the way. In his children’s books, Stannard is very careful
to base his stories around a child asking questions as well as highlighting some of the debates
within the history of modern physics. Texts are also open to be ignored, remixed and critiqued
in society at large, even if such responses do not make their way to their original author (see
Jenkins 2006 for discussion on web culture – but more broadly applicable). Richard Dawkins’
word ‘meme’ is an especially interesting case study in this (Brown 2013; Salon 2013).
Recent work from historians of science has further critiqued the idea that the popularisation
of science is simply a form of cultural hegemony done to passive publics. Fyfe and Lightman’s
(2007) collection of essays on nineteenth-century popular science, Science in the Marketplace, char-
acterises the audiences of popular science as consumers, happily buying popular science products
be they books, magazines, exhibitions, shows, songs or toys. It is important to note here that they
are applying a sense of consumer identity as a relatively powerful one. To Fyfe and Lightman, the
consumers of scientific culture in the nineteenth century were increasingly aware of the range
of forms of expertise and the different, competing, ideas on offer. As well as choosing which
products to partake of, such consumers had the ability to choose which ones to trust and how
far. There is much power in Fyfe and Lightman’s analysis, although we should be careful of their
arguably slightly romantic view of consumer [Link], customers are not simply passive dupes,
but neither are they all-powerful; there is space for more nuanced views of power applied to
popular science, as well as for more empirical audience studies.

An outline history of popular science

The simplest sketch of the history of popular science is one that could, at first, look rather like
one led by the works of great men.2 As the cult of Newton grew in the century after his death,
many popular lectures and books, including a celebrated account of his ideas by Voltaire, set
out versions of the Newtonian system which were more accessible. Our view of this history is
easily distorted by the prominence of particular books or authors. Much discussion centres on
key works like The Origin of Species in 1859, which were expounding path-breaking science but
were still accessible to a generally educated readership. Or it tends to focus on periods when
well-known scientists wrote for popular audiences, as in the 1930s when Arthur Eddington and
James Jeans published bestselling versions of Einsteinian physics and astrophysics. There were
even children’s versions, such as the pseudonymous effort by Tom Telescope of 1861, attributed
to the pioneering children’s author John Newbery but possibly written by Oliver Goldsmith or
Christopher Smart (Secord 1985).
Such works grew in number and variety as disciplines developed and divided, and more
science became susceptible to an apparent need for popularisation by intellectual gaps (such
as mathematical formalisation) or social/cultural ones (through professionalisation of sci-
ence). Closer historical study reveals that there were many writers, whose books are now

17
Alice Bell and Jon Turney

largely forgotten but were important at the time, active as expositors of science throughout
the last two centuries. Over this time, values changed around popular science; at one point
it was common for texts, especially those for children, to synthesise scientific and religious
education through the lens of nature study.
By Thomas Henry Huxley’s time in Victorian England it was becoming possible to support
oneself (precariously) as a writer specialising in natural history and science. But, as Fyfe (2005)
puts it, ‘by the 1850s an increasingly clear division had developed between writings that con-
tributed to a scientific reputation (and usually paid little) and those that paid the bills (but did
nothing for one’s reputation)’. Fyfe’s study – set against the backdrop of the shift from the ‘public
sphere’ of the eighteenth century to the mass audience of the nineteenth – shows how a market
emerged for a wide range of science books, aimed at instruction, moral improvement or even
entertainment, many written by women.
Increasingly, authors specialised in science or its exposition, and many of these new authors
were not active as researchers but rather specialised in writing for popular audiences. Among
historians, as Bowler (2006) argues, there arose a widespread assumption that the vast majority
of scientists turned their back on writing for lay readers in the early twentieth century as profes-
sionalisation took hold. But he suggests this was not really true; some scientists were happy to
write for the wider public, and publishers valued them because the authors’ credentials allowed
them to sell the books as educational. In this mixed economy, now little-known authors, usually
without professional scientific training, were writing more entertaining works. It is perhaps true,
though, that few prominent scientists wrote for the public in this period. But by the 1930s, a
cadre of ‘visible scientists’ (Goodell 1977) was again active. Retrospective reviews generally lump
together the conservative British physicists Eddington and Jeans on the one hand and the more
liberal or radical biologists, such as Huxley and Haldane, on the other. But there were also nota-
ble popular works by Einstein, for example, whose global fame boosted the appeal of a number
of expositions of special and general relativity which remain in print today.
After World War II, there was not only a large literate public but a larger cohort who had
accessed higher education. Again, accounts of the general development of popular science books
differ according to the focus of the author. Lewenstein (2005) detects a major shift in the promi-
nence of science books in the 1970s, but his verdict is based on study of Pulitzer Prize winners
and New York Times listed bestsellers in this period. As he puts it, ‘beginning with Carl Sagan’s
Dragons of Eden in 1978, then every year or every other year the Pulitzers begin honouring a sci-
ence book…. Clearly something happens in the late 1970s to make science books more central
to American culture. Science becomes a part of the general public discussion’. The influence of
other media was powerful, with Sagan’s TV series Cosmos leading to a book which became a
bestseller on both sides of the [Link] modern popular science book boom was under way.
Again this broad-brush story is slightly too simple, and there were also more gradual changes
which were visible earlier. In the US, the advent of mass higher education brought a new read-
ing public to non-fiction. A close study of the bestsellers that were published by Knopf about
human history and evolution in the 1950s and 1960s shows how they came to depend less on
old models. In the early post-war period this publisher relied on a biographical style closely akin
to that used by researcher-turned-writer Paul deKruif in his successful pre-war Microbe Hunters.
But over time the publishers found that books with considerably more technical content could
be successfully promoted and could sell strongly. The overall story of the subject, incorporating
up-to-date results and told by an expert or a journalist in close touch with the experts, proved
as appealing as the stories and struggles of the discoverers (Luey 1999).
Both models continued to exist through the popular science boom – now declared by some
to be over (Tallack 2004) – and beyond. So we now have a profusion of titles in print on a

18
 Popular science books: public education to bestsellers

wide range of subjects and offering many different treatments of similar subjects. Some books
are regarded as classics and remain strong sellers over many years, although otherwise popular
science can be a reasonably evanescent area of publishing. An example of the more durable clas-
sics is Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, first published in 1976, expanded into a successful second edition
in 1989, and republished in a thirtieth anniversary edition along with a companion volume of
essays considering its influence in 2006. Children’s books can have a particular cultural durabil-
ity, perhaps because they are more likely to focus on more settled scientific principles but also
because adults will share the writings of their childhood with younger generations. Some books
would stay in publication partly due to having become a traditional school prize, as with John
Henry Pepper’s Playbook of Science (Secord 2003). There was something of a nostalgia market in
youth popular science in the early twenty-first century, following the success of The Dangerous
Book for Boys, although it seems to be fading. The web has also allowed for some republishing of
magazines. There is a prestigious archive of New Scientist viewable through Google, and Popular
Science magazine has an impressive ‘word frequency visualizer’ to encourage browsing through
their archive; type a word in and see the distribution of its use over 140 years of publications.

Books and beyond

Books are an attractive focus for study of science popularisation partly because of their long-
established significance in cultural production. The technology of the printed book has been
around in the West since the fifteenth century, so its history spans that of modern science. But
it’s also true that books are easy to study. Historians of science have pointed out that popular
science is more than just books, perhaps as a self-critique but also as a prompt to search out
archives for traces of other examples of the mediation of science. Such a critique is applicable
to contemporary researchers; studies based on books can be very illuminating, as long as their
specific social contexts are remembered and they are not made to act as a proxy for science
communication in general.
Books occupy a specific position, economically and socially, compared with other forms
of science communication. There is an upfront cost in contrast to outlets that are free at
the point of consumption such as much of the web, much television and many museums.
Reading a book also implies some time and varying degrees of commitment. It can also be
a reasonably independent involvement compared with social or family events such as a sci-
ence show or festival, although there can be a sociability to reading (e.g. book clubs, online
review and discussion forums). Whereas a degree course in a science subject takes significant
time and money, a book – especially since the advent of paperbacks – is relatively cheap and
portable, easy to keep in a pocket and dip into during the day. All of these issues, in turn, have
an impact on the relationships books may assume with readers, and the relationships between
science and a public they may help produce.
As already mentioned, there is a history of seeing popular science books as a way of bringing
otherwise rarefied knowledge to the people. This discourse runs through science communica-
tion in general – and might be generally problematised – but we should also consider specific
social-class dimensions of science books when exploring this point. Paperback publishing has a
history as a political attempt to offer the advantages of education to the masses, not just those
who can afford to go to universities. Many scientists have taken to books and magazines with a
sense that knowledge is power and they might help redistribute such power – Haldane’s writing
for the Daily Worker being a notable example (e.g. Haldane 1940). But it is also true that books
and magazines can be both marketed and consumed as luxury items, with the role of recent
children’s non-fiction in ‘topping up the middle-class child’ of particular interest (see Vincent

19
Alice Bell and Jon Turney

and Ball 2007; Buckingham and Scanlon 2005). In a sociological analysis of the sites of con-
temporary bookselling, Wright (2005) argues that much of our literary consumption embodies
a style of ‘soft capitalism’ which aims to quietly perform respectability. Of course, books are not
only sold, but borrowed, lent, even stolen. There is also an argument to be made that science
books are qualitatively different from the sorts of literary cultures on sale in most bookshops,
with science playing a more instrumental role in social mobility. But with evidence that science
increasingly plays a role in the construction of middle-class identities (see Savage et al. 2013)
and the rise of ‘geek chic’ (Corner and Bell 2011), analysts of contemporary popular science
would do well to pay attention to the role it plays in twenty-first-century identity politics, with
a particular focus on issues of social status.
Just as we might ask if there really are fewer quality female writers, we should question the
historiography that offers a story dominated by texts in English. English has become the lan-
guage of much professional science, but there is no need to assume that English texts should
set an international pattern for popularisation. Children’s literature offers some interesting case
studies here. As Gillieson (2008) notes in her study of the Eyewitness guides, these are designed
around images, with spaces left for text to be inserted in a variety of languages. But the founda-
tional nature of science for young people does not necessarily make it applicable across national
borders, and image-based publications do not necessarily have multicultural [Link] Horrible
Science books, for example, have been translated into several languages but struggled to make an
impact in the United States. As scholarship in popular science grows, there are greater opportu-
nities to connect disparate cultural studies and consider popular science literature in comparative
contexts. A special issue of the journal Public Understanding of Science on popular science pub-
lishing, for example, included work on China (Wu and Qiu 2013) and Spain (Hochadel 2013).
When considering the larger social context of the popular science book, it is worth noting its
aim to do more than just present science. Many are also political projects, though how overt that
political project is varies. Recent examples include Mark Henderson’s Geek Manifesto and Ben
Goldacre’s Bad Pharma (which worked alongside a well-orchestrated online campaign), as well
as several books on climate change, which often apply both science and historical exposition for
political ends (e.g. Oreskes and Conway 2010; Hansen 2009). As Buckingham (2000) writes of
the early 1990s wave of environmental media for young people, it might be suggested cynically
that much climate-related literature is directed at young people as a way of putting off dealing
with the issue until the next generation. As the children of the early 1990s become parents, we
can add further questions on the ethics of targeting young people, the age-appropriateness of
some visions of the future and, more generally, whether science writers should be doing politi-
cal activism under the cover of exposition. Children are subject to lobbying from a range of
perspectives in and around science and technology, from the Primary Science Teaching Trust
(formerly AstraZeneca Science Teaching Trust) to Terry, the Friendly Fracosaurus, a cartoon
character produced by an energy company active in the controversial gas extraction technology
of fracking (Hickman 2011). Projects that not only promote science and engineering to young
people and the public at large but also promote particular forms of it can be very powerful, and
the various semiotics of science education may offer a rather attractive public relations oppor-
tunity. That said, it is noticeable that the Royal Society’s science book prize has found it hard to
retain a sponsor in recent years as industrial sponsorship – along with much public funding – is
either simply cut or shifts to the more potentially interactive and locally based network of
science festivals.
The biggest change to popular science writing in recent years has, arguably, come through
the web. One might worry about the quantity of free content, meaning people no longer pay
for popular science publishing, or decry the shortening of attention spans, but both concerns

20
 Popular science books: public education to bestsellers

may also be overstated. Moreover, there are opportunities for popular science here. With agents
increasingly looking to blogs, rather than senior common rooms, to find new writers, there is
the possibility of greater diversity of writers, although such a model does also assume writers are
able to work for free as they build a reputation.
E-book shorts provide authors with the option of working through an idea that might, after
all, be best suited to a form 8,000 words long; or allowing a trial version of an idea which, after
feedback and the chance to articulate an audience, may be commissioned and developed into a
full book which is much more successful and richer due to prior publicity. There are also new
opportunities with the niche audiences along the so-called long tail of online markets, although
there are concerns this may also provide silos of content for already highly interested readers
(as discussed in Fahy and Nisbet 2011). There are new opportunities for funding too, although
the tendency towards making material free at the point of access brings many challenges. The
variety of publishing possibilities is great: for every user-funded or micro-funded site aiming to
publish one long-form piece of science writing a month there is another which may rely on a
rich benefactor to churn out an essay a day. As with science journalism, science education and
more, who pays for popular science in the globalised, liberalised age of the web (and therefore,
whom it might serve) remains an open, and important, question.

Ways to read a book

In terms of historical studies, one does not have to be limited to biographical sketches of authors
or details of what books existed when (though these may also be rich pieces of research). The
most difficult to realise is to recover a sense of how a book was read, as Jim Secord (2000) does
for Chambers’ early epic of science, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The core of his
study is an analysis of readers’ responses to Vestiges’ natural-historical account of the evolution
of the universe culled from diaries, letters, reviews, and newspaper and journal commentaries.
Priscilla Murphy’s (2005) book-length study of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring offers an inter-
esting comparison in the modern era. This is concerned with the way a book can influence a
political debate; although, as this and other considerations of Silent Spring remind us, the fact that
Carson was already a nationally celebrated author, that Silent Spring was serialised in the New
Yorker before publication, and that it inspired a CBS 60 Minutes TV programme were all key fac-
tors in increasing the book’s impact (see also Kroll 2001). There is scope for more studies which
integrate work on books with examination of other forms of science communication, such as
the web of text which Fred Hoyle wove over many years across different media (radio, books)
and genres (popularisation, science fiction) to promote his cosmological theories and his ideas
about the origins of life (Gregory 2005).
More sociologically, Jurdant (1993) offers the useful metaphor of popular science as the
autobiography of science, a way in which the scientific community writes a collective story of
its life, with all the specialist insights and reasons to be sceptical such narratives imply. Books also
contain implied epistemologies (Turney 2001a: 49–55) or can incrementally build boundaries of
what is or what is not science (Mellor 2003; see also Gieryn 1999 on ‘boundary work’). Gregory
and Miller (1998) also offer an idea of popularised science as science in public, which not only
focuses on the form as a way of presenting science but can help us consider the occasions where
the popularisation process is part of the making of science and/or of science policy.
There may be normative views about science in society embedded in popular science. Mary
Midgley (1992) offers perhaps the classic example of such critique, and, in a more detailed study,
Hedgecoe (2000) suggests that the popularisation of genetics contributed to the overreaching
claims for genetic explanation which have been labelled geneticisation. Nisbet and Fahy’s (2013)

21
Alice Bell and Jon Turney

study of bioethics in Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks provides a fresher approach,
including a methodology that incorporates related publications such as book reviews which thus
considers more than just the text itself. Another route into the analysis of popular science is to
reflect upon it in a more literary manner. This allows a focus on semiotics and ways in which
realism is constructed, or looking for precise spaces where language offers opportunities to
open or close areas for [Link] might explore the ways metaphor are used, where boundaries
between fictionalisation and non-fiction exposition are drawn – even assonance, rhythm and
other wordplay, depending on the case study. Elizabeth Leane (2007) offers an extended example
of such an approach applied to physics and is especially interesting in her application of work
previously applied to fiction, such as Haynes’s (1994) taxonomy for considering the characteri-
sation of scientists in literature. This shows how even if popular science is rooted in our ideas
of reality, it is still a form of storytelling. Other studies have folded in analysis of visual culture
(e.g. Eisner 1985, 1996; McCloud 1993; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Barker 1989). Just as
techniques in literary analysis may be useful in understanding images, the opposite is true: visual
analysis techniques can be useful for exploring text as well as the many images popular science
publishing offers us.
Popular science somehow has to emulate the persuasive power of empiricism with words
on a page. The writer has to describe observations, experiments, reports, even demonstrations,
in such a way that the readers believe in them (Turney 1999). It is an act of persuasion that is
different from any act of discovery; although the two are often linked, they should not neces-
sarily be confused. Humans live in a medium-sized world, only directly experiencing the range
between a few millimetres and a couple of hundred meters. Scientific research transcends these
limitations and considers speeds and sizes only brought within our reach via specialised equip-
ment or mathematically based models. What the more literary aspects of science writing can do
is take the reader into ‘realms beyond the normal human senses’ (Turney 2001a: 55). Perhaps
most useful here is Shapin’s (1984) classic study of the ‘literary technology’ of Robert Boyle,
which explores how the sense of real in the passing-on of science is constructed within certain
contexts, including philosophical ideas of science and broader political agendas.
Another approach to the more story-like aspects of popular science is to focus on narrative
[Link] (1981, 1992) argues in the context of writing history that the tendency to relay
events as narrative arises out of a desire for coherence and closure; he also argues that these are
both illusionary. Moreover, the process of organising events coherently and imposing a neat end-
ing imprints a moral view on the events described in a text; the moral or political standpoint of a
writer acts as the organising principle for the narration. Applying this idea to scientific contexts,
Mellor (2007: 501) argues that the ‘inexorable movement of a narrative towards a predetermined
end’ allows assumptions made by scientific writing to be glossed over and to go unchallenged
(see also Brown 2006).
Curtis (1994) applies White’s approach to science writing and argues that by structuring
texts as a form of detective story, where revealing the truth provides narrative closure, writ-
ers employ a powerful rhetorical tool which may help imbue accounts of scientific work
with an appearance of certainty. Curtis advocates what he sees as a more Lakatosian view of
science, as an ebb and flow of questions and continual research. He puts it memorably when
he suggests that with narrative accounts of science ‘we begin with unanswered questions.
We end with unquestioned answers’ (Curtis 1994: 431).
Perhaps in response to this sense of science as continual questioning, children’s popular sci-
ence has often been structured around presenting questions and answers. An interesting example
of these dialogic structures is Murphy’s (2007) Why is Snot Green?, based on questions child visi-
tors asked the writer when he worked in the interactive galleries of London’s Science Museum.

22
 Popular science books: public education to bestsellers

What makes this book especially interesting in terms of its narrativity (or lack thereof) is the
way Murphy includes cross-referencing footnotes and citations to further reading to allude to
continual learning and/or discovery outside the perimeters of a book plotted to a conclusion.
Stannard also builds his stories around the questioning of young children (Bell 2007), convey-
ing a sense of science’s ebb and flow to conclude his tightly plotted narratives on a message of
uncertainty. Artful science writers are not about to be limited by something as dull as a narrative
theory, and neither are their audiences.
We can think of the story of science as a grand story of the universe, and such a view offers
us a chance to consider something of the cultural role popular science plays. The historical sci-
ences may be particularly suited to provide accounts of change over time (Turney 2001b; see
also O’Hara 1992). Eger suggests that the emerging canon of popular science makes up a grand
narrative in the form of the ‘new epic’ of science, but it does so collectively:

From Darwin’s original theory, the lines of extension radiate downward to prebiotic (chem-
ical) evolution as expounded by Prigogine and Eigen; to cosmic evolution as described by
Weinberg, Paul Davies, and the astrophysicists; to human culture as Wilson explains in
his theories of sociobiology; and finally, through the work of brain physiologists and AI
researchers, to consciousness itself.
(Eger 1993: 197)

A narrative of nature is woven into a narrative of science: the natural world is ordered through
a reductive framework which imagines one set of scientific detail as inherently behind another
(e.g. biology reduces to chemistry, and then to physics). Eger may suggest a multi-volume epic,
but it is worth noting that single popular science books have tried to at least allude to such a sci-
entific epic, selling themselves on science’s ability to present a coherent, reduced narrative. The
titles of some of the most popular books are indicative: from the seminal Brief History of Time
(Hawking 1987) to Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2000).These stories of the past
and future development of the world, be they cosmological or genetic, are narratives of nature
and of science which perhaps offer secular alternatives to religious texts (see also Beer 2000;
Midgley 2002). This perhaps offers another example of popular science books being superseded
by live events, such as the Rationalist Association’s Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People or
the Sceptics in the Pub movement; though both may also work to promote or inspire books,
just as Sagan’s television shows did before them. The place for popular science books in larger
ecosystems of science in popular culture and public policy remains to be worked out.

Concluding remarks
This chapter has considered the long-standing question of whom popular science is supposed
to serve. It also reflected upon the make-up of popular science in terms of focusing on books
or not (and if so, how books may sit in larger media contexts), but also in terms of the different
types of books and ways in which books might connect as well as compete with other media.
We raised issues of class, gender and culture, all topics which are relatively under-studied, and
offered these as analytical lenses along with other sociological questions, including those based
on the ideas of philosophy of science implied in popular science books, images of scientists
presented, and the idea of boundary work and use in influencing public policy. We might imagine
that popular science tells a sort of multi-authored autobiography of science.
We also offered the texts as literary objects to be considered, and suggested some sources for
the analysis of visuals as well as language. With reference to the disruptive effect of the web, the

23
Alice Bell and Jon Turney

future of popular science as a publishing category is uncertain, but it has shown itself to be mal-
leable to a range of cultural, political and scientific agendas for centuries. Future studies should
track such changes in the form, but also explore more fully the role of popular science books as
political and cultural objects, the part they play influencing policymaking and the ways in which
readers articulate a sense of self through their consumption of such books.

Key questions
x Consider a set of books tagged ‘science’ by an online retailer. Which amongst them would
you call ‘popular science’? What concepts of science and popular are you using?
x Is popular science an inherently top-down approach to science communication?
x What are the philosophies of science implicit in a chosen example of popular science?
What views on the ethics or application of science are most overt here?
x Select an example of non-fiction popular science and examine what characterisation of the
scientist is being applied in it. What rhetorical purposes does this characterisation serve?

Notes
1 This new version of the chapter, as compared with the version in the first edition of this book in 2008,
includes broader reflections on the impact of the Internet on popular science books publishing and
reading. It also looks at developments in historical scholarship reflecting ideas about the meanings of
popular science. Sections are added on books for young people, the analysis of images and some refer-
ence to global trends in publications, issues of class and the role of women authors.
2 Marchant (2011) rightly points out in a contemporary context that the privileging of male authors is
worth questioning.

References
Barker, M. (1989) Comics, Ideology, Power and the Critics, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Beer, G. (2000) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bell, A. (2007) ‘What Albert did next: the Kuhnian child in science writing for young people’, in P. Pinsent
(ed.) Time Everlasting: Representations of Past, Present and Future in Children’s Literature, Lichfield: Pied
Piper Publishing, 250–267.
Bell, A. R. (2008) ‘The childish nature of science: exploring the child/science relationship in popular
non-fiction’, in A. R. Bell, S. R. Davies and F. Mellor (eds) Science and Its Publics, Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 79–98.
Bowler, P. J. (2006) ‘Experts and publishers: writing popular science in early twentieth-century Britain,
writing popular history now’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39, 2: 159–187.
Brown, A. (2013) ‘Richard Dawkins and the meaningless meme’, Guardian Comment is Free (24 June); online at
[Link]
Brown, N. (2006) ‘Shifting tenses – from “regimes of truth” to “regimes of hope”’, SATSU Working Paper
No 30; online at [Link]/org/satsu/OnLinePapers/[Link]
Buckingham, D. (2000) The Making of Citizens: Young People, News and Politics, London and New York:
Routledge.
Buckingham, D. and Scanlon, M. (2005) ‘Selling learning: towards a political economy of edutainment
media’, Media, Culture and Society, 27, 1: 41–58.
Corner, A. and Bell, A. (2011) ‘Specsaviours’, Times Higher Education Magazine, (25 August); online at www.
[Link]/[Link]
Curtis, R. (1994) ‘Narrative form and normative force: Baconian story-telling in popular science’, Social
Studies of Science, 24, 3: 419–461.
Eger, M. (1993) ‘Hermeneutics and the new epic of science’, in M. W. McRae (ed.) Literature of Science:
Perspectives on Popular Science Writing, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 186–209.

24
 Popular science books: public education to bestsellers

Eisner, W. (1985) Comics and Sequential Art, Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press.
Eisner, W. (1996) Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press.
Fahy, D. and Nisbet, M. C. (2011) ‘The science journalist online: shifting roles and emerging practices’,
Journalism, 12, 7: 778–779.
Fyfe, A. (2005) ‘Conscientious workmen or booksellers’ hacks? The professional identities of science writers
in the mid-nineteenth century’, Isis, 96, 2: 192–223.
Fyfe, A. and Lightman, B. (eds) (2007) Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences,
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Gieryn, T. F. (1999) Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line, Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press.
Gillieson, K. (2008) A Framework for Graphic Description in Book Design, PhD thesis, University of
Reading.
Goodell, R. (1977) The Visible Scientists, Boston: Little, Brown.
Gregory, J. (2005) Fred Hoyle’s Universe, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gregory, J. and Miller, S. (1998) Science in Public: Communication, Culture and Credibility, Cambridge, MA:
Basic Books.
Haldane, J. B. S. (1940) Science in Peace and War, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Hansen, J. (2009) Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last
Chance to Save Humanity, London: Bloomsbury.
Haynes, R. (1994) From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hedgecoe, A. (2000) ‘The popularisation of genetics as geneticization’, Public Understanding of Science, 9, 2:
183–189.
Hickman, L. (2011) ‘“Fracking” company targets US children with colouring book’, Guardian Environment
blog (14 July); online at [Link]/environment/blog/2011/jul/14/gas-fracking-children-
colouring-book
Hilgartner, S. (1990) ‘The dominant view of popularization: conceptual problems, political uses’, Social
Studies of Science, 20, 3: 519–539.
Hochadel, O. (2013) ‘A boom of bones and books: the “popularization industry” of Atapuerca and human-
origins research in contemporary Spain’, Public Understanding of Science, 22, 5: 530–537.
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University
Press.
Jurdant, B. (1993) ‘The popularization of science as the autobiography of science’, Public Understanding of
Science, 2, 4: 365–373.
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006) Reading Images:The Grammar of Visual Design, second edition, London
and New York: Routledge.
Kroll, G. (2001) ‘The “silent springs” of Rachel Carson: mass media and the origins of modern environ-
mentalism’, Public Understanding of Science, 10, 4: 403–420.
Leane, E. (2007) Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies, Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate.
Lewenstein, B. (1995) ‘From fax to facts: communication in the cold fusion saga’, Social Studies of Science,
25, 3: 403–436.
Lewenstein, B. (2005) Science Books Since World War II: History of the Book in America, Vol 5; online at www.
[Link]/pages/bvl1/[Link]
Luey, B. (1999) ‘“Leading the public gently”: popular science books in the 1950s’, Book History, 2, 1:
218–253.
McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics:The Invisible Art, Kitchen Sink Press.
Marchant, J. (2011) ‘Why are so few popular science books written by women?’, Guardian Notes and
Theories (4 October); online at [Link]/science/blog/2011/oct/04/popular-science-
books-women
Mellor, F. (2003) ‘Between fact and fiction: demarcating science from non-science in popular physics
books’, Social Studies of Science, 33, 4: 509–538.
Mellor, F. (2007) ‘Colliding worlds: asteroid research and the legitimatization of war in space’, Social Studies
of Science, 37, 4: 499–531.
Midgley, M. (1992) Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning, London and New York: Routledge.
Midgley, M. (2002) Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, London and NewYork: Routledge.
Murphy, G. (2007) Why Is Snot Green? London: Macmillan Children’s Books.

25
Alice Bell and Jon Turney

Murphy, P. (2005) What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring, Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press.
Myers, G. (2003) ‘Discourse studies of popular science: questioning the boundaries’, Discourse Studies, 5, 2:
265–279.
Nisbet, M. and Fahy, D. (2013) ‘Bioethics in popular science: evaluating the media impact of The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on the biobank debate’, BMC Medical Ethics, 14: 10.
O’Hara, R. J. (1992) ‘Telling the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history’, Biology
and Philosophy, 7, 2: 135–160.
Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. (2010) Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscure the Truth on Issues
from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, London: Bloomsbury.
Salon, O. (2013) ‘Richard Dawkins on the internet’s hijacking of the word “meme”’,[Link] (20 June);
online at [Link]/news/archive/2013-06/20/richard-dawkins-memes
Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor, M., Li, Y., Hjellbrekke, J., Le Roux, B., Friedman, S. and
Miles, A. (2013) ‘A new model of social class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey’,
Sociology, 47, 2, 219–250.
Secord, J. (1985) ‘Newton in the nursery: Tom Telescope and the philosophy of tops and balls, 1761–1838’,
History of Science, 23: 127–151.
Secord, J. (2000) Victorian Sensation:The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Secord, J. (2003) ‘Introduction to The Boy’s Playbook of Science’, in A. Fyfe (ed.) Science For Children, Vol.
6, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, v–ix.
Shapin, S. (1984) ‘Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle’s literary technology’, Social Studies of Science, 14,
1: 481–520.
Stannard, R. (1999) ‘Einstein for young people’, in E. Scanlon, [Link] and [Link] (eds) Communicating
Science: Contexts and Channels, London: Routledge, 134–145.
Tallack, P. (2004) ‘Echo of the big bang: an end to the boom in popular science books may actually raise
standards’, Nature, 432: 803–804.
Topham, J. R. (2007) ‘Publishing “popular science” in early nineteenth-century Britain’, in A. Fyfe and B.
Lightman (eds) Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 135–168.
Turney, J. (1999) ‘The word and the world’, in E. Scanlon, E. Whitelegg and S. Yates (eds) Communicating
Science: Contexts and Channels, London and New York: Routledge, 120–133.
Turney, J. (2001a) ‘More than story-telling: reflecting on popular science’ in S. M. Stocklmayer, M. M. Gore
and C. Bryant (eds) Science Communication in Theory and Practice, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 47–62.
Turney, J. (2001b) ‘Telling the facts of life: cosmology and the epic of evolution’, Science as Culture, 10, 2:
225–247.
Vincent, C. and S. J Ball (2007) ‘Making up the middle class child: families, activities and class dispositions’,
Sociology, 41, 6: 1061–1078.
White, H. (1981) ‘The value of narrativity in the representation of reality’, in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.) On
Narrative, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1–23.
White, H. (1992) ‘Historical employment and the problem of truth’, in S. Friedlander (ed.) Probing the Limits
of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 37–53.
Wright, D. (2005) ‘Commodifying respectability: distinctions at work in the bookshop’, Journal of Consumer
Culture, 5, 3: 295–314.
Wu, G. and H. Qiu (2013) ‘Popular science publishing in contemporary China’, Public Understanding of
Science, 22, 5: 521–529.

26
Sheila Jasanoff, 'Language and Science in Science and
TechnologyStudies, The Routledge Handbook of Language and
Science, edited by David R. Gruber and Lynda C. Olman (Abingdon
and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 60-72.

5
Language and science in science
and technology studies
Sheila Jasanoff

Poets write, novelists write, judges write, even politicians write. Scientists also write. Indeed,
it has been a central tenet of the field of science and technology studies (STS) almost since its
inception that there could not be a science without its expression through language. Scholarship
from varied disciplinary enclaves of STS—​anthropology, history, philosophy, rhetoric, pol-
itics, law, sociology—​has converged on the claim that science is best understood not as a
mirror of nature but rather as a series of representations of nature, hence as mediated renditions
of the world’s ‘reality’. Language is among the most powerful instruments through which
that mediation occurs. Scientific work produces inscriptions, as famously observed by Latour1
and affirmed by many others; but science also produces verbal texts, and language is no less
important to the construction of authority in science than is the objectivity of an image, a graph,
a map, or a statistical chart.
This chapter reviews the major ways in which STS scholars, broadly conceived, have
grappled with the role of language in making scientific knowledge: from the construction
of specific facts, objects, and classifications to the formation of scientific disciplines and the
establishment of science’s institutional authority as the custodian of truths about the world.
Scientists use language in talking to one another and to outsiders, in naming the subjects and
products of their observations, and in writing up the results of their work as records for deposit
in the archives of scientific discovery. Language permits the translation of what one pair of
trained eyes has seen into a medium that allows many others to share in that intimate act
of discovery. Language also draws boundaries and stakes out claims, since attaching names
to things inevitably creates alliances and divisions among those who can and cannot speak
the words associated with particular ways of seeing. Not least, language provides a bridge
between science and non-​scientific ways of making sense of the world. How scientists commu-
nicate with other influential wielders of language—​for example, the media, the legal system, or
publics and citizens—​is a prime concern of STS scholarship. Without communicating beyond
the inner sanctums of science and technology, it would be difficult to influence human affairs
or to maintain public support for expensive scientific work. Even Britain’s Royal Society, the
oldest science academy in the world and proud bearer of a motto that seems to eschew human
language altogether—​nullius in verba (on no one’s word)—​lists, in plain English, as one of its
top priorities, ‘demonstrating the importance of science to everyone’. 2

60
 Language and science in science studies

STS scholars have explored the relationship between science and language from three major
angles that provide the organizational framework for this chapter: constitutive, looking at the
ways in which language constitutes the claims, boundaries, observable objects, and products of
science and technology; translational, comprising the work needed to relate scientific know-
ledge to other domains of social practice, such as law, religion, or education; and persuasive,
or the use of rhetoric and discourse to achieve particular aims in society, including the pol-
itical agenda of retaining public financial support while holding regulation at bay. In each
domain, some language practices can be attributed to intentional choices by one or another
scientific community, while others arise through less conscious and more contingent processes.
Together, however, these intersecting and overlapping modes of deploying language are inte-
gral to establishing the facticity of scientific claims, and hence also to constructing science’s
cultural authority in modern society.

The voice of nature: word, style, and narrative

The Royal Society’s motto proclaims that the facts its Fellows find do not rely on taking
anyone’s word. Facts, by implication, stand on their own, independent of the investigator’s
social status or persuasive power. Rather, the truthfulness of facts is verifiable through
experiments that appeal directly to nature and can, in theory, be replicated. The history of
science, not surprisingly, tells a more nuanced story, in which humans and their voices retain
a much more significant role. Ludwik Fleck, the Polish physician whose history of the con-
cept of syphilis became a foundational work in STS, insisted that scientific ideas and facts
must be fitted into the beliefs and practices of what he termed ‘thought collectives’.3 Crucial
to the formation and durability of such collectives, Fleck observed, was the use of language.
Not merely technical terms, such as the bacterium Spirochaeta pallida4 identified in 1905
as the causal agent for syphilis, but much more common words and phrases, such as ‘speci­
ficity’ in immunology, function as identifiers of particular thought styles. Fleck noted the
divisive as well as unifying properties of scientific language once there is a collective to
speak it: ‘Words which formerly were simple terms become slogans; sentences which once
were simple statements become calls to battle […]. Whenever such a term is found in a sci-
entific text, it is not examined logically, but immediately makes either enemies or friends’.5
Sometimes terms can become so charged or discredited that scientists rename their object
of study so as to move to safer waters, as when pursuers of the idea of ‘cold fusion’, widely
dismissed as not replicable science, continued their inquiries under the less hot-​button label
‘low-​energy nuclear reactions’.6
Fleck offered a sociological description of a phenomenon that scientists themselves have
recognized, especially when they are engaged in unseating older ideas or theories—​namely,
that the new idea must make sense in relation to the way some relevant group of people
perceives and experiences nature. Thus, as Dear elucidated, early modern scientists, including
Isaac Newton himself, were unable to comprehend gravity except in mechanistic terms, as
bodies physically pushing against each other, because their scheme of things did not allow for
the concept of matter acting at a distance through a vacuum. 7 Embedded as they were within
particular paradigms of sense-​making, or what Dear terms intelligibility, the scientists of that
era adopted varied stylistic approaches to attacking others’ ideas and advancing their own.
René Descartes, for instance, applied ridicule as a device to contradict Aristotelian theories of
motion, while using what some have seen as a precursor of science fiction, the device of an
imagined other world, to advance theories deemed too dangerous to hold in the context of his
era’s Catholicism.8

61
Sheila Jasanoff

For science to function as a collective enterprise, however, experimental results achieved

in one space, such as a single laboratory, need to be communicated in ways that others find
trustworthy enough to build on. Reports from inside the lab therefore call for a style of com-
munication that carries conviction and cannot be dismissed as rhetoric, ridicule, or fiction. In
their study of the early days of the Scientific Revolution, Shapin and Schaffer described how
the establishment of experimental science prompted the development of a new, impersonal
mode of writing.9 Robert Boyle urged his fellow experimentalists to report their results in a
manner ‘plain, ascetic, unadorned (yet convoluted)’, designed to divert the reader’s attention
from the narrator to the facts being narrated. To this day, Boyle’s stylistic injunctions persist
in the preference for the passive voice in standard scientific writing, along with the avoidance
of color, metaphor, and above all the first person. This helps explain why, for instance, The
Double Helix, James D. Watson’s brash, breathless, and unabashedly personal account of the
race to decode the structure of DNA caused such a stir when it was first published,10 and why
his authorial voice rivals in popularity that of a fictional contemporary, J.D. Salinger’s Holden
Caulfield, in the annals of American coming-​of-​age narratives.11
Boyle and other leaders of the Scientific Revolution saw the need to make the language of
science impersonal, but feminist scholars have demonstrated that their efforts to decenter the
observer left intact the gendered character of their writing. Most centrally, feminist analysts
agree that the relationship between scientists and the natural world they examine was couched
from the start in masculinist and instrumental terms. In an early and still influential polemic,
Merchant documented the use of mechanistic imagery to sanction the commercial exploitation
of the Earth and, ultimately, the ‘death of nature’. 12 Keller argued that Francis Bacon’s meta-
phor of a marriage between science and nature was frequently marked by sexual imagery that
connoted, and condoned, mastery and domination. 13 Bacon imagined nature as slave to the
noblest aspirations of men seeking ‘to extend the power and dominion of the human race over
the universe’, to sire heroes and supermen in their own image, and thereby to return man to a
state before the Fall.14
Language, in feminist writing on science, not only configures how science is imagined
and practiced, but also perpetuates conventional ideas about gender roles. Thus, Keller and
others15 called attention to the fact that the terms in which the men of early modern science
described their work associated the masculine qualities of objectivity and rigor with the scien-
tific method, while ruling out affect and intuition, qualities associated with women’s thought,
as not belonging in science. Such gendered talk made its way into the materiality of sci-
entific work, especially in the life sciences. In one widely cited, if controversial, essay the
anthropologist Emily Martin noted a striking asymmetry in descriptions of male and female
gametes, connecting the sperm to ideas of generation and productivity but the egg to failure
and decay.16 Haraway’s brilliantly idiosyncratic takedown of primatology carried this genre of
critique to a more systemic level. Haraway represented an entire scientific field as dominated
by the presumptions of a white, male, militarist, and capitalist culture that shaped its narrative
practices. One of language’s most basic functions—​storytelling—​thus became in the work of
male primatologists an instrument to advance their hegemonic cultural preferences. 17
If language has the power to make and unmake relations between nature and society, then
one might expect grave tensions to emerge around the choices that actors make in speaking
about science. Such struggles are not hard to find, and they come in many guises. It has long
been noted, for example, that scientists tend to downplay the contingency of their claims and
present more assured statements when talking to audiences outside their domains of expertise
than when speaking to their nearest colleagues. Based on correspondence, interviews, and
published articles in one area of biochemistry, the sociologists Gilbert and Mulkay identified

62
 Language and science in science studies

two contrasting discursive repertoires in scientists’ descriptions of their work: one empiri-
cist, or impersonal and naturalizing; and the other contingent, or admitting the investigator’s
subjective judgments and social position.18 Hilgartner noted the role of powerful scientific
institutions, such as the US National Academy of Sciences, in steering the discursive repertoires
that spokespersons adopt when discussing the results of their deliberations in public forums. 19
The assurance conveyed in such empiricist, ‘frontstage’ communications may paper over the
contingencies that scientists are much more willing to admit in their ‘backstage’ in-​group
conversations. Maintaining this discursive divide comes as second nature to scientists, even
though allowing the parallel discourses to come into view at the same time risks public confu-
sion and embarrassment. Thus, the disclosure of hacked e-​mails from a prestigious UK climate
research center in 2009 shocked public opinion by revealing private doubts and uncertainties,
let alone personal animosities, behind the outwardly smooth certainties of climate science. 20
The episode, instantly tagged with the disparaging label ‘climategate’,21 ruined reputations,
triggered multiple investigations of climate modeling, derailed international policy at a key
political juncture, and dented the reputation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) for scientific integrity.
Climategate followed the time-​tested strategy of debunking scientific claims by unmasking
hidden interests that seemed to guide the findings, thus reducing science’s magical realism
to the all too fallible work of human wizards behind the curtain. The event exemplifies the
immense stakes associated with the ways in which one speaks about scientific claims in the
contemporary world. Indeed, as science has moved further and further from the ivory tower
to its present role as would-​be orchestrator of human affairs, struggles over how to name and
claim authority for science’s findings and products have become more acute and self-​conscious.
Part of the reason for such sensitivity is the implicit recognition that science classifies objects
and phenomena through words and images that affect everyone’s perceptions of how the world
is. These terms may not even be abstruse or technical: the ‘ozone hole’ became an object
of study and regulation even though no hole as such exists in the stratospheric ozone layer.
Classifications, moreover, are unstable and may change over time until they assume a canon-
ical form and so become common knowledge, as in the case of chemistry’s periodic table. 22 For
people and groups in the social world, classification performs a yet more profoundly reality-​
shaping function as people come to see themselves in terms of physical or behavioral traits
provided by science.23 The philosopher Ian Hacking identified this interactive or ‘looping’
effect as specific to the social sciences and their construction of ‘human kinds’.24
The life sciences and technologies emerged as prime sites of linguistic contestation, per-
haps because the word life itself straddles many domains of meaning. Who has the last word
in describing life may determine which institution or interest group has greatest say in deter-
mining the limits and possibilities of biological inquiry. Hurlbut writes compellingly about
scientists’ recognition that the locus and forms of public deliberation have come to depend on
who writes the controlling text, be it a news story, an informational paragraph in a referendum
ballot, or a bioethics report.25 In my own work, I have associated the struggle for linguistic
primacy with a more general move by contemporary biology and biotechnology to assume the
power to declare not merely what life is but also what are life’s purposes. 26 These struggles
often play out in overlapping linguistic space, with scientists desperately, and sometimes com-
ically, seeking to cleanse everyday language of widely used biological terms, such as savior
sibling or designer baby, that might ‘confuse’ the public or draw forth aggressive regulatory
responses from governments. What matters in these contests is not whether language functions
as the contestants believe it does (it may not), but rather that scientific language is widely
perceived as shaping social action.

63
Sheila Jasanoff

At stake in efforts to control how things should be named and debated is not just power
for its own sake, but the fraught question of possible limits on scientific research. Scientists
in the age of social media are acutely aware that word spreads quickly and may prompt rapid
and extreme responses. Language use in these circumstances becomes a high-​stakes game.
For example, scientists have been particularly anxious to keep popular terms from taking hold
in ways that arouse fear (e.g., ‘Frankenfoods’ for genetically modified crops) or otherwise
raise red flags about the aims of scientific inquiry (e.g., ‘playing God’ and ‘pre-​embryos’ in
reproductive biology).27 The irony is that scientists’ own uses of language and symbols some-
times violate the very norms that science would like to impose on the lay public—​as when the
Scottish researchers who created the world’s first cloned mammal named her Dolly in a joking
and gendered reference to the singer Dolly Parton’s breasts; 28 or when the results of climate
modeling are presented in ‘hot’ colors calculated to provoke alarm; 29 or when the designers of
a bacterium with a synthetic genome ‘had a photo taken in the lab with a plate of the microbes
as the central figure in a recreation of the nativity’.30 The point here is not to engage in tit for
tat accusation, but to note that language operates on varied registers at the same time: popular,
technical, rhetorical, promissory, prophetic, and more. To insist on reducing public talk about
science’s productions to a single register could not work and would be counterproductive.
Scientists’ own symbolic and discursive practices only reinforce that conclusion.

A sovereign space
Controversies about finding the right language for science and its objects reflect a more
basic fight for control between science and technology on the one hand and particular ruling
institutions, such as religion or politics, on the other. Since Galileo met the inquisitors of
the Catholic Church, science has sought to erect firm boundaries around its own autonomy
or, some might say, its sovereignty. Citizens of the ‘republic of science’ 31 demand freedom
to choose what work to pursue or not, the right to decide what counts as good practice, and
the power to exclude those who do not belong within science. The most basic form of such
boundary work occurs, as Gieryn among others has shown, 32 around the term science itself,
sometimes further adorned with adjectives like basic, pure, good, sound, or responsible.
These labels are potent demarcating devices. Anyone on the wrong side of the peripheric
wall of good science, however defined, loses the capacity to speak with science’s forcefully
cultivated cultural authority.
The boundary between science and politics is especially salient. When science speaks out
to publics, it is in the register of fact and the truths it declares are assumed to lie outside the
realm of political influence and even deliberation. Evolutionary theory has become axiomatic
in biology and so no other theory of human origins can credibly be espoused as true. The
medical profession affirms the efficacy of vaccines, and parents everywhere are supposed to
immunize their children lest they create the preconditions for mini-​epidemics of infectious
disease. The IPCC declares the facts of climate change on scientific grounds, and politicians
throughout the world are expected to respond with urgency, not to contest findings on which
they lack expertise. Indeed, it is seen as corruption or scandal, or both, if politicians turn away
from the truth on such well-​established consensus positions as the human-​made character of
climate change.33
In practice, the facts that provide the grounding for public policy are seldom so uncontested. 34
Yet, rhetorically, the battle lines between those who follow and those who flout the reigning
scientific consensus continue to be drawn as if facts reside inside black boxes that should not
be open to challenge. One unexpected consequence of science’s insistent boundary work is that

64
 Language and science in science studies

other belief systems, such as organized religion and even fringe science movements, have laid
claim to the discourse of science, and so fight the experts with their own counter-​expertise.35
Creationists in the US context, for example, established their own journals, publications, and
research strategies to advance the claims of ‘Creation science’ and, later, ‘intelligent design’.
Terming evolution just a theory, religious defenders of the biblical account have sought to
position their claims as just another, equally tenable, theory. Science on its own proved unable
to stem this appropriation without assistance from judges who used law talk to steer the anti-​
evolutionists back into the preserves of religion. 36 Yet, illustrating the extraordinary power of
ordinary language, one distinguished ecological economist seized upon the Creationists’ pro-
vocative term—​intelligent design—​as an apt enough label for the evolutionists’ own vision of
the truth.37
The terms denial and denialism, which entered the political lexicon in relation to the
Holocaust, have been extended in subsequent years to science-​driven matters such as HIV-​
AIDS and climate change. These words reinscribe the bright line that science typically insists
on between truth and its negation. Cross that line and you enter the morally murky territory of
‘post-​truth’ politics, a space where democracy itself becomes unthinkable because there is no
common ground left for deliberation.38 Yet, investigations of what the so-​called science deniers
believe suggests a more complex social reality—​not amounting to the rejection of facts as
such, but rather a refusal to live with the social and moral order implied by those facts. 39 As the
anthropologist Fassin observes, ‘The word denial itself is usually presented by those who use
it as merely factual, but it is both prescriptive and polemic’. 40
Whereas Creationism and denialism look like frontal assaults on the institutional cred-
ibility of science, a far more common form of boundary work occurs around the construc-
tion and deconstruction of specific claims offered to steer collective action in one direction or
another. Such controversies have arisen in realms as diverse as the content of school textbooks
(see above), disputes between academic fields,41 and above all the reliability of ‘regulatory
science’.42 In many of these controversies, the line at stake is the one dividing good method
from bad, one that scientists wish to control without interference from society. If one can show
that canons of good scientific method were systematically violated in the work of one’s adver-
saries, then one can relegate that work to the category of ‘junk science’,43 another powerfully
derogatory label. The case of regulatory science demonstrates how, even within this politically
consequential domain, the scientific community strove to define what would or would not
count as the right way to establish facts. In 1983, a committee of the prestigious US National
Academy of Sciences introduced into policy language a distinction that proved extremely
helpful to policymakers throughout the world. A largely scientific exercise of risk assessment,
the committee urged, should be distinguished from the more value-​laden task of risk man-
agement. Despite many demonstrations that this demarcation is at best blurry, and that risk
assessment always involves significant value choices,44 this instrumental term entered policy
discourse as an apparent guarantor of objectivity. Expert advisory committees remain on rela-
tively strong ground, able to defend their activities as sound science, so long as they are seen as
sticking to the assessment side of the assessment–​management boundary. The IPCC’s repeated
insistence that its reports ‘are policy-​relevant without being policy-​prescriptive’ implicitly
rests on the same kind of boundary work that its predecessors at the NAS performed between
the science of assessment and the politics of management.
Of the principles of good method, one that cuts across every field of modern science, and
hence serves almost as a scalpel for separating good science from bad, is peer review. This
methodological device has acquired such hallowed status that peer-​reviewed publications
are weighted differently from non-​peer-​reviewed ones for purposes of promotions and other

65
Sheila Jasanoff

rewards to which scientists aspire. Yet, while the label ‘peer-​reviewed’ carries unquestioned
weight, who counts as a peer and thus what constitutes good peer review remain essentially
contested.45 Once again, the very capacity of language to legitimate what scientists do ensures
that struggles over the authority of science are displaced to struggles over the social meaning
of the validating discourses.

Science in translation
Boundary work occurs all the time in scientific practice and is accompanied by rhetorical
quarrels over questions of classification and method. These disputes acquire altogether
greater salience when they spill out from internal debates within a scientific community to
consequences in the outside world. What scientists say about their work matters greatly in
building and maintaining their own communities, 46 but it matters even more immediately to
society when the work that scientists do helps decide how lawsuits are settled, regulatory
standards are set, and public money is channeled to support one or another field of scien-
tific activity. Technological discourses, too, play their part in influencing the trajectories
of collective action. Cohn wrote of her entry into the male-​dominated world of American
defense intellectuals and how her own capacity to think and ask questions shifted with
her immersion in their ‘technostrategic’ language—​‘words so bland that they never forced
the speaker or enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust’. 47 Edwards
described the convergence of postwar geopolitics, computing technology, and popular cul-
ture to form the ‘closed world’ discourse of the Cold War. 48 In all these broader social
contexts, scientific claims and technological practices need to be explained to non-​scientists
through what are, in effect, acts of translation. The process of bridging between scientific
sense-​making and other communicative contexts entails its own linguistic innovations and
practices.
The relationship between science and law involves particular modes of translation that have
attracted notice from STS scholars. To begin, the styles of writing in law and science are suf-
ficiently different for intelligibility between the two communities of practice to be far from
straightforward. A patent application, for example, must meet the needs of patent law while
also conveying the nature of discovery in succinct form. Greg Myers noted in a closely read
study of two patent applications that scientific articles and patents operate differently in rela-
tion to other texts: the former gain strength through connections to the existing literature while
the latter, in asserting the novelty of claims, are weakened by such associations. 49 A some-
what similar tension arises when intellectual property law seeks to detach human biological
materials from the bodies to which they were connected in order to represent them as novel-
ties for patent protection. Something old and organic, connected to being human, is thereby
turned into something inanimate, novel, and commercially exploitable. Contradictions within
the texts of legal opinions noted by STS scholars and legal analysts point to the messiness of
this area of law as a domain of awkward, imperfect translations. 50
Another kind of rhetorical translation occurs when experts, and the lawyers who examine
or cross-​examine them, put their case to the judge or jury in terms considered intelligible
to laypersons. Here, just as the early modern scientists found when explaining novel phe-
nomena such as gravity, complex ideas may have to be simplified into everyday language
that fits prevailing commonsense understandings of the issues. Thus, in a lawsuit arguing that
human genes are not patentable, the Justice Department and a senior lawyer for the American
Civil Liberties Union opted for homely metaphors to translate genetics into meaningful terms
for Supreme Court justices: a hypothetical ‘magic microscope’ capable of identifying DNA

66
 Language and science in science studies

strands inside the human body; and the difference between elemental gold and earrings made
from the gold to illustrate the legally significant distinction between ‘products of nature’ and
patentable inventions.51
Attention to languages of translation inside the sciences as well as between science and
other fields has helped to foster a move toward reflexivity within STS, a concern with the
way the analyst’s own language practices may reinforce or obscure assumptions embedded
in scientific and technical practice. The focus on new literary forms in STS toward the end of
the twentieth century illustrated some of these sensitivities. In a playfully provocative essay,
Ashmore, Myers, and Potter presented a wide-​ranging review of the STS literature on science
and language as a weeklong trip through a library housing its major branches: discourse, rhet-
oric, history, non-​linguistic texts, gender, social science, reviews, and reflexivity. Using the fic-
tional device of a solo female narrator, the essay’s three male authors sought to capture but also
destabilize the genres of writing on science, and thereby to draw attention to the demarcating
functions of language ‘between the serious and the nonserious, the important and the trivial’. 52
A still more elaborate tour de force was Mol’s ethnography of a common disease, atheroscler-
osis of the leg arteries.53 Here, using the layout of the text itself as an argumentative tool, Mol
adopted the format of two parallel commentaries, the top half of the page devoted to her ethno-
graphic observations and the bottom to literature from fields that provide an interpretive lens
for what she saw in the clinic. The ‘body multiple’ of her book title called attention to splits
in ways of naming, understanding, and explaining a medical condition that no unitary ana-
lytic language, in Mol’s view, was capable of encompassing. To many scientists, however, this
insistence on putting the observer back in the text, while fragmenting the authority of the facts
being reported, seems the very antithesis of the move toward depersonalizing that Boyle and
his collaborators in the Royal Society recommended as the only right way to speak for science.
In its own way, then, reflexive talk in STS represents a transgression against the methods, and
indeed the ethos, of science.

Science and public understanding

Science’s cultural authority depends on language use not only inside communities of prac-
tice (Fleck’s thought collectives) and in translations between science and other professional
groups, but also, increasingly throughout the twentieth century, in science’s communication
with wider publics. STS scholars have noted an unavoidable circularity in the claims made
on behalf of science to shore up its cultural authority. 54 On the one hand, science draws power
from instrumental uses that show things working in the world, like planes flying or Ebola
outbreaks ending. On the other hand, technological applications are said to work because the
science justifying them is a true representation of nature, even though history tells us that
neither the simple causal explanation nor the allegedly unchanging nature of scientific truths
holds up under careful scrutiny. These disconnects between representations of science and
empirical accounts of scientific practice underscore the importance of language and rhetoric
in public accounts of science. How does science prevent the disconnects and contingencies
from undermining its authority? Supplementing work in the rhetoric of science and science
communication, STS scholarship on relations between science and the media and on the public
understanding of science offers particular insights.
Scientists exist today in a symbiotic relationship with science writers and science
popularizers, with some well-​known names in science serving also in the latter role. In
1995, the eminent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was appointed as the University
of Oxford’s first professor of the public understanding of science, a post from which

67
Sheila Jasanoff

he published best-​selling works in defense of atheism as well as Darwinian evolution.

Moreover, since the advent of television, science popularization has attended to visual
communication as well as the written word. In the United States, the Cornell University
astronomer Carl Sagan ushered in a new era of science-​themed television with his wildly
popular series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, estimated to have been watched by 500 million
viewers worldwide since it debuted in 1980. These successful ventures by individual cha-
rismatic scientists resonate well with the work of many lesser-​known writers, film makers,
museum curators, and now bloggers and new media specialists, all engaged in communi-
cating science to their varied audiences. STS scholars studying science communication
have noted the interactive and mutually constitutive relations between scientific claims and
cultural contexts in producing both utopian and dystopian claims about the consequences
of new communication technologies. 55
Media language about scientific work is often marked by hyperbole. Nelkin, an early ana-
lyst of newspaper reports on scientific discovery, noted the enthusiastic language of early
reports on superconductivity: ‘An ecstatic press […] heralded “breathtaking advances”,
“stunning possibilities” and “revolution”. Journalists reported “gasps” from scientists; high-​
Te superconductivity was “a quantum leap in technology”, a “new frontier” ’.56 The sense of
science as a field of perpetual breakthroughs and progressive revolutions gains added force
from the construction of significant discoveries as ‘eureka moments’—​moments in which the
world in effect is changed in a flash—​by both scientists and their admiring followers in the
media.57 Reports such as these erase the hard, collective work that must be done to move from
idea to application or from science to technology. The figure of the inspired sole inventor,
in this respect, does a great deal to mask the contingencies of practice and to maintain the
circular reasoning that validates theory by its instrumental applications and applications by
reference to theory.
The public representation of science carries substantial consequences not only for
scientists’ professional standing and individual epistemic authority, but also for the ways
in which society responds to science. Historians and social theorists have conventionally
associated the rise of science with secularization, 58 even the death of God. Looking at the rhet-
oric of science, however, Walsh sees more an appropriation of religious authority by prom-
inent public scientists such as Rachel Carson, Stephen Hawking, and Carl Sagan, who spoke
in a prophetic register better suited to telling society how it should conduct itself. 59 That
scientific-​prophetic discourse enables even anonymous advisory bodies such as the IPCC
to push back against embarrassments such as climategate. No organization dedicated to the
sacred purpose of warning the world against catastrophe should be derailed by minor errors of
detail, let alone the missteps of some careless members. As one rueful IPCC author remarked,
‘fessing up’ to his own nasty e-​mail comments, ‘Newton may have been an ass, but the theory
of gravity still works’.60
Gilbert and Mulkay divided the discourse of scientists into two types based on their epi-
stemic presuppositions: empiricist (just facts) and contingent (facts situated in contexts).
Scientists’ public discourse can similarly be divided into two stylized forms on the basis of the
attitudes that scientists adopt toward their listening publics, as discussed in the STS literature.61
Drawing on this work, Perrault refers to the common adulatory version of science popularizing
as Public Appreciation of Science and Technology (PAST), and the less common version that
seeks to empower listeners as Critical Understanding of Science in Public (CUSP).62 The PAST
literature often casts the public as being in a state of what Wynne characterized as an epistemic
deficit: not knowing what it needs to know for a full appreciation of science and its virtues, and

68
 Language and science in science studies

hence needing to be informed in a way that both teaches and awakens a sense of wonder. 63 The
CUSP orientation, by contrast, is aimed at winning critical engagement from publics so that
they can participate more completely in integrating science’s values and beliefs with those of
other societal actors.
Such works underscore the extent to which STS scholarship has become crucial to the con-
stitution of the public sphere in the twenty-​first century.64 Many governments acknowledge
that public engagement is essential if their efforts to foster social change through science and
technology are to gain traction. For some issues, the problem may not reach nationwide sali-
ence as in times of war, but rather may involve creating sufficiently empowered ‘mini-​publics’
to sanction ways forward on particular problems. STS scholars have documented in detail how
the choice of language and other informational materials affect public deliberation in such
situations, whether constituted at local, national, or global levels. 65 The abiding lesson from all
of these studies is that analyses of public imaginations of desired futures must attend to actors’
reflections on the role of science and technology if the promises of deliberative democracy are
to be fulfilled in our era.66 Without this kind of attentiveness, attempts to understand the politics
of future-​making leave to one side the capacity of scientific and technological developments to
awaken public hopes, fears, desires, and fantasies—​in short, the very stuff out of which today’s
political demands and disappointments are constituted. A theory of democracy that does not
draw on STS insights thus operates with a radically incomplete picture of what the contem-
porary demos wants or how it expresses itself.

Conclusion
Language, that ancient repository of human thought and creativity, permeates the uses of
science and technology, which are among humankind’s more recent instruments for changing
the world. STS research, as reviewed in this chapter, illuminates the myriad ways in which not
just facts and things, but also how we see them, display them, understand their properties, and
invite them into our imagined worlds, depend on language choices and practices. Knowing
and naming emerge as two faces of the same coin, co-​constitutive of the work of representa-
tion. Science knows nothing until it finds language in which to express itself, and language
increasingly means not words alone but also the larger toolkit of symbols and devices that STS
scholars refer to as inscriptions.
The STS perspective on science and language thus dissects as well as reconstitutes the
relations between science, technology, and society. Far from being neutral labels affixed to
things as they are, scientific words, metaphors, and discourses appear through STS lenses
as instruments of power, directing the human imagination and society’s normative instincts
from the world as it is to worlds that might or should be. Reflecting on science and language
through STS, then, is as much an exercise in political theory as it is in the social studies of
knowledge. It looks beyond past and present to consider how to speak about what we may
yet become.

Notes
1 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together’, in
Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1990), 19–​68.
2 ‘History of the Royal Society’, The Royal Society, [Link]

69
Sheila Jasanoff

3 Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979 [1935]), 25–​35.
4 This name itself is now scientifically obsolete, replaced by Treponema pallidum.
5 Fleck, Genesis, 43.
6 For discussion, see Mark Greshko, ‘Cold Fusion Remains Elusive—​but these Scientists May Revive
the Quest’, National Geographic, May 29, 2019.
7 Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2006), 27–​8.
8 Ibid., 19–​21.
9 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental
Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 61–​9.
10 James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
(New York: Atheneum, 1968).
11 The US Library of Congress names both Watson’s autobiography and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye
(1951) in its list of ‘books that shaped the world’.
12 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (New York: Harper Collins, 1980).
13 Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1985), 34–​42.
14 Ibid., 35.
15 For example, Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
16 Emily Martin, ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on
Stereotypical Male-​Female Roles’, Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 485–​501.
17 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
(New York: Routledge, 1989).
18 Nigel G. Gilbert and Michael Mulkay, Opening Pandora’s Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’
Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
19 Stephen Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000), 42–​50.
20 Lynda Walsh, Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), 183–​5.
21 The label ‘climategate’ exemplifies the generative force of ordinary language, even when applied
to science. Since the Watergate break-​in of the Nixon years, the suffix ‘gate’ has been attached to
any event that speaks of scandal and cover-​up in high places. The disclosure of hacked e-​mails
from the University of East Anglia showed that even science is not immune to such accusation.
22 Eric R. Scerri, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), chap. 1.
23 See, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
24 Ian Hacking, ‘Kinds of People: Moving Targets’, British Academy Lecture, in Proceedings of the
British Academy 151 (2007): 285–​318.
25 Benjamin J. Hurlbut, Experiments in Democracy: Human Embryo Research and the Politics of Bioethics
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
26 Sheila Jasanoff, Can Science Make Sense of Life? (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 121–​38.
27 Ibid., 131–​8.
28 M.L. Stein, ‘Are News Stories about Cloning Being Distorted?’, Editor and Publisher 131, no. 16
(1998): 58–​60.
29 Walsh, Scientists as Prophets, 181–​2.
30 Ian Sample, ‘World’s First Living Organism with Fully Redesigned DNA Created’, Guardian, May
15, 2019.
31 See Michael Polanyi, ‘The Republic of Science’, Minerva 1 (1962): 54–​73.
32 Thomas F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), 1–​6.
33 Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the
Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 267–​70.
34 For extended discussion, see Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

70
 Language and science in science studies

35 Yaron Ezrahi, ‘Science and Utopia in Late 20th Century Pluralist Democracy’, in Nineteen
Eighty-​Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Everett Mendelsohn and Helga Nowotny
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984), 273–​90.
36 See Dorothy Nelkin, The Creation Controversy: Science or Scripture in the Schools (Boston:
Beacon, 1984).
37 In an op-​ed entitled ‘Evolution is intelligent design’, Costanza wrote, ‘if school boards were to require
the teaching of “intelligent design,” they would, in fact, just be calling for the teaching of standard
evolution’. See Robert Costanza, ‘Evolution is intelligent design’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution
24, no. 8 (2009): 414–​15.
38 Arendt says something similar. See Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, New Yorker, February 25,
1967: 49.
39 See Sheila Jasanoff and Hilton Simmet, ‘No Funeral Bells: Public Reason in a “Post-​Truth” Age’,
Social Studies of Science 47, no. 5 (2017): 751–​70. Also see Melissa Leach and James Fairhead,
Vaccine Anxieties: Global Science, Child Health and Society (London: Earthscan, 2007).
40 Didier Fassin, When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 115.
41 Steven Shapin, ‘Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-​Century
Edinburgh’, Annals of Science 32 (1975): 219–​43.
42 Jasanoff, Fifth Branch.
43 See Peter W. Huber, Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
44 See Jasanoff, Fifth Branch; Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an
Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 138–​54.
45 Jasanoff, Fifth Branch.
46 See Dear, Intelligibility of Nature, 19–​26; Fleck, Genesis.
47 Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs 12, no. 4 (1987): 690.
48 Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
49 Greg Myers, ‘Writing and Rewriting Two Patents’, Social Studies of Science 25 (1995): 57–​105.
50 See Hannah Landecker, ‘Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and
Science’, Science in Context 12, no. 1 (1999): 203–​25; James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and
Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996); Jasanoff, Fifth Branch.
51 Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Science, Common Sense, and Judicial Power in U.S. Courts’, Daedalus 147, no. 4
(2018): 15–​27.
52 Malcolm Ashmore, Greg Myers, and Jonathan Potter, ‘Discourse, Rhetoric, Reflexivity: Seven Days
in the Library’, in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald Markle,
James C. Petersen, and Trevor Pinch (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 340.
53 See Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2002).
54 Dear, Intelligibility of Nature, 5–​6.
55 Pablo Boczkowski and Leah Lievrouw, ‘Bridging STS and Communication Studies: Scholarship on
Media and Information Technologies’, in New Handbook of Science and Technology, ed. E.J. Hackett,
O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, and J. Wajcman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 962.
56 Dorothy Nelkin, ‘Selling Science’, Physics Today 43, no. 11 (1990): 41.
57 Jasanoff, Can Science Make Sense of Life, 40–​54.
58 See, for example, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2007).
59 Walsh, Scientists as Prophets, 181–​5.
60 Ibid., 183–​4.
61 Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne (eds.), Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science
and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
62 Sarah Tinker Perrault, Communicating Popular Science: From Deficit to Democracy (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 24.
63 Brian Wynn, ‘Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science’,
Public Understanding of Science 1 (1992): 281–​304.
64 For discussion on the topic, see Jason Chilvers and Matthew Kearnes (eds.), Remaking
Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics (New York: Routledge, 2018).

71
Sheila Jasanoff

65 For examples, see Ulrike Felt, ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’, in Handbook of Genomics,
Health and Society, ed. Sarah Gibbon, Barbara Prainsack, Stephen Hilgartner, and Janette Lamoreaux
(London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 108–​16; Hurlbut, Experiments in Democracy; Stefan
Sperling, Reasons of Conscience: The Bioethics Debate in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2013); Irwin and Wynne, Misunderstanding Science.
66 Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-​Hyun Kim (eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries
and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

72
 Jody Byrne, Technical Translation:
Usability Strategies for Translating
Technical Documentation (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2010), pp. 1-45.
Chapter 1
Technical Translation

Technical translation has long been regarded as the ugly duckling of transla-
tion, especially in academic circles. Not particularly exciting or attractive
and definitely lacking in the glamour and cachet of other types translation,
technical translation is often relegated to the bottom division of translation
activity and regarded as little more than an exercise in specialised terminol-
ogy and subject knowledge. Indeed, these factors, particularly subject
knowledge, have in some quarters led to technical translation being feared
and loathed, like a modern-day barbarian of the linguistic world.
That technical translation has traditionally been regarded as the poor
cousin of “real” translation in the literature is clear. This vocational and in-
dustrial type of translation has been largely neglected in the literature on
translation theory. This is supported by an enlightening survey by Franco
Aixelá (2004) who reports that out of 20,495 publications listed in the
BITRA1 multilingual bibliography of translation research only 1,905 or
9.3% addressed technical translation. Literary translation, on the other hand,
is the subject of some 4,314 entries accounting for 21% of the total number
of entries despite its niche status in professional practice.
The work that has been done in this area has largely been restricted to
terminological issues or technical issues (e.g. translation memories or ma-
chine translation, etc.) or needs to be updated to reflect the modem
realities of technical translation (e.g. Pinchuck 1977, Sykes 1971). However,
technical translation is a much more promising an avenue of theoretical investi-
gation than many suspect. Indeed, its inevitable roots in commercial transla-
tion and technical communication have served to make this an even more
rich and complex area than previously believed.

1 BITRA is the Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation which was created by

Javier Franco in the Department of Translation & Interpreting at the University
of Alicante. This useful web-based resource can be found at [Link]
es/tra_int/usu/[Link]?idioma=en

1
2 Technical Translation

The aim of this chapter is to challenge some misconceptions about tech-

nical translation and describe the reality of this form of translation. I will
also try to relate technical translation to some of the more common theories
of translation. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, to show that
technical translation is worthy of theoretical study and secondly to show
that technical translation, like other specialised types of translation, does not
fit neatly into any one theory or approach and that there is, as yet, no ade-
quate explanation of technical translation as an activity.

The Importance of Technical Translation

It has been estimated that technical translation accounts for some 90% of
the world’s total translation output each year (Kingscott 2002:247). This is
unsurprising given the importance attached to the availability of technical
information in a variety of languages, motivated partly by the increasingly
international focus of many companies and partly as a result of legislation
such as Council of the European Union Resolution C411 (1998a), EU Di-
rective 98/37/EC (Council of the European Union 1998b) and Council
Directive 93/42/EEC (1993) and international standards such as EN 292-2:
1991 and EN 62079: 2001 to name just a few. These represent just some of
the various laws, directives and regulations across the world that require the
provision of comprehensive, accurate and effective technical documentation
in a variety of languages. Coupled with increasing international co-
operation in scientific, technological and industrial activity, it is clear to
see why technical translation is one of the most significant employers of
translators.
Yet despite the overwhelming demand for and importance of technical
translation, there are several stubbornly persistent myths about technical
translation’s importance, nature and role both in industry and within aca-
demia.

Some Misconceptions

Before we examine technical translation in greater detail and try to relate it

to various theories of translation, it would be useful to look at what we
mean by “technical translation” and contrast some misconceptions about
technical translation with the realities of what it means to be a technical
translator.
 The Importance of Technical Translation 3

Technical translation includes economics, law, business etc. In reality,

“technical” means precisely that, something to do with technology and
technological texts. Just because there is a specialised terminology, doesn’t
make something technical. In discussing technical translation it is useful to
make the distinction between specialised and technical translation. For ex-
ample, religion has a very specific terminology and very definite conven-
tions, styles and document structures but it is never regarded as “technical”.
The tendency among certain theorists to include LSP texts such as legal, fi-
nancial and economic texts within the field of technical translation is less
than helpful not least because each area has its own unique characteristics,
requirements and constraints. Simply because a field or subject area has
unique or specialised terminology does not make it technical. This is not to
say that financial translation, or indeed legal translation, do not deserve to
be studied in detail as areas in their own right, in fact there are a number of
extremely useful books on these areas such as Alcaraz & Hughes (2002), but
rather that they will not be discussed here. Instead, this book will take as its
basis a definition of technical translation that has its roots in the translation
industry and indeed industry as a whole, namely, that technical trans -
lation deals with technological texts. Or more specifically, technical
translation deals with texts on subjects based on applied knowledge from the
natural sciences.
Technical translation is all about terminology. This particular misconcep-
tion is not unique to those uninvolved in technical translation. A surprising
number of people within technical translation share this belief Pinchuck
(1977:19), for example, claims that vocabulary is the most significant lin-
guistic feature of technical texts. This is true insofar as terminology is, per-
haps, the most immediately noticeable aspect of a technical text and indeed
it gives the text the “fuel” it needs to convey the information. Neverthe-
less, Newmark (1988) has claimed that terminology accounts for at most
just 5-10% of the total content of technical texts yet there is a dispropor-
tionate amount of attention devoted to terminology and lexical issues in
technical translation. A simple subject search for “technical translation” on
the BITRA bibliographic database reveals that more than half of the 150
entries found relate to terminological or lexical issues.
What makes this even more surprising is the fact that in many fields of
science and technology, the terminology is remarkably similar to the extent
that separate, specialised dictionaries are frequently unnecessary. Indeed,
Fishbach (1993 and 1998) points to the quasi-conformity of medical termi-
nology thanks to the common origins in Latin and Greek. So, depending
on the particular language pairs, a translator should have less trouble
locating appropriate specialised terms in the target language than with
4 Technical Translation

non- specialised, general terms. Similarly, in computing and IT, the termino -
logy is largely uniform thanks, in part, to a predominance of English in the
creation of new terms and partly to the proliferation of proprietary terms
and the availability of terms from software companies, e.g. the Microsoft
glossaries which are available in every language into which Microsoft’s
products have been localized.
However, perhaps even more important than terminology is actually
knowing how to write the texts. Translators need to produce texts which
are identical to those produced by technical writers working in the target
language (Fishbach 1998:2). Failing to comply with target language text
conventions can undermine the credibility of the text, the author and the
information in the text. O’Neill (1998:72) claims that “there is no substi-
tute for a thorough knowledge of the target language”. In order to do this,
it is necessary to look to technical writing and this is not something many
translators have the opportunity to do, either as part of their training or as
part of their own efforts to improve their skills.
According to Lee-Jahnke (1998:83-84), there are three things that are
essential in order to learn how to deal with scientific and technical texts:
• know the text structure in the different languages
• know the LSP for the area
• know the subject area

Style doesn’t matter in technical translation. This is, perhaps, one of the
more irritating misconceptions for technical translators because it is so com-
pletely unfounded and implies that technical translators do not have the
same linguistic and writing skills as other types of translator. Perhaps the
problem stems from differing opinions of the nature of style and the popu-
lar belief that it relates exclusively to literature. If we look at style from a
literary point of view, then it does not have any place in technical transla-
tion. But if we regard style as the way we write things, the words we
choose and the way we construct sentences, then style is equally, if not
more, important in technical translation than in other areas because it is
there for a reason, not simply for artistic or entertainment reasons. As Korn-
ing Zethsen (1999:72) asserts, literary texts “do not hold a monopoly on
expressivity and creativity”. To illustrate this, consider a leaflet containing
instructions for using a product. The limited space available requires both
the author and translator alike to express information in a way which is suf-
ficiently clear, simple and concise so as to allow readers to understand the
information completely and quickly but which nevertheless conveys all of
 The Importance of Technical Translation 5

the necessary facts. In comparison, consider a poem where an author may

purposely choose stylistic devices, structures and metaphors which will
make the meaning ambiguous and leave it open to several interpretations
so as to add to the readers’ enjoyment of the poem. Both situations will
require the use of stylistic and expressive language in order to achieve the
desired effects although these approaches may be at opposite ends of the
stylistic spectrum.
In many cases, the importance or even existence of style in technical
texts goes completely unacknowledged, due largely to the belief that be-
cause technical language is functional, it must be “plain” and stripped of
any form of style or linguistic identity. In reality, however, technical trans-
lation is a highly complex endeavour and style is one of its most important
facets. For this reason, this book will take as its basis the concept of style
and its application in technical translation. This book will show that style,
which has been regarded at best as a way of ensuring compliance with tar-
get language norms, can actually have much more profound effects on the
quality of technical translations.
Technical translation is not creative; it is simply a reproductive transfer
process. While technical translation “is undoubtedly more restricted in
range than aesthetic translation” it is much too easy to overestimate and ex-
aggerate its apparent simplicity (Pinchuck 1977:20). But in order to convey
information in an appropriate and effective way, technical translators have
to find novel and creative linguistic solutions to ensure successful commu-
nication. That this task is often hampered by a restricted vocabulary and
stylistic constraints merely makes the achievement all the more impressive.
You need to be an expert in a highly specialised field. There is a common
belief that in order to be a good technical translator, you need to be an ex-
pert in a highly specialised field and you can’t specialise in more than one
or two subject areas. But the reality is that, armed with a good and solid
understanding of the basic principles and technologies, many technical
translators can, in the words of Robinson (2003:128) “fake it”. He says that
“translators… make a living pretending to be (or at least to speak or write as
if they were) licensed practitioners of professions that they have typically
never practiced.” They are like actors “getting into character”.
However, lest technical translators be branded a bunch of scurrilous
charlatans who deceive unwitting clients we need to put Robinson’s com-
ments into perspective. The notion of pretending to be an expert means
that the translator should have enough subject knowledge either to know
how to deal with the text or to be able to acquire whatever additional
information is needed. Researching a new subject area for a translation is
6 Technical Translation

always easier when you know at least something about it compared to when
you know nothing at all. It is, therefore, essential that translators have ex-
cellent research skills, make full use of parallel texts and have a very good
understanding of general scientific and technological principles. Technical
translators need to “impersonate” the original author who is generally,
though not always, an expert in a particular field and they need to write
with the same authority as an expert in the target language. So in this case,
the real challenges for the technical translator are to be able to research sub-
jects and to have expert knowledge of the way experts in a particular field
write texts. We can summarise the essential areas of expertise for technical
translators:
• subject knowledge
• writing skills
• research skills
• knowledge of genres and text types
• pedagogical skills

With regard to subject knowledge, O’Neill (1998:69) says that medicine,

nursing, dentistry etc. all share some subject knowledge, e.g. physics, biol-
ogy, pharmacology etc. Consequently, what are normally regarded as quite
separate specialisms frequently share the same basic knowledge. The same
can be said of various other types of technological area: engineering,
mechanics, construction etc. They all share more or less the same core
knowledge.
When it comes to specialised subject knowledge, it is a truism that you
cannot master every area so it’s probably best to get a good foundation in
the more generic, transferable subject areas and rely on this together with
an ability to research new areas to deal with unfamiliar subjects. So for a
technical translator, gaining a good understanding of the basics of science
and technology can provide a good basis for diverse applications within
technical translation.
Technical translation is all about conveying specialised information. This
is not entirely true, of course the main concern for technical translators is to
make sure that information is conveyed accurately but they are also respon-
sible for ensuring that the information is presented in the correct form, that
it is complete and that the information can be used correctly and effec-
tively. The translator’s responsibilities encompass many of those of the
technical author and that may involve quite radical changes. Technical
 The Importance of Technical Translation 7

translation involves detailed knowledge of the source and target cultures,

target language conventions, text type and genre conventions, register,
style, detailed understanding of the audiences; whether translators realise it
or not, an understanding of how people learn and use information. Subse-
quent chapters in this book, particularly Chapter 2, will show that merely
presenting information to readers is not enough. Readers must be able to
assimilate the information with as little effort as possible. The information
presented in technical documents is a means rather than an end and it
should not add to the work of readers.

The Reality of Technical Translation

Having looked at some of the more prevalent and serious misconceptions

of technical translation, it’s time to look at the truth behind technical trans-
lation. Our aim here is not to provide an exhaustive and comprehensive
treatment of the area but to give a good general overview and insight into
the area. This section seeks to describe the reality of technical translation in
a professional context, to describe what it is that technical translators do and
what factors affect their work.

Scientific vs. Technical Translation

One of the greatest fallacies when discussing technical translation is to
somehow lump it together with scientific translation, or worse still, to use
the two terms interchangeably. Throughout the literature on translation, in
the frequently brief references to technical translation we see the expression
scientific and technical translation, where, out of convenience perhaps, au-
thors see no problem in treating these two siblings as conjoined twins or
even as the same person. This fundamental error serves only to confuse the
issue because scientific and technical translation are not the same and as
such, cannot be compared equally.
Despite the obvious connection between the two, i.e. they both deal
with information based, to varying degrees, on the work of scientists, scien-
tific translation is quite distinct from technical translation. Certainly, they
both contain specialised terminology and, on the surface, deal with compli-
cated scientific subject matter (to an extent) but it is all too easy to overes-
timate these apparent similarities at the expense of other, more compelling,
differences.
One of the easiest ways of disambiguating the matter is to look at the
words themselves: scientific and technical. Scientific relates to science
8 Technical Translation

which is defined by the Chambers Dictionary as “knowledge ascertained by

observation and experiment, critically tested, systematised and brought un-
der general principles” (Chambers 1992). Technical relates to technology
which is defined as by the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as “the ap-
plication of scientific knowledge for practical purposes”. Thus we can say
that scientific translation relates to pure science in all of its theoretical, eso-
teric and cerebral glory while technical translation relates to how scientific
knowledge is actually put to practical use, dirty fingernails and all. The dif-
ferentiation between scientific and technical translation is also acknowl-
edged by the information sciences. Pinchuck (1977:13) points out that even
in libraries, pure sciences are classified under 5 while applied sciences, i.e.
technological material, are shelved in their own place under 6.
Scientific and technical translation, therefore, is a generic term which is
used to refer to pure science, applied scientific research and technology. But
it is not just the subject matter that distinguishes scientific from technical
translation. Technical translation (and technical communication, which will
be covered later on) can be characterised at a basic level on the basis of:
1. subject matter
2. type of language
3. purpose

So we can, for example, translate a scientific paper which deals with the
concept of electromotive force and the effects of currents passed through
conductors, complete with formulae, hypotheses, discussions and calcula-
tions or we can translate an installation guide for an electrical motor. Both
texts are based on the fact that if you pass an electrical current through a
piece of wire, a magnetic field is created which exerts a force acting at
right-angles to the wire. The difference is the way in which the knowledge
is used and presented. And this is a fundamental difference between scien-
tific and technical translation and one which also affects the type of lan-
guage used in the texts.
In our scientific paper on electromotive force, the goal is to discuss, ex-
plain, justify, impress, convey, convert and possibly entertain. An author
will use the full extent of the language, within specific conventions and
norms, to present the information in an interesting, serious and impressive
way. In some cases, these texts even border on the literary, using the same
devices and strategies as a short-story writer or novelist. Scientific language
 The Importance of Technical Translation 9

can be quite formal2 (think of journal papers) and will often have consider-
able range, just like a literary text. Such texts will also see the use of various
rhetorical strategies, Greek and Latin terms and expressions as well as vari-
ous affixes and compound terms.
The following examples illustrate the type of literary language use which
can be found in scientific texts and even within a single text. In the intro-
duction to a detailed book on astrophysics, Schatzman and Praderie
(1993:1) paint a rather picturesque scene:

In the splendour of a moonless night, far from the pollution of the sky by
artificial lighting, the first revelation is that of the stars.

The next sentence is taken from a book discussing the scattering of X-

rays in gases, liquids and solids where the author uses rhetorical questions,
among other strategies, to enrich the text.

How is the sudden decrease of µ in Fig. V.5 explained by resonance?

(Hukins 1981:47)

In discussing the origins of the universe and the Big Bang theory, Gold-
smith (1995:68) uses the expression “tough little devils” as a humorous way
of explaining the nature of helium nuclei:

This tiny fraction results from the characteristics of helium nuclei, tough
little devils that cannot easily be made to fuse into larger nuclei, because
no stable nuclei exist with either five or eight nucleons (protons or neu-
trons).

An installation guide, on the other hand, is written to help someone do

something. The aim here is to convey the information an engineer needs in
order to install, connect and commission the motor. Consequently, the lan-
guage used will reflect this: simple, unambiguous, concise, and, for want of
a better word, unremarkable. The aim here is not to entertain the reader.

2 Popular science books and magazines which form a sub-class of scientific texts
tend to have a less formal and possible more journalistic tone but they are still
capable of switching between a jovial, friendly style and a more formal “scien-
tific” tone.
10 Technical Translation

People generally do not settle down with a glass of wine to spend the eve-
ning reading installation guides for fun. Pinchuck refers to technical lan-
guage as “workshop language”3, which is somewhere between scientific
and general language. It is less regulated, less literary and even colloquial on
occasion but always strictly functional.
Scientific texts will be conceptually more difficult and will be more ab-
stract than other types of text. They will, however, have more standardised
terms which are easier to look up and they are likely to be better written
than texts on other levels. Technology-based texts will be more concrete,
will contain less information in more space, they will be more colloquial
and will feature concepts which are easier to understand. In addition to this,
there will be products and processes in the external world which can be re-
ferred to. In other words, technical texts can rely on world or background
knowledge to a greater extent. (Pinchuck 1977:218-219).

The Aim of Technical Translation

This leads us on to examine the aim of technical translation. While the pre-
ceding discussion would lead us, quite justifiably, to say that the aim of
technical translation is to transmit technical information, this would be just
half of the story. Although it is true that technical texts are utilitarian
(Pinchuck 1977:18) and are intended to serve a relatively finite purpose,
namely to clearly present information to the target language readers, there is
more to technical translation than simply transmitting information. Instead,
the challenge for technical communicators is to ensure that all of the rele-
vant information is indeed conveyed but also that it is conveyed in such a
way that the readers can use the information easily, properly and effectively.
Indeed, this aim is precisely the same as that of technical writing, which,
rather unsurprisingly, forms the basis for technical translation in that it sup-
plies the raw materials for translation activities.

3 Pinchuck (1997:163-164) is eager to stress that workshop is not meant in any

derogative sense. Rather, it reflects one of the traditional areas where scientists
work and as such is equally as valid as “scientific”. In any case, he offers an in-
teresting discussion of the differences between scientific and technical language.
 The Importance of Technical Translation 11

A Communicative Service
In previous paragraphs we referred to technical translation as a communica-
tive service. Indeed, this is reflected in the following quote from Sykes
(1971:1):

Practical translating... is a service industry. The value of the service pro-

vided by... the translator, depends here, primarily, not on the effort
which went into its preparation, its literary merit, its quality of presenta-
tion, production and reproduction, etc., but on its gap-bridging capac-
ity, its message and content, its scientific or commercial utility to the
requester.

The purpose of technical translation is, therefore, to present new techni-

cal information to a new audience, not to reproduce the source text, per se,
or reflect its style or language. Technical translation is a communicative ser-
vice provided in response to a very definite demand for technical informa-
tion which is easily accessible (in terms of comprehensibility, clarity and
speed of delivery).
As a communicative service or act, translation inevitably involves people.
At the most basic level, we can say that this communicative act involves the
author, the translator and the reader. This is the standard way of examining
the translation process. However, this is far too simplistic for anything other
than the most basic discussions.
In reality, several parties are involved in the process. This has been ad-
dressed by authors such as Vermeer and Nord but it is necessary here to
emphasise the important roles played by the various stakeholders. Con-
scious of the fact that the majority of non-literary documentation is not
produced as a result of some desire or intention on the part of the author,
Nord (1991:42ff) distinguishes between the sender and text producer (au-
thor). Using software user guides as an example, we can say that the sender
would be the software company who actually develops and sells the soft-
ware. As part of the product development process, the company instructs
one of its employees, a technical writer, to produce a comprehensive user
guide to help users learn to use the software. Thus, the text producer in this
case is the technical writer working for the software company.
An interesting point is made by Nord (1997:21) who claims that unless a
source text was produced specifically to be translated, the source text author
has no immediate involvement in the translation process. This poses some-
thing of a problem because in the current climate with multilingual,
multinational companies and legislation requiring documents in multiple
12 Technical Translation

languages, it is difficult to imagine a case where it does not occur to someone

during the production of documentation that it may be translated at some
stage, even if it is just a distant prospect. Still, it is hard to see why the au-
thor would be involved in this process unless the translator needed to clarify
an ambiguous part of the text. Again, with the growing dependency on
freelance translators, it is unlikely that a translator would have any direct or
indirect communication channel with the author. A peculiar situation in-
deed and, perhaps, worthy of further investigation in the future.
We can see from this however, that the stakeholders in the technical
translation process are not simply the author, translator and reader. If we
examine the practical circumstances surrounding the production of multi-
lingual documentation, we can propose a number of other parties:
• Document Initiator
• Writer/Text Producer
• Translation Initiator
• Translator
• User
The Document Initiator is the person or entity responsible for the pro-
duction of the original source language document. In the case of product
documentation, this is invariably the company that manufactures the prod-
uct. The Document Initiator’s aim here is to have documentation that will
help users learn how to use the product effectively, safely and efficiently.
This can be motivated by a genuine desire to help users, to provide a
“complete” product, to improve the company’s competitiveness and repu-
tation, to reduce calls to technical support or simply to comply with legal
requirements.
The Document Initiator then instructs the Writer (who may be in-house
or a freelance contractor) to produce the documentation. The Writer either
receives a detailed brief from the Document Initiator or develops a docu-
ment specification on the basis of interviews with the Document Initiator
and/or the Writer’s own expertise. Working to this specification, the
Writer gathers information from a variety of sources such as white papers,
project outlines, hand-written notes, product specifications and marketing
materials and processes them to produce a text which then goes through a
number of iterations which is tested at each stage for content, clarity and
ideally usability. The completed document is returned to the Document
Initiator and distributed to customers. By referring to the sender and the
text producer (Nord 1991:42ff) also acknowledges the need to differentiate
 The Importance of Technical Translation 13

between the person who actually writes a text and the person or entity who
orders its creation.
The Translation Initiator is the person or entity responsible for starting
the translation process. This is generally the Document Initiator but it can
be argued that the Translation Initiator may be a different department or
manager within the same company. The motivations for the translation
process are similar to those for the document production process, i.e. a de-
sire to enter into new markets where the documents serve not only as a
way of training customers but also as an “ambassador” for the company and
its products. Translations may be motivated by a need to comply with legal
requirements such as the Council of the European Union Resolution C411
which states that “customers are entitled to manuals produced in their own
language” irrespective of where the product was made (Council of the
European Union 1998:3). The Translation Initiator sends the document
and some form of instructions to the Translator.
While strictly speaking the Translator is the next step, in reality this is
not always the case. Frequently, texts will be sent to translation agencies or
localization vendors who will then send the document to a translator. It
goes without saying that this additional link in the chain can present both
problems and benefits for the Translation Initiator and the Translator. Prob-
lems arise from the fact that this is another stage in the communication
process and as such, any instructions or requirements specified by the
Translation Initiator may well be “watered down”, misinterpreted or not
passed on by the agency or vendor. Of course, this depends on the systems
and processes the agency has in place as well as on the personalities and
communication skills of the project managers and administrators involved.
It is not unheard of for a project manager to simply send a text out for
translation by a freelancer without passing on any form of instruction, as-
suming instead that the translator will know what to do with it. On the
other hand, certain agencies have robust processes in place to ensure that
translators are given detailed information such as whether the text is for
publication or for information purposes, whether specialised terminology or
style guides need to be used and so on. However, for the sake of clarity and
simplicity, we will assume that the instructions from the Translation Initia-
tor have been conveyed perfectly to the Translator and that there is no
cause to suspect that ambiguities have been introduced or instructions lost.
Translators can be either staff (working for the Document/Translation
Initiator), in-house (working in-house for an agency or vendor) or free-
lance and they are responsible for producing a foreign language version of
the original document. Unfortunately, practices regarding translation briefs
or instructions for producing the translation are far from consistent and
14 Technical Translation

frequently problematic. In addition to the factors discussed above, the problem

is that many Translation Initiators simply do not have the necessary knowl-
edge or experience to realise that they should give some form of brief when
commissioning translations. Some simply regard this as the translator’s re-
sponsibility. For instance, some might argue that you would not give a me-
chanic a detailed checklist and instructions for servicing your car. Instead
they would expect that, having described the problem in general, the me-
chanic would be able to establish what the problem was and would know
how to fix it. The same thinking applies when some clients think of transla-
tors. At best, many clients will simply specify that the document is for pub-
lication purposes, should use company’s own terminology and should “read
well”. In this regard, in-house and staff translators fare a little better than
their freelance counterparts.
Even in the absence of a translation brief, an in-house translator will have
access to various experts, sometimes even the original author as well as ac-
cess to a variety of existing documentation in the form of previous versions
of the document and parallel texts. Freelancers, unfortunately, do not al-
ways have this luxury although the more conscientious will pester the client
or agency for this material. More often than not, translators have to rely on
previous experience and knowledge of the document conventions for both
languages. So, using a knowledge of the two languages, including the
methods for producing effective texts in the target language, subject knowl-
edge and their perception of the audience’s needs, expectations and re-
quirements while at the same time ensuring that the client’s wishes are met
along with the legal requirements for documentation, the translator pro-
duces the foreign language version of the text. The translation is then made
available to the User, who represents the final stage in the process.
It is the User who, according to Holz-Mänttäri (1984:111), is the deci-
sive factor in the production of a target text. Where technical documents
are translated, there are two sets of users: the source language user and the
target language user. Although both users are on the surface quite different
in terms of their needs, i.e. documents in the respective languages, they
share certain macro-aims, e.g. learn how to use the product. However, this
may need to be achieved in different ways. This is where the technical
writer and the technical translator share a common purpose to determine
what their respective users want and how to achieve this. In order to trans-
late effectively, a translator needs to fully understand and know the users
(Reiss & Vermeer 1984: 101).
The user is the real reason the original document was produced in the
first place and subsequently translated. What the user wants from a transla-
tion has been subject to much debate, argument and hand-wringing among
 The Importance of Technical Translation 15

translation theorists. Some argue that the target language reader may be in-
terested in gaining an insight into the culture of the source text culture or
the source language itself. Others would argue that the target reader wants
to experience the text in the same way as the original audience did. In cer-
tain circumstances this may be true. However, in the case of technical
translation, all readers are concerned about is getting the information they
need and being able to understand and use it effectively in order to do
something else, usually some task relating to their day to day work. This
may sound rather absolutist and dogmatic, but in reality many people treat
translations not as translations but as original target language texts. This is
unless, of course, there is some quality issue within the text which identifies
it as a translation in which case the user will probably lose much, if not all,
trust in the text. In any case, the translation needs to function in precisely
the same way as any other text in the target language. Readers are unlikely
to show mercy to a translation that is obviously a translation just because it
is a translation. This serves only to distract them from their primary con-
cern: finding the information they need in the document and using it.
With this general overview of the key stakeholders involved in technical
translation, we now need to take a closer look at the role of the translator.
After all, it is the translator who facilitates this extension of the communica-
tion process.

The Translator’s Role

Given its central position in the entire translation process, the role of the
translator is, understandably, more complex than the other participants and
as such merits closer investigation.
Much like the source language technical writer, the translator’s primary
job is to communicate information by means of a text. This aim supersedes
any desire or intention to transfer the source text into the target language.
As Robinson (2003:142) maintains, “translators don’t translate words they
translate what people do with words”. In this case, we have the added
complications presented by the fact that we are dealing with two different
16 Technical Translation

languages, a fairly rigidly prescribed framework within which to produce

the target text (i.e. the translation brief and the source text4).
However, like the technical writer, the translator uses information from a
variety of sources, not just the source text, to produce a target text which is
effective and which performs the desired communicative function.
In this sense, the translator becomes the intercultural or cross-cultural
technical writer referred to by Göpferich (1993) and Amman & Vermeer
(1990:27). But this isn’t just an excuse for loose and overzealous translations
by translators who are dissatisfied with their role as mere translators and
yearn for the “power” of an author. Quite the opposite in fact! The sign of
a good technical translator is the ability to do some of the things a technical
writer does to make sure that the person who ultimately reads the text can
do so with relative ease and that whatever tasks the reader needs to per-
form, are easier having read the text.
However, in practical and professional terms, the actual work of a trans-
lator is still somewhat unclear and not fully understood. In the words of
Mossop (1998:40) there are “no systematic observations, or even self- de-
scriptions, of how professional translators proceed when they translate”.
This is indeed true. We may speculate as to what is actually involved in
translating a text and how it is done by a translator but in terms of what a
translator actually does and when, we are still guessing to a large extent.
Mossop describes the process of translation as a process consisting of 5 tasks
performed over 3 phases of translation production:
• Phase 1: Pre-drafting
• Phase 2: Drafting
• Phase 3 Post-drafting

4 I am conscious of the need not to elevate the source text to such heights that it
dominates and determines the translation process. The emphasis here is, and will
remain, firmly on the needs of the target audience and not on the source text or
author. Having said this, there is a limit, as yet intangible, to what a translator
can do and how far a translator can deviate from the source text. A useful way of
thinking about this is Nord’s notion of “function plus loyalty” as part of her ap-
proach to Skopos theory (see page 38) although Vermeer has reservations about
introducing subjective, value judgments into Skopos theory (Vermeer 1996:83).
 The Importance of Technical Translation 17

During the course of these phases, translators perform the following tasks,
although it is not clear, according to Mossop, how the tasks are distributed.
It is possible that the tasks are performed sequentially or in parallel.
• Task 1: Interpret the source text
• Task 2: Compose the translation
• Task 3: Conduct the research needed for tasks 1 and 2
• Task 4: Check the draft translation for errors and correct if necessary
• Task 5: Decide the implications of the commission. In other words, how
do the intended users and uses of the translation affect tasks 1 to 4?

While Mossop presents these phases and tasks as a description of practical

translation as a whole, they are easily applied to technical translation, al-
though it is possible that the distribution of tasks and stages is even more
difficult to pin down. Nevertheless, this description serves to give a useful
overview of the stages involved in producing a technical translation because
it acknowledges the need for translators to conduct research so as to under-
stand not just the text but also the subject while at the same time ensuring,
by means of revisions and corrections, that the text conforms to target lan-
guage norms and target audience expectations.

Technical Translator or Technical Communicator?

That the lines separating the role of technical translator and technical writer
have become somewhat blurred is inevitable. What’s more, this fact is gain-
ing greater recognition in the wider “communication” community. Various
professional societies for technical communication in Europe and in the
United States - such as the Institute for Scientific and Technical Communi-
cators and the Society for Technical Communication - specifically include
translators in their definitions of technical communicators.
Not only do both camps deal in the same currency, i.e. technical infor-
mation in texts, they also share several key tasks and activities. Perhaps first
and foremost, technical writers are, to a certain extent, not unlike transla-
tors in that they need to “translate” what Van Laan and Julian (2002:18) call
“geek-speak” into clear and understandable English. As mentioned previ-
ously, a technical writer gathers information from a variety of sources
including documents that were produced by and for experts such as pro-
grammers and engineers. With this come the inevitable infelicities of style,
excessively technical content or indeed missing information. This information
18 Technical Translation

needs to be rebuilt, reinterpreted, remodelled and restructured so that it

can be understood and used by the reader. Likewise, the translator needs to
transform information from a form which was produced by and for speakers
of the source language into a form which can be understood by the target
audience. This is achieved by editing, rearranging, adding and even remov-
ing information.

Adding and Removing Information

Göpferich (1993:52) says that sometimes it is quite necessary to add addi-
tional information to a text to help ensure that the information and text are
as usable and effective as possible. Similarly, some information needs to be
omitted, condensed or made implicit because it is of less importance for the
target audience, because it may not apply to the target audience’s particular
situation or because it may result in confusion. Put simply, sometimes
information must be sacrificed in order to protect the integrity of the
communication.
Pinchuck (1977:206-207;210-211) maintains that a text should give
readers just enough information for their purposes; no more, no less. Too
much information, like too little information can lead to confusion, stress
and unnecessary effort on the part of readers. The rule of thumb is that if a
user does not need to know something at a given moment, don’t tell them
about it. But this can be abused, either intentionally or unintentionally. In
her discussion of medical translation, O’Neill (1998:76) claims that doctors-
turned-translators (who have much more subject knowledge than tradi-
tional translators) tend to edit, reduce and summarise texts to make them
better. However, the problem here is that unless this is specifically what the
reader wants and needs, the translator is committing quite a serious error.
This type of intervention also manifests itself in the formulation and edit-
ing aspects of the translation process. In the case of poorly formulated
source texts, this requires the technical translator to intervene whenever
necessary in order to reword, edit or present information in the best way
for the reader. According to Sykes (1971:6) the translator should “not feel
compelled to perpetuate the more sinful omissions or commissions of his
[sic] author”. Sykes goes on to advise technical translators to “look out for
unnecessary verbiage (including padding)” as it allows the translator to “re-
phrase rather than paraphrase”. The opposite is true of excessively concise
texts (Sykes 1971:10). In fact, Ramey (1998) discusses how sentences that
have been overly condensed can result in Escher effects, or sentences that
can have multiple meanings that take more than a little detective work on
the part of the reader to decipher.
 The Importance of Technical Translation 19

Similarly, the translator may need to intervene in the flow of information

within a text. This is particularly important in the case of user guides or in-
structions for use where instructions in the text must match the actual se-
quence of actions the reader needs to perform. This is also useful for the
purposes of ensuring the appropriate register in the target text. Gerzymisch-
Arbogast (1993) discusses how the sequencing of information in a text
reflects its register or author-reader contract and how the register for a par-
ticular document type may need to change in translation.
Sometimes, too, changes to the sequencing of sections in a document are
needed because of cultural norms relating to the structure of a particular
type of document. For example, a user guide for an electrical appliance in
German might typically start with an explanation of the parts, then infor-
mation for disposing of the product after use followed by an introduction.
In English, the user guide for a comparable (or even the same) product
might start with an introduction followed by a quick start tutorial.
There is a very definite legal requirement on technical writers and in
turn, on technical translators to ensure that documents contain enough in-
formation to ensure the safe operation of products and devices. European
directives such as Directive 98/37/EC of the European Parliament place
the onus on manufacturers (and the writers and translators working on their
behalf) to predict possible hazards and to document them in instructions
and product documentation. The directive states that:

1.2.2. Principles of safety integration

(c) When designing and constructing machinery, and when drafting
the instructions, the manufacturer must envisage not only the normal
use of the machinery but also uses which could reasonably be expected.
The machinery must be designed to prevent abnormal use if such use
would engender a risk. In other cases the instructions must draw the
user’s attention to ways - which experience has shown might occur - in
which the machinery should not be used. (Council of the European
Union 1998) [emphasis my own]

What this means for the translator is that, if a manual describing the pro-
cedure for repairing a machine vital information is missing or incompre-
hensible and could result in death or injury or damage to the machine, the
translator needs to ensure that the information is either completely refor-
mulated, supplemented and made explicit or at the very least brought to the
attention of the client. I once had to translate a maintenance manual for a
die pressing machine used to manufacture body panels for motor cars. As
such texts go this was fairly unproblematic except for one particular section
20 Technical Translation

which, if I had translated as it stood, would have caused the user to lose lost
an arm as a result of reaching in to the machine without first engaging the
safety mechanisms. The manual was divided into various sections and stages
which described the different maintenance tasks which could be carried
out. In a previous section, the manual described how to disengage the
power supply to the die punch and activate the safety barrier before recon-
necting the power. In the next section, this information was left out al-
though it was still essential. It’s possible that the author assumed that it
wouldn’t be necessary to repeat the information a second time. Perhaps the
writer simply forgot to include it. In any case, there are several compelling
reasons as to why it was essential to include this information again:
• the nature of manuals means that people do not always read manuals
from cover to cover or even in sequence,
• even if users had read the previous section, there is no guarantee that
they would remember this information
• even if users realise that there is potentially something missing from the
instructions, many people trust the instructions they are given and will
assume that the information was left out for a reason, e.g. it does not ap-
ply in this particular instance

Ambiguous information can also necessitate the addition of information in a

text. Pinchuck (1977:66) gives an example of ambiguity in the form of the
following text on a sign:

“Flying planes can be dangerous”

We can disambiguate this by making explicit certain information relating to

the situation in which the utterance is intended to function or be used.
Thus we could say:

“Planes flying overhead can be dangerous”.

While this may seem unacceptable because it is clearly adding text where
there was none, if we take the view that a text is supposed to function in a
particular situation, it therefore depends on that situation in order to have
the correct meaning, relevance and importance. Thus, the text is part of the
situation and so adding material or facts from the situation is perfectly ac-
ceptable because it is not so much adding but reallocating information. In
 Theory in Technical Translation 21

fact this is similar to what Kussmaul (1998:123) describes as “enlarging a

scene”. In this case, the scene would be the situation and circumstances in
which the sign is used, e.g. on an airfield. He does urge caution in this re-
spect because of the difficulty in definitively saying “how many and which
kinds of elements can be added to a scene without getting into another
scene that is no longer adequate as a translation”. So there is a limit to how
much information we can make explicit from the scene but unfortunately,
there are no hard and fast rules.
Conversely, it is sometimes essential to remove information from a text.
This can happen for several reasons: sometimes the information is legally
inappropriate for a particular audience; the information does not apply to
the target audience for technical reasons; or the information is meaningless
for the target audience.
Another example comes from a translation I carried out for the manufac-
turer of a satellite television receiver. The document consisted of a series of
frequently asked questions relating to the receiver, its configuration and its
operation. The document stated that users could find details of the frequen-
cies and polarities of various television channels in a range of German
magazines, each of which was mentioned by name. At first glance this was a
fairly innocuous sentence but in reality it was potentially problematic.
Firstly, the magazines are not available outside Germany and even if they
were, they would be in German and would be of no use to the reader. An
alternative to listing the names of the magazines would be to do a little re-
search and replace the names with the names of similar English-language
magazines which also provided the same information. A little above and
beyond the call of duty perhaps, but it is the type of thing some translators
would do as a matter of course for a customer. This, however, is not with-
out its problems either. With English being spoken in several countries,
how do we know that the magazines we select will be available in places
like Canada, the United States, Ireland, England, Australia and so on? The
translation itself may end up in any number of these countries but the like-
lihood of a magazine being available in some or all of them is by no means
assured. In this case, a more sensible solution would be to simply omit the
names of the magazines and refer users to “your satellite listings magazine”.

Theory in Technical Translation

Technical translation, like translation in general, has both benefited and suf-
fered as a result of the work of translation theorists. In the past 40 or so
22 Technical Translation

years a plethora of theories, models, approaches and ideas have been circu-
lated seeking to explain, rationalise, analyse and describe the translation
process. Technical translation has, however, been largely omitted from
much of this work and is rarely dealt with explicitly. Rather, it is for tech-
nical translators themselves or those academics who feel strongly enough
about this species of translating to try and see how the “mainstream” theo-
ries can be related to the practice of technical translation at the coal-face, as
it were. More often than not, the results are disappointing. Not because
technical translation is inherently unique and challenging (although it is)
but because translation itself is as elusive and mercurial as ever and there
seems to be a real collective mental-block preventing a clear understanding
of what translators actually do. But what are our options? Do we want a
theory of translation that is sufficiently flexible and general that it can be
applied on at least some level to all types of translation but which will not
provide any concrete answers or insights? Or do we want highly specialised,
narrowly focussed theories that are so rigid and unyielding that they either
exclude vast swathes of translation activity or come crashing down around
our ears at the first sign of an anomalous translation situation?
The aim of this book is most certainly not to redress this situation. It
would be a brave soul who would try to tackle the patchwork that is trans-
lation studies in this way. Instead, my aim here is to discuss various theories,
models and approaches and try to relate them in some way to technical
translation. Conscious of the need to avoid reinventing the wheel or worse
still, further muddying the already murky waters of translation theory, there
will be no lengthy or exhaustive discussions of the various theories. This is
not necessary or indeed appropriate here. The aim here is, therefore, to
provide some theoretical background so as to illustrate the nature of techni-
cal translation and to provide a better understanding of the environment
within which it operates.

The Trouble with Translation Theory

Good theory is based on information gained from practice. Good practice

is based on carefully worked-out theory. The two are interdependent.
(Larson 1991:1)

When trying to explain or situate technical translation within a theoreti-

cal framework it is often extremely difficult to know where to begin. This
is made all the more problematic when we consider the shockingly diverse
 Theory in Technical Translation 23

range of approaches, models, rules and theories. This can be illustrated us-
ing a much quoted example from Savory (1957:49) who compiled the fol-
lowing list of “rules” of translation from a variety of “authoritative” sources
on translation which state that a translation:
• must give the words of the original
• must give the ideas of the original
• should read like an original text
• should read like a translation
• should reflect the style of the original
• should possess the style of the original
• should read as a contemporary of the original
• read like a contemporary of the translation
• may add to or omit from the original
• may never add to or omit from the original

These rules are, without doubt, contradictory and at times paradoxical but
they cannot be dismissed completely since each one will find legitimate ap-
plication in a specific translation context. And this is, perhaps, where we
should begin our attempts to situate technical translation in its own theo-
retical “space”, if such a thing is possible. Looking at the professional con-
text upon which this book has as its background, we can describe technical
translation in very basic terms as a communicative process, or rather, a ser-
vice provided on behalf of someone else for a particular purpose and within
a particular situation and environment. In fact, the constraints and circum-
stances affecting technical translation are really quite similar to those affect-
ing technical writing which will be discussed in the next chapter.
So how does this help us find a theoretical basis for technical translation?
To answer this, we first need to look at the most prevalent theoretical ap-
proaches to translation to see where this communicative, reader-orientated,
service approach fits in. We can broadly categorise the different theories ac-
cording to the emphasis they place on the source text (ST) and/or target
text (TT). It should be noted, however, that such is the situation with
translation theory that there is frequently an overlap between these two
categories; while a theorist may ostensibly be in favour of concentrating
on the target text, there may be varying levels of source text-orientation
within the theories. Far from being a ground for questioning the decision
24 Technical Translation

to divide theories in this way, this fact serves to highlight not only the diffi-
culty in developing a theory of translation but also in placing technical
translation within a particular theoretical framework.
However, a useful starting point, particularly for technical translation, is
the idea presented by Toury (1995:56-7) that translation is essentially af-
fected by two major roles:
1. the translation is a text in a particular target language and culture
2. the translation constitutes a representation in one language of another
text existing in another language and culture

He states that the basic choice which is made by a translator in deciding be-
tween the requirements of the two different roles represents an initial norm.
This choice with regard to preferences for either role determines whether
the translation can be regarded as adequate or acceptable. Thus he says:

…whereas adherence to source norms determines a translation’s ade-

quacy as compared to the source text, subscription to norms originating
in the target culture determines its acceptability. (Toury 1995:57) [em-
phasis in original]

We can see, therefore, that adequacy is typically regarded as a term associ-

ated with source text-orientated attitudes and approaches; acceptability on
the other hand, by its very implication of a target audience focuses on the
target text. Relating this to technical translation, we can say that, in general,
the aim of a technical translation is to achieve a high level of acceptability,
primarily because technical texts, particularly instructional texts, are in-
tended to function first and foremost as a target language text.
Toury goes on to say that adequacy and acceptability can be manifest on
both a macro and a micro-level. Thus, on a macro-level, the text may sub-
scribe to target culture norms but on a micro-level, not all translation
choices and strategies need to comply with the overall macro-level strategy.
In effect, we can see that we can still produce a target-orientated text even
if we have to resort on occasions to source-orientated strategies on a lower
level. This is especially true of technical translation where some sentences
can and need only be translated literally while other sentences or even para-
graphs need much more radical translation strategies.
Larson (1987:69) provides some additional insight when she states that
“the goal of most translators is to produce translations which are acceptable
for the audiences for whom the translations are produced”. This acceptability,
 Theory in Technical Translation 25

she continues, can only be attained “if the translator has a set of criteria
which will guide him [sic] as he works and by which he can measure his fi-
nal product”. Crucially, she says that these criteria vary from project to pro-
ject - or from translation to translation.
The notion that a technical translation must be acceptable to the client is
echoed by Pinchuck (1977:205) who states that what both the client and
translator want is a satisfactory translation which is achieved with a mini-
mum expenditure of time and effort. It should be pointed out at this point,
however, that Pinchuck does not make a distinction between acceptability
and adequacy like Toury. While Pinchuck refers to the adequacy of transla-
tions, it is used in the same way as Toury uses acceptability - in other
words, the translation is adequate for the needs of the target audience. In-
deed, Pinchuck says an adequate translation is always a compromise be-
tween conflicting demands in that has a tendency to concede fidelity to the
requirements of intelligibility and of speed. The extent of this, Pinchuck
maintains, depends on the circumstances in which the translation is pro-
duced (1977:207).
In general, an inferior translation according to Pinchuck (ibid.) is “a
work that is unreadable, or difficult to read, and possibly also inaccurate”.
Pinchuck goes on to say that in any case, an adequate translation will always
be one that has been produced utilising just enough time and energy to en-
sure that the needs of the consumer are met. The translation should not be
of a higher quality than that required by the client, particularly if this in-
volves a higher cost. Having said that, the quality should not be lower if it
means that the reader will have to spend a lot of time and energy on deci-
phering it. The technical translator, according to Pinchuck, aims to achieve
adequacy and not perfection in translation. Realistically, this should be the
goal for any translator or writer because we can never assume that a com-
municative act will run perfectly smoothly and that nothing will be lost.

Source-Orientated Approaches to Translation

Equivalence
The idea of equivalence forms the basis of many theories of translation and
by implication, definitions of translation quality. But the term “equiva-
lence”, however, is fraught with difficulties. Indeed Newmark (1993:75)
claims that “the cerebration and the brain racking about translation equivalence
26 Technical Translation

goes on forever”. He goes on to say that translation equivalence cannot

be defined and as such, there are only degrees of equivalence (ibid).
While there are numerous definitions and types of equivalence, they all
rely on one thing: a link or bond of some sort between the source text and
the target text. As Catford (1965:49) explains “the TL text must be relatable
to at least some of the situational features to which the SL text is relatable”.
According to Catford, a translation does not necessarily have to consist of
target language elements with the same meaning as the source language ele-
ments but ones which have the greatest possible amount of overlap across
the different levels of equivalence.
This is echoed by Halverson (1997:207) who provides a slightly broader
definition of equivalence and says it is a relationship which exists between
two entities and it is described as one of likeness / sameness / similarity /
equality in terms of any number of potential qualities. Equivalence theories
regard translation as an attempt to reproduce the source text as closely as
possible. But because there are numerous reasons why they can never be
perfectly equivalent on all levels, numerous of types equivalence have been
defined such as formal and dynamic equivalence (Nida 1964), denotative,
connotative, pragmatic, textual and formal aesthetic equivalence (Koller
1979).

Levels of Equivalence
We see that equivalence between the source and target texts is not absolute
and total but it can operate on a number of different levels. There are a
number of systems which have been put forward to examine the levels of
equivalence. One of the most enduring is the scheme proposed by Koller
(1979:188-189). According to Koller, equivalence can occur on the follow-
ing levels:
1. Denotational Meaning, namely the object or concept being referred to.
In texts such as user guides, equivalence on this level is relatively easy to
achieve because we need to keep referring back to the product the
reader is learning to use.
2. Connotational Meaning, which is, according to Koller divided into lan-
guage level, sociolect, dialect, medium, style, frequency, domain, value
and emotional tone. Equivalence on this level can sometimes prove
problematic where, for example, the enthusiastic and informal tone
adopted by the source text may be culturally unacceptable in the target
language.
 Theory in Technical Translation 27

3. Textual Norms, which are typical language features of texts like patents,
legal documents, business letters etc. Textual norms may include the use
of the second person to address the readers of user guides or the use of
passive constructions to describe experiments in scholarly journals.
4. Pragmatic Meaning, which includes reader expectations

Komissarov (1977) also proposes a series of levels on which translation

equivalence can occur. In the context of what Fawcett (1997:60) refers to
as “sharp and fuzzy equivalence” Komissarov’s levels all build upon each
other with the lowest level of equivalence being retained and built on by
the next higher level of equivalence and so on. These levels are as follows:
1. Equivalence on the level of the general meaning or message. Aside from
the general communicative intention, there is no tangible equivalence on
the basis of situational, grammatical or lexical factors.
2. In addition to the preceding level, this type of equivalence identifies a
particular situation in both texts.
3. Building on the preceding levels, equivalence on this level maintains fac-
tors or elements which describe the situation established in level 2.
4. As well as all of the information presented as a result of the preceding
levels of equivalence, this level establishes semantic and syntactic equiva-
lence in that the majority of the source text words have corresponding
target language lexical items and the syntax is transformationally related.
5. This level of equivalence displays a close parallelism between the source
and target texts on all levels of language.

Types of Equivalence
Perhaps the most well known types of equivalence are formal and dynamic
equivalence posited by Nida (1964). Formal equivalence is concerned with
the message in terms of its form and content. With this type of equivalence
the message in the target language should match the different elements in
the source language as closely as possible, be they lexical, syntactic, stylistic,
phonological or orthographic. According to Catford, a formal correspon-
dent (or equivalent) is any target language category (unit, class, structure,
element of structure, etc.) which can be said to occupy, as nearly as possi-
ble, the ‘same’ place in the ‘economy’ of’ the target language as the given
source language category occupies in the source language (Catford
1965:27).
28 Technical Translation

Dynamic equivalence on the other hand is based on the notion that the
target text should have the same effect on its audience as the source text
had on its own audience. With this type of equivalence the emphasis is not
so much on finding a target language match for a source language message
but rather on creating the same relationship between the target audience
and the message as that which existed between the source language audi-
ence and the message (Nida 1964:159). By using this type of equivalence it
is hoped to produce a target text which is natural and idiomatic and which
focuses on the target language culture. According to this definition of
equivalence, a successful translation needs to capture the sense of the source
text and not just the words. As such it can only be regarded as a successful
piece of communication if the message is successfully transmitted to the tar-
get audience. One example, proposed by Nida, of how this can be achieved
in practice would be to change the sequence of sentences where they do
not match the real-time chronology of actions. This particular strategy is
quite useful, especially in the translation of instructions.
On the surface, dynamic equivalence seems useful in that it emphasises
the importance of meaning, and more specifically, of equivalent response. It
could be argued that this is essential in the translation of instructional texts,
training materials, tender documents etc. but the usefulness of this concept
is limited as it is primarily concerned with cultural phenomena which, as a
rule, do not occur in technical texts. I say as a rule because technical texts
can, and do on occasion, contain certain items which Lee-Jahnke (1998:82)
describes as socio-culturally specific. Such items may include time and date
conventions, units of measure, laws, government departments and authori-
ties etc.
While legal terms, such as those that appear in product documentation or
patents, are potentially problematic, from a practical point of view it can be
argued that they are easier to deal with. If for example, the target audience
needs to know precise details of the law, we give the name of the law in
the source language accompanied by the official translation or a paraphrase
in the target language. The reason for including the source language name
here is to ensure that if the reader needs more information on the law or
needs to seek advice from a lawyer in the source language country, they
will be able to refer to the law using its correct name. There is, after all, lit-
tle point in referring to something by a name which nobody recognises. On
the other band, if the precise term is not important, we simply give a de-
scription or generic term. An example of this would be a user guide for a
refrigerator which tells users to dispose of the packaging in accordance with
the German laws on disposal of household waste. It makes little sense for
someone living outside Germany to dispose of waste in accordance with
 Theory in Technical Translation 29

German laws. In this case, we simply say that the packaging should be dis-
posed of in accordance with the relevant waste disposal laws (unless of
course we are certain of’ the intended target country and want to mention
specific equivalent laws but sometimes it’s best to keep these things vague!).
Nida makes the point, however, that eliciting the same response from
two different groups of people can be difficult, particularly when we con-
sider that no two people from the same language group will understand
words in exactly the same way (1969:4). This sentiment is also expressed by
Steiner (1975:28). What we are left with, therefore, is an approach which is
theoretically quite desirable but often regarded as excessively vague, difficult
to implement and imprecise in practice.
Other types of equivalence include referential equivalence whereby the
equivalence centres on the ST and TT words referring to the same ex-
tratextual entities in the “real world”. Connotative equivalence is used to
describe the relationship between ST and TT words which result in the
same or similar associations or connotations in the minds of the reader.
Text-normative equivalence involves source language and target language
words being used in the same or similar contexts in their respective lan-
guages.

Technical Translation and Equivalence

Source-based approaches, as exemplified by the various types and levels of
equivalence briefly mentioned above, represent a problematic foundation
upon which to base technical translation. While referential equivalence can
ensure that a translation accurately conveys the intended information, con-
notative equivalence can help avoid the introduction of inappropriate regis-
ter or terms and textual equivalence can benefit the flow of information and
cohesion of texts, the fact that source-based approaches do not consider the
full communicative situation in which technical texts are translated and
used poses significant problems for the technical translator. Since technical
translation is a communicative service aimed at providing information to a
new audience, the concentration on the source text and not on those in-
volved in the communication means that a crucial part of the translational
situation is simply not considered. If we do not consider the purpose of the
communication, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether it was
successful.
Linguistic approaches - of which Nida’s theory is one, its sociological
dimension notwithstanding - presuppose some form of equivalence be-
tween the source text and the target text. This is fine as long as we are
solely interested in the text and we are content that the target text, as a
30 Technical Translation

reflection of the source text, is an end in itself. But if we are interested in the
communicative value of a translation and what people do with texts (see
Robinson 2003:142), equivalence-based theories have difficulty in account-
ing for the changes, alterations, additions and omissions etc. which are
needed in professional translation projects. Koller (1995:196) acknowledges
this when he talks about the “contradictory and scarcely reconcilable lin-
guistic-textual and extra-linguistic factors and conditions”.
Source-based approaches also fail to take into account the fact that trans-
lations, once they have been “released into the wild”, so to speak, become
subject to the norms, standards and requirements of contemporary texts
originally produced in the target language. In other words, the translation is
no longer regarded by the target audience as a translation and instead is
measured against other target language texts. Rather than providing us with
a means of producing independent and autonomous target language texts,
equivalence, because of its need to maintain a close link between source
and target texts, provides us with texts that can only be evaluated on the
basis of a source text which the target audience will usually not know
about. Apart from this, if the target audience was in a position to compare
the translation with the source text, they would be unlikely to need a trans-
lation in the first place.
Problems also arise from the fact that the various typologies of equiva-
lence rarely provide any real guidance as to how we should go about actu-
ally translating texts. While equivalence typologies such as Komissarov’s
above are useful in highlighting the different levels of equivalence which
may be achieved by a translator, when it comes to the actual process of
translating they are difficult to implement because they do not specify
which type of equivalence could or should be used under which circum-
stances. For instance, in the case of a user guide, should the translator strive
for denotational equivalence alone or denotational and textual equivalence?
As Fawcett (1997:62) says “it is only a little more helpful than the old trans-
lation adage ‘as literal as possible, as free as necessary”. Some source-based
approaches, do in fact, provide some form of prescriptive rules to be applied
during the translation process, for example Schveitser (1987). Though in-
teresting and enlightening, they are not particularly useful for practical ap-
plications because they are generally too cumbersome and numerous for
one person to remember and implement. In any case, in schemes such as
Schveitser’s which has some 55 rules, only a small proportion of the rules
will apply in any one translation job. The time spent by a translator trying
to decide which of these rules applies to the various parts of the text would
be better spent actually reading the text or researching parallel texts.
 Theory in Technical Translation 31

Functionalism

Unfortunately for the professional translator, the categories, levels and clas-
sifications of equivalence described above, while helping us to pick through
a translation to see how it ticks, do not really help with the actual process of
translation.
In an attempt to escape the restrictive and often limited approaches to
translation based on theories of equivalence, translation theorists such as
Reiss (1971) and House (1981) changed the focus from being entirely
source-based to include some aspects of the target text. To be precise, their
attention centred on the function of the target text. Such an approach
moves away from the bottom-up linguistic approaches of equivalence-based
theories and instead involves pragmatic and situational aspects of the transla-
tion process. This is indeed an improvement in that it goes at least some
way towards acknowledging the fact that texts are written and translated for
a reason. However, functionalist based theories do not entirely forsake the
source text. Rather they are a hybrid approach which considers both the
source and the target texts.
Nevertheless, functionalism as a general ideology based on extralinguis-
tic, pragmatic and communicative factors of translation is nothing new.
Even in 1964, Nida’s notion of dynamic equivalence called for the repro-
duction of the effect (or function) of the source text in the target text
through equivalence of extralinguistic communicative effect. This was al-
ready hinting at functionalism as we later came to know it.
In 1971, Reiss included the element of text function in her model of
translation criticism. While Reiss’ work is often regarded as highly conser-
vative and dated, it did mark a turning point in the way scholars looked at
translation, particularly in Germany. Her model, while being overwhelm-
ingly equivalence-based, also includes the functional relationship between
the source and target texts. According to Reiss, the ideal translation is one
where optimum equivalence is achieved as regards the conceptual content,
linguistic form and communicative function. This essentially means that,
taking into account the linguistic and situational context, the linguistic and
stylistic factors as well as the author’s intentions (even though this in itself is
a persistent source of debate), the target text should have the same “value”
as the source text. One of the problems, however, with this approach to
the function of translations is that it cannot deal with instances of translation
where the function of the target text is different to that of the source. To
circumvent this problem, Reiss defines such instances as “Übertragungen”
(1971:105) or transfers. Thus, translations where the function changes are
not, she maintains, ‘real’ translations, but rather adaptations.
32 Technical Translation

House (1981) also adopts a functionalist approach and states that it is

“undeniably true that a translation should produce equivalent responses”
(1981:9) and it is on this basis that she maintains that the ultimate goal of a
translation is to achieve the same function in the target text as that in the
source text. She defines two types of translation: covert and overt. A covert
translation is one where the text function is preserved and the reader is not
aware that the text is a translation. An overt translation, on the other hand,
does not maintain the text function of the original and the readers are
somehow aware that it is a translation and not the original language text. In
order to determine whether functional equivalence has been achieved,
Houses proposes that the source text be analysed first so that the target text
can be compared against it.
Like Reiss, this approach escapes the restrictive, purely linguistic criteria
of traditional equivalence-based models by including certain pragmatic and
extralinguistic factors but they both fail to take into instances where it is ei-
ther not always possible or not desirable to maintain the same function in
both texts (cf. Kade 1977:33; Nord 1997:9) to accommodate audience ex-
pectations for the text genre (cf. Gerzymisch-Arbogast 1993:33-34). A
prime example of this comes in the analysis of a tourist brochure by House
(1981:118ff). House criticises the translator for not preserving the apparent
flattery provided by the German text’s lack of explanation for certain cul-
turally-specific items. She regards this, not so much as an error, but more as
proof that the translation was not really a translation, but rather an adapta-
tion. Gutt (1991:50) asks the question of what happens if flattery is not so-
cially acceptable in the target culture. Can the translation really be criticised
for conforming to the social norms and customs of the target audience? Af-
ter all, preserving individual functions within a translation may ultimately
make the translation as a whole functionally non-equivalent. It could be ar-
gued that purposely changing the function in the target text is actually an
important way of hiding any clues as to the text’s true origins in the source
language, something which is central to the notion of a covert translation.
According to House texts where the function is not maintained are overt
(1977:194) and not real translations because they draw attention to the fact
that they are translations. Reiss claims that a target text where the function
of the source text is not maintained is a transfer and dismisses them as
something other than “real” translations. So for instance, if a German user
guide is intended to instruct while an English user guide is intended to ex-
plain, a translation between these two languages will not be a translation
but rather an adaptation, even though the target text can be regarded as a
translation in every other sense.
 Theory in Technical Translation 33

What is more - as is the case with traditional equivalence-based ap-

proaches - any attempt at translation based on this approach is constrained
by the need to define the target text in terms of how closely it reflects the
source text on a variety of levels. This is problematic in that the target text
is not regarded as an independent, autonomous text - and this is how trans-
lations are regarded by the target audience, at least in a professional context.
Since Reiss’s model, for example, focuses on the linguistic means the source
language uses to express text function, the wording of the source text be-
comes the yardstick for judging the appropriateness of the linguistic means
employed in the target text (Lauscher 2000:155). But because text function
is expressed using different linguistic means or writing strategies in different
languages, reflecting the source text linguistic features will result in unusual
and possibly unacceptable target texts.
There are other problems with this type of approach, however. Nord
(1991:23) argues that the function of the target text cannot be “arrived at
automatically from an analysis of the source text”. Instead, it needs to be
defined pragmatically by the purpose of the intercultural communication.
Fawcett (1997:107) maintains that there is no need to link text function and
translation strategy. He maintains that just because it is possible to identify
the function of a text, there is no “logical or translation-scientific impera-
tive” on a translator to shape and govern translation decisions on the basis
of the function. Besides, if technical texts are translated with a specific
communicative situation in mind, surely this situation should form an inte-
gral part of the translation process and define the end result. In any case, us-
ing the source text as the sole means for determining the function of the
source text and subsequently the target text is a risky business. This is pri-
marily because such an approach presupposes a uniformity of skill and care
on the part of the original author in the way the text is written (thereby
encoding the text function within it) which is impossible to quantify or
achieve.
Technical translators also encounter the problem that it is not always ap-
parent from the text what type of text it is, let alone what the actual pur-
pose is. This can be for a variety of reasons: the text sent to the translator
may be pre-translated or tagged using a translation memory (TM) tool and
the visual clues indicating text type may be missing making the linguistic
clues more difficult to spot; or web pages may be cut and pasted into a
word processor file. In other cases, the file to be translated may be designed
to serve as the source document for a single-source multi-channel publish-
ing system where the same text is used to provide content for a range of
texts such as manuals, advertising materials, newsletters, technical documen-
tation, web pages, presentations, etc. In such cases, the translator cannot
34 Technical Translation

possibly know what the ultimate function of the translated text will be
unless some form of extratextual information is available.

Target-Orientated Approaches to Translation

Toury (1995:26) in his work Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond

puts forward the notion that the position and function of translations “are
determined first and foremost by considerations originating in the culture
which hosts them”. Toury regards translations as “facts of target cultures”
and in his discussion of traditional methods of examining texts he mentions
the fact that they “were primarily concerned with the source text and with
its inviolable ‘sanctity” whereby target text factors “while never totally ig-
nored, often counted as subsidiary especially those which would not fall
within linguistics of any kind” (Toury 1995:24). Here we see a shift in
emphasis away from the source-orientated treatment of translations and to-
wards the treatment of translations as autonomous, independently function-
ing target language texts. And this is precisely how the translations are
generally viewed by readers.
The following paragraphs deal with approaches to translation which do
not depend on the supremacy of the source text. In other words, theories
which acknowledge the importance of the target text in the translation
process.

Relevance
Gutt (1991:22) stresses that translation should be approached from a com-
municative point of view rather than any other, for instance, a theory of
translation. Basing his relevance theory on work by Sperber and Wilson
(1986), Gutt proceeds from the notion that the key to human communica-
tion is our ability to draw inferences from people’s behaviour, be it verbal
or non-verbal. Thus, what is said (or written) provides, within the context
of relevance theory, the stimulus from which the recipient can infer what
the sender means. This is referred to as the informative intention.
Breaking the communicative process down into steps, Gutt maintains
that utterances are firstly decoded and, on the basis of their linguistic prop-
erties, are assigned to meanings or things they represent. This is similar to
de Saussure’s notion of signifiant and signifié or aliquid statt pro aliquo
[something stands for something else] (Linke et al. 1994:18, 30). Thus,
these representations are referred to as semantic representations and they re-
fer to the mental representations which are essentially the output of the
 Theory in Technical Translation 35

mind’s “language module5” (1991:24). He continues to say that these se-

mantic representations are assumption schemas which need to be processed
in order to become truth-conditional and to have a propositional form. In
other words, out of all of the possible meanings or representations associ-
ated with an utterance, the brain must select what is in fact feasible, likely
or credible within the particular context of the utterance. Indeed, it is the
very notion of context which helps, according to Gutt, to explain the fact
that while linguistic expressions do, in fact, have a meaning, it is not neces-
sarily the same as that conveyed by the expression at a particular time and
place (1991:25).
Gutt regards context as a psychological concept which, in contrast to
common definitions, does not refer “to some part of the external environ-
ment of the communicative partners, be it the text preceding or following
an utterance, situational circumstances, cultural factors etc., it rather refers
to part of their ‘assumptions about the world’ or cognitive environment”
(1991:25). Cognitive environment does not exclude the various external
factors but rather includes them along with information they provide and its
“mental availability for the interpretation process” (ibid.).
But we find ourselves asking the question of how readers select the cor-
rect assumptions and meanings as intended by the sender, or author. This is
indeed essential for communicative success. Gutt asserts that communica-
tion is governed by a desire to “optimise resources”. In other words, read-
ers want to gain as much information with as little expenditure of resources
as possible. This means that meaning and understanding will always take the
path of least resistance, and readers will start processing information using
those contextual assumptions which are most accessible to them. He goes
on to say that “[a translation] should be expressed in such a manner that it
yields the intended interpretation without putting the audience to unneces-
sary processing effort” (1991:101-102). Relevance theory might well re-
quire us to build in certain contextual clues for a reader to fully and cor-
rectly understand a text. This modification and addition of information
in the text brings us towards the notion of interlingual technical writing
mentioned elsewhere.

5 This notion of a language module is presumably made for the sake of conven-
ience. Although we can associate language skills with certain parts of the
brain - usually in the left hemisphere (Eysenck 2000:79; Kalat 2004:441) - there
is no specific “language module” to speak of in the human cognitive system;
language is regulated by a range of processes and functions throughout the
cognitive system.
36 Technical Translation

Thus, the assumptions and information which allow the reader to under-
stand the communicative intent must be easily accessible to the reader. Of
course, when applied to the text we can deduce that this information can
be composed of both contextual information in the form of knowledge of
the world and also information presented in the text itself. Gutt says that in-
formation obtained through perception is generally given more importance
than information based on inference and so it gives the translator greater
flexibility to ensure that the first interpretation of the utterance which the
reader arrives at is the correct one as intended by the sender. And perhaps
equally as importantly, particularly in the case of communicative texts and
manuals to ensure that the effort involved in obtaining the meaning or con-
textual effects is justified (1991:30-31). So, the responsibility ultimately falls
to the translator to decide how best to achieve this to ensure that the con-
textual effects are “adequate to the occasion in a way the speaker could
have foreseen” (1991:31). Such a notion of target audience expectations is
similar to assertions by Pinchuck (1977) who claims that elements in texts
provide “triggers” for readers to allow them to anticipate what is to follow
next. Indeed, Gutt states this even more explicitly when he says “introduc-
tory words would guide the hearer in searching his memory for the in-
tended referent and hence considerably ease his processing load” (1991:33).
Similarly, Gerzymisch-Arbogast (1993) states that information must be pre-
sented in varying amounts of given and new information - relative to what
the author perceives the audience to already know - in order to achieve the
appropriate register and flow of information.
Hönig (1997), however, levels the criticism at relevance theory that it
fails to take into account precisely what readers regard as a good or bad
translation, only what they regard as relevant. It is indeed a sound point in
that we do need to take into account what readers regard as good and bad.
It would be conceivable to determine what readers regard as good or bad
texts either from empirical studies involving reader reactions or usability
studies or to analyse a broad range of style guides relating to the text type in
question.
Relevance theory does provide compelling support for taking the cogni-
tive abilities of readers into account to improve translation but Gutt’s opin-
ions regarding what does and does not constitute a translation is quite prob-
lematic for technical translation particularly with regard to interpretative
and descriptive translations.
At the heart of relevance theory is Gutt’s distinction between interpre-
tive and descriptive language use and it is this distinction which is most
relevant in terms of technical translation. Interpretive language use, accord-
ing to Gutt, refers to an utterance which is intended to represent what
 Theory in Technical Translation 37

someone else thinks or says. In the context of translation, an interpretive

translation is one which has some form of link or relationship with the
source text. Descriptive language use, on the other hand, is intended to be
an accurate representation of what the writer or speaker believes to be true.
In the context of translation, a descriptive translation is intended to function
as an independent and autonomous target language text whose readers will
not be aware of the existence of a source text.
According to Gutt, only an interpretive translation is a “real” translation.
A descriptive translation, he claims, cannot be regarded as a true translation
because a translation only achieves relevance by communicating effectively
AND by standing in for the original text. While Gutt maintains that a
translation must share at least some link with the source text, the notion
that a text which can survive on its own and which is undetectable as a
translation cannot be regarded as a true translation is difficult to reconcile
with the reality of translation.
We could argue that a descriptive translation mimics the production of
an original text but it is still a translation albeit one that could have been
achieved using very different means. Gutt’s assertion that only interpretive
translations are true translations seems to contradict the communicative ori-
entation of his theory if translation is a communicative act, then the transla-
tion should do the same as a standard text or communicative act, i.e. con-
vey information in order to affect a change in behaviour, attitude or
knowledge of the receiver (cf. Gommlich 1993:177-178).
He does try to clarify interpretive use by making two sub-categories: di-
rect and indirect translation. Almost as if he realised that the existing cate-
gories of descriptive and interpretive would effectively eliminate translations
whose function was to blend seamlessly into the target language landscape,
he says that indirect translation allows the translator to “elaborate or sum-
marize” (Gutt 1991:122) in order to communicate as clearly as possible
rather than “give the receptor language audience access to the authentic
meaning of the original” (Gutt 1991:177). This certainly bears a remarkable
similarity to the aims, factors and features involved in a descriptive transla-
tion.
Gutt claims that if a translator aims to produce a translation that can stand
alone as a target language text using whatever means necessary, then it is
not a “real” translation but rather an “adaptation”, in principle this might
be true but there is a problem with it insofar as technical translation is con-
cerned. Some texts require more work than others. For example, a techni-
cal specification or description of a process will require less work than a
user guide or technical brochure. So while the technical specification or
38 Technical Translation

brochure are intended to serve as freestanding original texts, they cannot be

regarded as anything but adaptations because there has been no “adapta-
tion” beyond that which is necessary to ensure compliance with target lan-
guage norms, requirements and conventions.
On the other hand, a user guide which needs to be modified in a num-
ber of ways, e.g. register, tenor, cognitive suitability, legal compliance etc.
can only be regarded as an adaptation. Here the ST has been used as the ba-
sis for producing an original target language text. The problem is that most
people would argue that the user guide is still a translation and not an adap-
tation. Perhaps the problem is really one of scales. If there are huge
amounts of adaptation, omission and addition then it becomes an adapta-
tion. What we are then left with is the problem of how much is too much?
Nevertheless, despite the confusing approach to what does and does not
constitute a “real” translation, relevance theory does provide some useful
insights into technical translation:
• a communicative approach which concentrates on the needs and expec-
tations of the target audience
• the minimax principle which, put simply, states that people do not want
to spend more time and effort than is absolutely necessary in order to re-
trieve information from a text; this is especially true for technical texts
such as user guides.

Skopos Theory

Skopos theory is linked with the functionalist approach to translation but

differs fundamentally in that where functionalist approaches such as Reiss’s
(1971) and House’s (1981) maintain that the function of the target must be
the same as the original, Skopos theory recognises that this is not always
practical or desirable. According to Vermeer, the methods and strategies
used to produce a translation are determined by the intended purpose of the
target text (Vermeer 1978:100). Unlike equivalence-based theories where
the source text and its effect on the source language audience or even the
function attributed to it by the author determine the translation, Skopos
theory holds that the prospective function or Skopos of the TT as deter-
mined by the initiator (the person who initiates the translation process, i.e.
the client) and the translator. As such, the Skopos is determined by the
initiator / customer, their view of the target audience along with the situ-
ational and cultural background. Skopos theory states “that one must trans-
late consciously and consistently, in accordance with some principle
 Theory in Technical Translation 39

respecting the target text. The theory does not state what the principle is:
this must be decided separately in each specific case” (Vermeer 1989:182).
In conjunction with this top-level rule are the supplementary general rules
of coherence and fidelity.
According to Nord (1997), the coherence rule maintains that the target
text should be sufficiently coherent in order for the reader to comprehend
it. Essentially, this rule requires that the TT fulfils the basic requirements for
any text written in that language. The fidelity rule is less perspicuous in that
it requires that there be some sort of relationship between the ST and TT
once the Skopos and coherence rules have been satisfied.
Unlike traditional functionalist theories such as that put forward by
House (1981) which focus on the pragmatic aspects of the translation act
but where the source and target texts have the same function, Skopos the-
ory acknowledges equivalence of function as just one of many possible
Skopoi of a translation. The reason for this is that there are numerous situa-
tions and circumstances where a translation needs to be produced. As such,
the situational environment of the translation process determines the
Skopos as does the text receiver. Thus the Skopos of the source text and
the target text may be different because of the needs of the two audiences
by virtue of the fact that they belong to two different social and linguistic
realities. Cases where the function stays the same are referred to by Reiss &
Vermeer (1991:45) as Funktionskonstanz (unchanged function); cases
where it changes are referred to as Funktionsänderung (changed function).
Kade (1977:33) also makes this distinction, referring to the fact that the
function of the translation does not have to be the same as that of
the source text, he defines equivalent translation as that which retains the
communicative function of the source text and heterovalent translation as
that which involves a reworking of the content and where the target text
takes on a different function to that of the original. Nord (1997:9) also rec-
ognises this fact when she states that we do not arrive at the function of the
target text from an analysis of the source text but rather from a pragmatic
analysis of the purpose of the communicative act. Referring back to Skopos
theory, she maintains that functional equivalence (the source and target
texts having the same function) is not the “normal” Skopos of a translation
but only one of a number of potential Skopoi and one in which a value of
zero is assigned to the “change of functions” factor (1991:23).
First and foremost, however, the Skopos of the translation must be for-
malised and clearly set out before the translator can actually start work. The
process of defining the Skopos of a translation is included in what is called
the translation brief (Vermeer 1989, Kussmaul 1995 and Nord 1997). We
can look at the translation brief as a form of project specification which sets
40 Technical Translation

out the requirements for the service / product to be provided. Ideally, such
a brief would be quite specific about the intended function of the transla-
tion, the target audience, the time, place and medium as well as purpose.
The problem with this concept is that the client who initiates a translation
is rarely a language professional and usually has no specialised linguistic
knowledge. Many clients have no interest whatsoever in the “mechanics”
of the translation process and may even regard such information as the re-
sponsibility of the translator.
Here the translator needs to function much like an architect who dis-
cusses a building project with an ordinary, lay customer. The customer
comes to the architect with an idea for a house and the architect advises
what is and is not possible within the constraints of physics, materials sci-
ence and building regulations. Having established what the customer wants,
the architect then decides how to design and build the house and what ma-
terials will be used. The customer will not specify which structural materials
will be used but may specify cosmetic materials like tiles, glass, doors, balus-
trades etc. This distinction is equivalent to the translator looking after trans-
lation strategies and linguistic matters and the customer specifying such
things as style, terminology or general audience. In both cases, the customer
specifies the objective and the expert (in our case the translator) decides
how best to achieve that. Thus, the Skopos is not a random or accidental
occurrence - it is specific to a particular constellation of factors relating to
situation, purpose, requirements etc.
In defining translation as the production “of a text in a target setting for a
target purpose and target addressees in target circumstances”, Vermeer
(1987a:29) presents the view that the target text is the foremost concern in
translation acts. The source text, through its noticeable absence from the
above definition, is of lesser importance here than in equivalence-based
theories of translation discussed earlier. Indeed, Vermeer refers to the
source text as an offer of information or Informationsangebot which is then
turned, either wholly or partly, into an offer of information for the target
audience (Vermeer 1982). Nord says of this offer of information that

…any receiver (among them, the translator) chooses the items they re-
gard as interesting, useful or adequate to the desired purposes. In transla-
tion, the chosen informational items are then transferred to the target
culture... (1997:25-6)

It can even be argued that the source text merely represents the “raw
materials” (Vermeer 1987b:541) for the translator in the production of a
 Theory in Technical Translation 41

target language text. Vermeer (1982) discusses the concept of Information-

sangebot so that each of the countless potential receivers can select the rele-
vant or interesting information from the text. As technical translators, our
job is to ensure that this information is as easy to find select and assimilate as
possible. This is quite similar to Gutt’s relevance theory and the notion of
usability engineering in texts which is discussed in Chapter 4. Rather than
leaving the choice of which information to select completely to the reader,
we can foreground information and make it more likely to be selected by
readers.
A similar sentiment was expressed by Pinchuck (1977:215) several years
previously when he said that “a text will normally contain more informa-
tion than is needed”. He goes on to say that not all of the information in a
text is of equal value (1977:220). This is indeed fascinating as it signifies a
break from traditional doctrine that all of the information in a text is essen-
tial. Thus we can, perhaps, on this basis justify the elimination or omission
of information which is “unnecessary”, irrelevant or unhelpful in relation to
the communicative act. Drawing from this notion of redundancy, Pinchuck
formulates more criteria for assessing the effectiveness or adequacy of a
translation, namely the excess, deficiency or appropriateness of redundancy
in a text. Claiming that different languages may adopt more formal styles
than others, Pinchuck states that German, for example, is more given to
adopting a more formal tone than English. As a result, the level of abstrac-
tion may also be higher in German than in English. This will inevitably re-
sult in the need for greater explicitation and redundancy in an English
translation, for example by referring to the product specifically, repeating
information to make the text more cohesive or to reinforce a certain point
etc.

Loyalty to the Source Text

Unless the translator is told otherwise, the text type of the translation will
be the same as the source text. To use Vermeer’s example (1989:183), it is
safe to assume that a scientific article on astronomy will be translated as such
in the target language. This might seem to contradict the claim made else-
where that consistency of function is not the normal Skopos of a translation
but it is not the case. The function of a given text type in one language
might be different to a greater or lesser degree in another. So while the
purpose of the text might stay the same (i.e. the astronomy article stays an
astronomy article), the function of the text, e.g. to entertain and educate or
educate and provoke, may need to change depending on the culturally or
text specific conventions in the target language. This is what Nord regards
as a “conventional” assignment (1997:31). But in order to do this, it is
42 Technical Translation

necessary to decide on various strategies, e.g. word-for-word, transposition,

calquing, modulation etc.
Nord refers to the difficulty in speaking of a single, definitive text,
instead claiming that the selectability of information presented in the Infor-
mationsangebot means that there are, in theory, multiple “texts” and multi-
ple meanings and interpretations. Similarly, there are multiple situations in
which the information could be used. Nord sums this up by saying that “a
‘text’ is as many texts as there are receivers” (1997:31). Hatim (2001:76)
describes this as a text’s “plurality of meaning”.
With this potential for different interpretations and situations, translators
need to ensure that the target text will at the very least be meaningful for
the intended receivers and that it will make sense in the particular commu-
nicative situation and culture. Only if the text makes sense in the receiver’s
situation will the translation be regarded as successful. For this reason, Ver-
meer introduces what he calls the coherence rule which states that a transla-
tion must be coherent with the receivers’ situation or that it should be part
of the receivers’ situation (Reiss and Vermeer 1984:113). This is defined as
intratextual coherence and is one of the two basic types of “conceptual
connectivity” central to Skopos theory (Hatim 2001:76).
This rule firmly places the emphasis on the target text and its audience.
However, because a translation is an offer of information based upon a pre-
vious offer of information, there has to be at least some relationship be-
tween the source text and the target text lest there are criticisms that the
translation is not a translation but rather some abstract form of adaptation
(Nord 1997:32). Vermeer calls this intertextual coherence or fidelity. The
form taken by intertextual coherence, however, depends both on the
Skopos and the translator’s interpretation of the source text (Nord
1997:32). Subordinate to the intratextual rule, the fidelity rule can take
form ranging from an extremely faithful rendering of the source text or a
loose rendering.
Nord (1997:125) introduces the notion of “function plus loyalty” to
Skopos theory. This she defines as a bilateral commitment on the part of
the translator to both source and target sides of the translational interaction.
She stresses that it is not the same as fidelity or faithfulness which is associ-
ated with texts. Rather, loyalty is a relationship between people. It is the
translator’s responsibility to provide readers with what they expect of a
translation (i.e., literal, word-for-word, free, readable). It also requires
the translator to convey the author’s intentions as regards the communicative
interaction.
 Theory in Technical Translation 43

It is important to note that this is an improvement on the notion that the

author’s intentions are evident from what the author has actually written
because this presupposes consistent and uniformly competent authors,
something which is impossible to gauge in the real world. However, Ver-
meer himself expressed concerns in 1996 at the inclusion of the loyalty rule
as it represented a social and subjective criterion which damaged the appli-
cability and reliability of his general theory.

The Applicability of Skopos Theory to Technical Translation

There are claims that Skopos theory produces “mercenary” translators who
are, in effect, only interested in pleasing their paymasters (Pym 1996:338).
This is untrue for a number of reasons. The “dogma” referred to by New-
mark (1990:105) simply does not exist. Also, Nord (1997:118-119) main-
tains that translators are only mercenaries when they do not use their own
judgement as language professionals to argue for doing something a particu-
lar way.
It can also be argued that Skopos promotes or even depends on adapta-
tion and as such cannot really be regarded as translation. This is not, strictly
speaking, true. Granted, in some rather extreme cases there may be several
quite drastic modifications needed in order to ensure that a translation fulfils
its Skopos and meets the needs of the addressees/users, but in the vast ma-
jority of cases (at least in my experience as a professional technical transla-
tor), there is only rarely a need for wholesale modification or rewriting to
the extent that the translation has only the most vague link with the origi-
nal text.
This is precisely why Nord (1997:125) introduces the notion of “func-
tion plus loyalty” to Skopos theory mentioned above. This is intended to
ensure that even though there may be significant differences between the
source and target texts, the needs of the key stakeholders are met.
The fact that Skopos theory states translations must be produced “in ac-
cordance with some principle respecting the target text” (Vermeer 1989:
182) which must be decided separately in the translation brief for each spe-
cific case could be regarded as something of a shortcoming of Skopos the-
ory. The reason being that it introduces an element of subjectivity into the
process and is not always repeatable. However, this is not unique to Skopos
theory and is inherent to many other approaches to translation. Conse-
quently, this has to remain a necessary confound in the equation.
44 Technical Translation

Conclusions

There are numerous translation strategies available to translators such as

modification, transposition, paraphrasing, literal translation, calquing etc. All
of these strategies are essential at various times when dealing with various
different texts. The problem facing us as translators is that depending on
which theory of translation we subscribe to, one or more of these strategies
may be prohibited, or at best, inconsistent with the spirit of the particular
theory. Indeed, these strategies are so different in terms of their effects that
it seems impossible that they could be comfortably incorporated within a
single “theory”. For example, the more formal linguistic approaches might
have difficulties in permitting the use of paraphrasing, primarily because
they do not regard paraphrases as “real” translations. With approaches based
on formal equivalence at its most conservative, anything other than word-
for-word translation would be unacceptable. Similarly, it is conceivable that
if we rigorously pursue the goal of dynamic equivalence as described by
Nida, we would be prevented from using calques or introducing loan-
words. Yet as translators, we use virtually all of these strategies at various
stages, sometimes even within a single project, text or paragraph. And this
seems to be part of the problem with much of the literature on translation,
namely that a translator can have one overall aim for the translation, for ex-
ample a target-orientated translation, but still use approaches and strategies
ranging from literal translation to radical paraphrasing, addition and omis-
sion without compromising the communicative purpose of the translation
process.
The idea that no one theory of translation, e.g. free, literal, formal, dy-
namic etc., can completely explain technical translation is borne out by
Skopos theory. Nord (1997:29) explains that the Skopos of a particular
translation project might require either “a free or a faithful translation, or
anything in between... depending on the purpose of the translation”. In-
deed, within a given text, we may need to switch frequently between literal
and free translation for individual phrases, sentences or paragraphs.
It would seem, then, that the easiest way of maintaining all of the tools
and strategies in the translator’s repertoire is to adopt a communicative ap-
proach to translation like that proposed by Gutt but without the ambiguity
as to constitutes a translation. After all, texts are written to communicate in-
formation and translations are no exception. Thus, Skopos theory would
seem to provide a more flexible framework which ensures that the strategies
and techniques of translation can be used legitimately wherever the transla-
tor deems it to be appropriate. We simply select the appropriate strategies
 Conclusions 45

depending on the Skopos for the project and the text. As Nord maintains,
“the translation purpose justifies the translation procedures” (1997:124).
This is not without its problems, however, particularly as translators are
left to make decisions which can be regarded as, at best, reasoned but ad
hoc, or at worst, subjective. But this problem is inherent to all theoretical
approaches to translation and is not unique to Skopos theory. However, it
is my view that Skopos theory is the only approach that truly acknowledges
the professional reality of translating and the demands, expectations and
obligations of translators.
To conclude this chapter, it is worth restating some of the more impor-
tant areas that need to be considered when translating technical texts:
1. we need to concentrate on the needs of the target audience this is who
the translation is produced for and these are the judges of whether a
translation is actually good or not;
2. we need to understand what it is the target audience needs and wants;
3. we need to understand how technical communication works in the tar-
get language if we are to produce independent. autonomous texts that
can “compete” with other texts produced in that language;
4. we need to remember that it is necessary to add, change or remove in-
formation as part of the translation process in order to achieve effective
communication via a technical text.

In the following chapter we will look more closely at the field of techni-
cal communication and in particular at the nature of user guides. Only by
examining and understanding the circumstances under which such docu-
ments are produced and the environment in which they are used can be
begin to understand what it is a technical translator needs to achieve in or-
der to make translations function as originals.
17 Introduction to the linguistics of scientific
language

§1 Above (chap. 4), linguistic prerequisites for a language of science were pos-
tulated. Its vocabulary should, it was suggested, (i) have a well-defined termi-
nology, (ii) be unambiguous for specialists, and (iii) display extendability/flex-
ibility, and its syntax should demonstrate (iv) perspicuity and (v) evidentiality,
such as nuances of certainty. In general, the syntactic structures available in a
language of science should represent the topic under consideration ade-
quately, for instance by representing clearly the kinds of relations between the
objects studied by the science in question. Structure words (conjunctions, pre-
positions, particles, the article) are especially important for achieving this. In
general, we might ask whether the parts of speech follow different distribu-
tions in technical scientific Latin than in other registers. How did their use
change diachronically in Latin? How do they compare to other languages of
science?
This introductory chapter will review some findings from the study of modern
scientific language; especially for English and German, quite a lot of work has
been done in the preceding decades. These insights will then serve as a point of
departure for studying scientific Latin. We would expect to find some similarities,
or at least a general trend converging toward contemporary practices, between
these Latin results and those for modern scientific English and German. Differ-
ences in vocabulary and syntax, especially parts of speech, in scientific German
and English are reviewed first.

Vocabulary
§2 According to Gerr (1942), the evolution of a language of science consists of
three elements: (i) increasing size and complexity of vocabulary, (ii) rationali-
sation of the vocabulary through multiplication of functional and operational
terms, and (iii) general rationalisation, that is, the progressive reduction of syn-
tactic complexity to the absolute minimum. Point (iii), however, may only ap-
ply to the contemporary English of the natural sciences and may not be typical
at all. Special vocabulary, point (i), is certainly the most conspicuous charac-
teristic of scientific language in general. Indeed, technical languages or lan-
guages for special purposes (Fachsprachen) have hitherto mainly been studied
in terms of specialised vocabulary, which, in turn, is often claimed to consist

Open Access. © 2021 Philipp Roelli, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
[Link]
390 17 Introduction to the linguistics of scientific language

especially of nouns.1 ‘Langues techniques’ were described by Vendryes (1921:

294–295) as:

Les langues techniques sont dues à la nécessité de désigner des objets ou des notions qui
n’ont pas de nom dans l’usage courant; mais elles répondent aussi au besoin de désigner
‘scientifiquement’, c’est à dire par un terme plus précis, excluant toute équivoque, des objets
que désigne fort bien la langue ordinaire.
‘Technical languages arise due to the need to designate objects or notions which do not have
a name in everyday use; but they also respond to the need to designate “scientifically”, i.e.
by a more precise term, excluding any ambiguity, objects which are already designated in
ordinary language.’

He then compares technical languages to argot, jargon, and cant. These varieties
of language have in common the fact that they are most distinctive in their techni-
cal vocabulary. Langslow defines technical terminology thus (2000a: 25):

A referring expression which is recognized and used in a standard conventional way by the
relevant community of specialists and which unambiguously (and often uniquely) names an
object or a concept of the discipline, and therefore, because of this attachment, tends itself
to absolute synonymy and total translation.

We have already pointed out (chap. 16 §4) that such total translation is in general
illusionary: it works only if the two languages in question share a scientific ap-
proach and a Begriffsgemeinschaft. If one is dealing with less ‘abstract’ topics, as
Langslow does in medicine, it may be enough to merely label a sensibly percepti-
ble ‘object’ shown by ostension and apply a name (a bone, medicinal plant, dis-
ease, etc.), or to define a translation for such a label from another technical
language (in the case of Antiquity, Greek). This makes the use of technical voca-
bulary in medicine, for instance, much more straightforward than in more ab-
stract sciences such as physics or even more ‘philosophical’ fields such as logic or
linguistics. Here, complex thoughts and often new not sensibly perceptible items
are met and stand in need of words that make sense only within the system of
thinking (Fleck’s Denkstil). Some examples: ‘work’, ‘force-field’, ‘significant er-
ror’, ‘metabolism’, and so on. If a science is strongly formalised, especially math-
ematically, which becomes common for some sciences only after the Scientific Re-
volution, this becomes much easier (e.g. work: W = ∫ F ds). This explains why
‘total translation’, as demanded by Langslow, was, in fact, not at all trivial. For in-
stance, the first mediaeval translators of Aristotle’s Physica and Metaphysica had
to deal with a very difficult task.

1 e.g. Langslow (2000a: 6–7).

 Vocabulary 391

In general, there seem to be two phases in the development of the terminol-

ogy of a scientific branch: a groping in a new field, accumulating facts, then a
cleaning-up of terminology once a certain standard approach and understanding
have been gained. Sager, Dungworth & McDonald put it thus: ‘only when a suffi-
ciently large body of knowledge has been accumulated, can an attempt be made
to order it systematically and to reflect this ordering in regular patterns of desig-
nation’ (1980: 239). In medicine and biology, this led to the contemporary quasi-
artificial language based on Greek and Latin; in chemistry, a special body (IUPAC)
defines rules for naming chemical compounds. But completely new substances,
such as toluene, are still named arbitrarily.2 Further examples are mentioned be-
low (chap. 21 §5).
Sager, Dungworth & McDonald (1980: 242) found that scientific vocabulary
consists of (i) general language words (‘note, observe, prove’), (ii) general lan-
guage words used specifically with some restriction or modification of meaning
(‘segregate, precipitate, current’), and (iii) specialist terms usually only used by
specialists (‘to age a dye, conversational device’). Such specialised terms can gen-
erally be formed by three methods (245): (i) creation within the language (suffixes,
compounds, …), (ii) extension of meaning, and (iii) borrowing from outside. In
comparison to other Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, or Ger-
man, compounding is less common in Classical Latin – it is even quite con-
sciously avoided – but suffixation does play an important rôle both in scholastic
Latin and in English, in fact with many suffixes from the former in the latter (‘‑ise’,
‘‑ous’, ‘‑ent’, ‘‑al’, ‘‑ic’, ‘‑ation’, …).3 English does use the equivalents of com-
pounds quite freely, but they tend to be considered noun phrases as they are
rarely written as a single word. They can get nearly as long as in German in scien-
tific English, for instance ‘fluid power transmission system’ (273).4
Some examples of scientific neologisms illustrate several ways in which they
can be formed in English (281): by combinations of Greek or Latin word elements
(such as ‘dictaphone’), Latin or Greek stems (such as ‘cusp’, ‘apex’), blending,
compression of existing terms (such as ‘transceiver’ < ‘transmitter’ + ‘receiver’),
eponyms (such as ‘Mach number’), and use of letters (often Greek, such as ‘gam-
ma ray’); absolute invention, however, is rare (such as ‘byte’, ‘paraffin’). Below
(chap. 21), we will study examples from medicine of the formation of Latin scien-
tific vocabulary. Sager, Dungworth & McDonald (chap. 9)5 also provide numbers

2 Although toluene could be called methyl benzene, and benzene itself [6]annulene, but termi-
nology becomes too long like this and is avoided.
3 Sager, Dungworth & McDonald (1980: 298–300) offer a list of English scientific suffixes.
4 On English compounds, see Marchand (1969).
5 This standard work will provide us with figures for many parameters below.
392 17 Introduction to the linguistics of scientific language

showing how far technical terminology can be developed. For instance, in 1980
there were more than 4 million names in organic chemistry. Although many con-
stituents of them stem from Latin- and Greek-based words or parts of words, this
special vocabulary has its own complex rules of derivation, enabling chemists to
understand most of these artificial words without having heard them before. For
instance, someone who knows ‘toluene’ will also understand ‘trinitrotoluene’.6

Syntax and parts of speech

§3 The distribution of parts of speech (PoS) in technical languages can differ sig-
nificantly from ordinary language.7 Below, it will be seen that this is also true for
scientific Latin. For English, Sager, Dungworth & McDonald (1980) provide some
numbers: nouns account for 28 % of words in general English, but 44 % in scienti-
fic English; on the other hand, adverbs seem to be less frequent (4 % vs 8 %; 234).
Conversely, a study by Alekssev (cited ibid.) also found verbs to be rarer (full
verbs 9.6 % vs 15.8 %, auxiliaries 6.9 % vs 11.9 %) when he compared the lan-
guage of electronics to ordinary telephone conversations. Articles were more com-
mon in scientific language (12.8 % vs 7 %). In contrast to Latin and Greek, English
(like Chinese) can very easily convert PoS (244), that is, use one word category for
another. But unlike Chinese, English also borrows very easily. All of this together
makes English quite unique among the major languages, and scientific English, a
mixture of constituents from many sources, even more so.
PoS distributions can also be telling regarding syntactic differences, espe-
cially the percentages of structure words, which will be studied for Latin below.
There is less literature about syntactic differences between ordinary and scientific
language than about vocabulary. Quite in general, specialised languages tend to
make use of already existing syntactic devices, although possibly fine-tuning
them and using them in different frequencies. Gross, Harmon & Reidy (2002:
230) summarise their study and describe scientific syntax as follows:

In the 20th century, we find the scientific article growing considerably more uniform across
national boundaries and scientific disciplines. Most striking of all, ‘scientific English’ has
become the international discourse of science, which involves not only a specific language
but also a suite of stylistic features: relatively short, syntactically simple sentences contain-
ing complex noun phrases with multiple modification, verbs in the passive voice, noun
strings, technical abbreviations, quantitative expressions and equations, and citational

6 Chinese characters are somewhat similar in this respect: sometimes it suffices to understand
their constituent parts to guess a character never seen before. Of course, in chemistry the system
is much more logically stringent.
7 For this section, see Sager, Dungworth & McDonald (1980: chap. 8).
 Syntax and parts of speech 393

traces. French and German scientific articles also conform to this basic style, with some var-
iations. For example, French and German scientific prose has resisted the noun string; each
of these languages employs several grammatical structures that avoid the passive voice yet
maintain an objective tone. Whatever the language or discipline, the style is streamlined to
focus the reader’s attention on the things of the laboratory and the natural world beyond the
printed page, rather than to draw attention to the text itself or its author.

Similarly, Gerbert (1970)8 already found that typical features of scientific English
syntax are ‘high density of nominal groups, usually heavily modified, a large
number of non-finite verb forms and extensive use of the passive’. On the other
hand, one is unlikely to encounter idioms (but not jargon), colloquialisms (such
as ‘isn’t’, ‘gonna’), or the personal pronoun ‘I’ (although ‘we’ is frequent; it may
be used for a group, a member of a society, anyone, the reader – ‘as we shall see
later’ – or the reader and the author; Sager, Dungworth & McDonald 1980: 226–
227). So the f i r s t p e r s o n s i n g u l a r is rarer than in most other types of writing.
Indeed, the third person is by far the most common one. Banks (2008: 197) finds
low numbers for the first person singular through the entire timespan of his study
(eighteenth to twentieth century) in English.
It would seem that the use of prepositions and conjunctions, which deter-
mine the relationship between words and clauses and which may be used to mod-
el those between processes and entities, is especially important in scientific writ-
ing.9 Declarative sentences are indeed frequent; logical connections between
thoughts are often expressed by conjunctions such as ‘consequently, hence, so,
therefore, thus’, ‘as a result of, because of, in view of, owing to’, and so on (Sager,
Dungworth & McDonald 1980: 186–202, here 190, 191). Sentences are often expli-
citly linked together by particles such as ‘such, this, these; consequently etc.; ad-
ditionally, in addition, besides, for example, for instance, furthermore, likewise,
moreover, similarly, then; conversely, however, nevertheless, otherwise; as fol-
lows, following, below, later’ (198–200). As science often deals with the relation
between things, p r e p o s i t i o n s are clearly also important. For prepositions, Pon-
celet (1957) tried to show that Greek’s richness was hard to reproduce in Latin,
especially in Classical Latin that of κατά (‘according to’) to express conformity (in
scholasticism, secundum was to take its function).10 Complex prepositions – those
consisting of several words, such as ‘in respect of’ – can usually be added to a lan-
guage’s repertoire easily. Gowers, Barrow-Green & Leader (2008a: 10–13) point

8 Quoted in Sager, Dungworth & McDonald (1980: 184–185).

9 In strongly inflecting languages, cases can take on such rôles as well; see, for Sanskrit, Jacobi
(1970).
10 Quoad can take similar functions (Lewis & Short’s last meaning: ‘[w]ith respect to, as to, =
quod attinet ad’), but it too was rare in classical times.
394 17 Introduction to the linguistics of scientific language

out that mathematical functions can be seen as having the same rôle as preposi-
tions in natural language. Thus, ‘the cat is under the table’ corresponds to ‘five is
the square root of twenty-five’; mathematical equivalence relations can similarly
be compared to conjunctions. Or, put differently: modern mathematics in a sense
generalises and formalises conjunctions and prepositions found in natural lan-
guages.
Among verb forms, imperatives are frequent in some technical writing (such
as manuals), but not in strictly scientific texts. On the other hand, the verb ‘to be’
is in general particularly frequent. 89 % of all tenses are simple present (64 % ac-
tive, 25 % passive), the remaining 11 % mostly present continuous active and pas-
sive and simple future. Earlier studies found percentages for the p a s s i ve v o i c e
in science to be 32.6 %, 28 %, 26 %, 26.3 % (Sager, Dungworth & McDonald 1980:
209), thus between a third and a quarter.11 In literary works, they are much lower:
only 2.2 %, or in drama 3 % (206). The reason for this seems to be that the focus is
on the result, not on the subject. The passive voice also allows the result to be
placed more prominently before the verb and permits shorter formulations: ‘den-
sity was measured’ vs ‘the experimenter (or: we) measured density’. Banks (n.d.:
13–14) confirms these numbers (30.6 %) and shows that this predilection for the
passive voice is noticeable from the early nineteenth century onward. It has often
been claimed that this is due to a wish to have the texts look impersonal and ‘ob-
jective’,12 but the above explanation to put the object of study rather than the
scientist himself into thematic and emphasised position seems more plausible.13
French, German, and Russian can also use reflexive verbs and impersonal active
clauses (German es) similarly; English only has the impersonal ‘one’, which easily
sounds awkward. Turner (1962: 181–197) claimed that the high incidence of the
passive voice goes back to Mediaeval Latin, providing examples from Frederick
II’s book on falconry (182). He concludes: ‘The scientific paper […] inherited the
passive from general English and from science Latin, but had to develop charac-
teristic uses of it’ (183). On the other hand, Banks (2008: 100) shows that between
the eighteenth and twentieth centuries in English scientific papers (both in phy-
sics and in biology) numbers for the passive voice rise from roughly one-fifth to
more than one-third of all finite verbs. Thus, it is not so clear whether this feature

11 Banks (2008: 99–111) similarly finds between 7 % and 50 % of all finite verbs in the passive
mood. The averages are around 30 %, with some differences between texts on physics and biol-
ogy. Similar numbers in Banks (1990: 14–15), for a corpus of eleven oceanographic English pa-
pers; I calculate from his table 32.16 % ±6.27 %, although in the sections describing the experi-
ments the numbers were even higher: 52.5 %.
12 e.g. by Quirk et al. (1985: §3.73, p. 166).
13 So also Banks (2008: 140).
 Syntax and parts of speech 395

stems from Latin or developed only recently within English. Numbers for Latin
scientific texts will be evaluated below and show that there is, indeed, a higher in-
cidence (chap. 18 §4), although less strongly: 12.8 % of all verb forms are third
person passive, in contrast to 9.1 % in non-scientific texts; in poetry, by contrast,
the numbers are much lower (4.6 %).
Among modal auxiliaries, those indicating possibility are especially common
(Sager, Dungworth & McDonald 1980: 210): ‘can’ and ‘may’ usually for possibility,
‘will’ for future and prediction. N o n - f i n i t e v e r b f o r m s are more common in
science (212–215): 35 %–39 % of verbs were found to be non-finite, compared to
only 17 % in drama. One study found 19 % infinitives, 34 % past participles, and
47 % ‑ing-forms among non-finite verb forms; another 37.7 %, 26.9 %, and 35.4 %
respectively. ‘The chief characteristic of the ‑ing form is its grammatical flexibility.
[…] [which] makes it extremely popular with specialist writers’ (215). It can be
nominal (‘rust proofing’), stand after prepositions (‘by considering’),14 be used as
an adjective (‘operating cycle’), appear in clause reduction (‘The E and B fields sa-
tisfying the Maxwell equation in free space’), express result (often after ‘thus’,
‘thereby’), or form detached non-finite clauses (‘Radioactive decay is a true first
order process, the rate of decay depending only upon […]’; often introduced by
‘with’ or ‘thus’). This last-mentioned usage combines clarity and conciseness,
which are important for economy of expression. Clause reduction and detached
non-finite clauses can be achieved in Latin using the ablativus absolutus, but
these English clauses can be used more generally. Below, it will become apparent
that non-finite verb forms are not more common in scientific Latin.
An important feature of modern English scientific language is what Banks (n.
d.) calls ‘hedging’, that is, ‘reducing the strength of what’ someone ‘is writing’
(104), especially by means of adverbs (110) such as ‘probably, generally, possibly,
perhaps, apparently, conceivably, presumably, significantly, reasonably, usual-
ly’. This is comparable to our criterion (v), evidentiality or modalities, for scienti-
fic language. For English, the n u m b e r o f w o r d s p e r s e n t e n c e has sometimes
been used as a measure of syntactic complexity.15 Unfortunately, this is a quantity
that is not well defined for pre-print Latin, and cannot be used.16 But indicative
vs subjunctive can be measured, as a broad indicator of main and subordinate
clauses. Numbers are presented below: they differ significantly from other Latin
prose only for some scientific texts, especially scholastic ones.

14 After, in descending frequency, ‘by’, ‘of’, ‘in’, ‘for’, ‘on’, ‘after’, ‘before’.
15 e.g. by Banks (2008: 68).
16 Antiquity used no or very different punctuation, and mediaeval manuscripts used their own
systems of punctuation. Punctuation in editions is largely the editor’s and depends strongly on
his nationality and taste.
396 17 Introduction to the linguistics of scientific language

N o u n p h r a s e s and compounds are also often mentioned as typical for

scientific English. Quirk et al. show the high frequencies of noun phrases in scien-
tific writing, especially of non-subject, complex ones.17 Sager, Dungworth &
McDonald (1980: 219) point out that

nominal groups are the most appropriate vehicles of condensed linguistic expression for
scientists and technologists who are trained to perceive and consequently to speak about the
physical world in terms of concepts, processes and quantifiable units.

In scientific English, there are many possibilities for modifying noun phrases: (be-
fore the clause) verbless or ‑ing clauses, predeterminers (such as ‘all’), determiners
(articles, demonstratives); (after the clause) adjectives, prepositional phrases,
non-finite clauses, relative clauses, nominal apposition, adjectival phrases (‘equal
to’).18 Banks (2008: 63) found that nominalised processes in the English transla-
tions of Newton’s works are directly derived from Latin. The method by which an
action is carried out can be described using ‑ing-forms or r e l a t i v e c l a u s e s . Re-
sult or purpose clauses introduced by ‘in order that, so that, such that’, adverbial
clauses introduced by ‘as, because, when, since’, and conditional clauses (‘if,
then’) also abound. Sager, Dungworth & McDonald (1980: 222–224) speak of ‘one-
way communication’, i.e. no dialogues, no questions other than rhetorical ones,
and so on. Relative clauses with a relative pronoun at their head also seem to
be more common in science than in ordinary speech. In English, active relative
clauses can be reduced to an ‑ing-form (without relative pronoun), unlike in Ger-
man, French, Russian, Latin, or Greek.19
English is not very helpful for studying the use of cases (excepting the g e n i -
t i v e , which alone has kept its own form). For German there seem to be no avail-
able data on the percentages of genitives or nominatives, which would a priori
seem to be the two cases most likely to be more frequent in scientific writing.
Nominal phrases with the genitive are a prominent feature in the German scienti-
fic texts studied by Brommer (2018: esp. [Link]).

17 Quirk et al. (1985: §17.123, p. 1350); their example is: ‘At the mouth of the respiratory tube is a
series of velar tentacles, corresponding exactly in position to those of amphioxus, and serving to se-
parate the mouth and oesophagus from the respiratory tube while the lampre is feeding’ (italics in
original).
18 More on such impersonal constructions in chap. 22 §7 below.
19 But a similar construction exists in Arabic: it is possible to form indefinite relative clauses
without the relative pronoun, e.g. ‘he is a man who works in a factory’ = ‘he is a man working in
a factory’, in Arabic huwa raǧul allaḏi yaʿmal fi masnaʿ = huwa raǧul yaʿmal fi masnaʿ. For this con-
struction, see Badawi, Carter & Gully (2004: 489).
 Syntax and parts of speech 397

In summary, we can conclude that the following features are especially con-
spicuous in scientific English today: the use of ‑ing-forms, prepositions and con-
junctions, the passive voice, a lack of the first person singular, and the nominali-
sation of processes. We can concur with Sager, Dungworth & McDonald (1980:
277): ‘Special languages are able to compress information both syntactically and
lexically.’ The next two chapters will test how much of this is also true for Latin.
 Henry Fischbach (ed.),
Translation and Medicine
(Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998)

Who Makes a Better Medical Translator: The

Medically Knowledgeable Linguist or the
Linguistically Knowledgeable Medical
Professional? A Physician's Perspective
MARLA O'NEILL, MD

Since there always will be more medical translations than can be handled
by the relatively few physicians who translate, medical translation will perforce
be done by non-physicians. And if, as Woody Allen proposes, "80% of success
is just showing up," then I suppose the linguists win this contest hands down!
But can the linguists do an adequate job (or perhaps even a more satisfactory one
than physicians themselves)?

"Physician" vs. "Medical Professional"

As a physician-turned-translator with a strong linguistic background

(language and translation studies at the university level, as well as overseas
residence and work for several years), I was intrigued by the issues inherent in
the title question originally proposed to me, which pitted the "medically
knowledgeable linguist" against the "linguistically knowledgeable physician."
The first issue that occurred to me was whether or not one could substitute
"medical professional" for "physician" in the title: I would argue yes (so I made
the substitution!). The curricula for most medical and para-medical fields include
the same core courses: biology, chemistry, biochemistry, organic chemistry,
anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, etc., such that physicians, nurses,
dentists, physician's assistants, and paramedics all have the same basic
knowledge. From that starting point, individuals will develop greater in-depth
knowledge of their particular fields, of course, with paramedics being better
versed in emergency terminology than physicians specializing in pathology, for
example. However, for the purposes of this article, I submit that all medical
professionals learn the language of medicine during their education and training
(although they also become proficient in the "dialect" of their specific fields).
70  Who Makes a Better Medical Translator?

The Language of Medicine

What is this "language of medicine" and why is it so important? Like any

field, the medical profession (particularly clinical medicine) is full of jargon and
idiosyncratic phrases which sound unusual, to say the least, in the context of
everyday speech or writing. For example, physicians routinely say, "the patient
complains of such-and-such" and "the patient's chief complaint is," which may
sound like we are calling the patient a whiner. However, this phrase has no such
connotation in the medical world (at least not overtly—an in-depth discussion in
that regard would be interesting, but is beyond the scope of this article!) and
simply means that these are the problems that the patient "presented with" (med-
speak for "came in with" or "consulted for").
The temptation may be great to change or omit these often awkward-
sounding phrases, but they are so much a part of the professional language that
the translator who does so is actually making a radical change in the register of
the text; and to medical ears, the text becomes jarring and sounds "less
professional" without these familiar phrases. Not only does this make it more
difficult for the medical professional end-user to quickly grasp the substance of
the communication, but I believe it also has the undesirable effect of
undermining the scientific credibility of the article or text (even if only
subliminally). For an in-depth discussion on the language of clinical medicine
(American English), there is a wonderful book titled Doctors' Stories: The
Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge, by Kathryn Montgomery Hunter,
which details the process of communication in the medical profession and the
conventions of both the oral and written forms.1
In addition to the above-mentioned jargon and idiosyncratic phrases, there
are also very specific medical terms which have been developed over the
centuries in order to describe a disease situation, medication or dosage so
precisely that someone who is only reading or hearing the description
understands exactly what is meant. Furthermore, there is often an entire body of
implicit knowledge underlying the actual written words. Barbara Thomas, a
physician-translator in Spain, says, "I run into situations all the time in which
there is so much implicit knowledge behind the words. For instance, steps or
conditions in an operation—a physician knows what is involved because her
anatomic knowledge allows her to form a complete mental picture of the
operation from a brief description; there's no way that a non-physician translator
can understand the implicit information. Generally speaking, the non-physician
isn't aware of it at all."
A slight mistranslation can lead the reader down the wrong path in terms of
conclusions, and although the reader will generally at some point realize a
mistake was made, it may be difficult for him or her to backtrack and determine
what the correction should be. Given the huge amount of reading that most
medical professionals undertake in order to keep up with current practice, a
 MARLA O'NEILL  71

poorly translated article (even if the errors are only minor ones) may be so
frustrating to read that it will end up being passed over. This does a grave
disservice to medical and pharmaceutical researchers all over the world, who
rely on the sharing of such information in order to receive recognition for their
work as well as to spark new avenues of inquiry or steer them away from clearly
fruitless ones. Worse yet, inaccuracies in medical translations have the potential
for causing serious clinical consequences, depending on the sort of material
being translated (i.e., pharmaceutical package inserts, medical guidelines for lay
persons, etc.).
I mention all this just to make the case that one might well believe that only
medical professionals themselves could successfully navigate these linguistic
shoals and turn out accurate, professional-sounding work. Even physicians who
translate have difficulty consistently maintaining an appropriate register and must
verify specific terminology. However, the fact of the matter is that there are
relatively few medical professionals doing translation work, and the vast
majority of medical translation is being done by linguists who have developed
some degree of medical knowledge. How are they able to do this and are they
turning out credible work?

A Survey of Medical Translators

In order to explore this topic, I devised a survey for medical translators and
one for translation bureaus as well, addressing some of the issues that I felt were
pertinent. I posted both surveys on the Internet LISTSERV Lantra-L (the
"Language and Translation" LISTSERV, a forum for translators and interpreters
and anyone interested in related topics2) and also sent them directly to
individuals and translation bureaus I had previously identified as being involved
in at least some medical translation work. (The comments I received from bureau
owners will be discussed in "The Translation Bureau Point of View," below.)
Of the 65 surveys sent to specific individuals, I received 36 responses; two
of those individuals did not consider themselves to be medical translators and
were eliminated from the results. In addition, I received four responses from the
general posting on Lantra-L, for a total of 38 usable surveys.
Of this number, only three identified themselves as "linguistically
knowledgeable medical professionals" (an RN, a medical student and a
translator with a "BA in medicine"), although I myself would reclassify two
others into that category, based on their professional history (RN's, one of
whom practiced six years, the other 19 years). Thus there were five medical
professionals and 33 linguists who responded to the survey.
Particularly interesting to me were the ways in which the "medically
knowledgeable linguists" gained their expertise:
72  Who Makes a Better Medical Translator?

- Studied medicine or took medical courses - 5

- Have worked or are working in some position related to the medical
profession (secretary in hospital, work for pharmaceutical company, etc.)
-7
- Translation courses with medical emphasis - 6
- Close relative is a medical professional -11
- Have access to medical professionals - 25
- Personal illness that led to a lot of medical research and contact with
medical professionals - 6
- None of the above - 6
(Note: The numbers add up to more than 33 because many people mentioned
more than one source of information.)

In general, concern and caution were expressed by almost all of the

respondents in terms of wanting to "get it right." Most of the linguist
respondents regularly contact medical professionals regarding sticky points in
their translations or for a check on register. Overall, half of the medical
translators who responded to the survey mentioned the Internet as a source of
medical terminology; and I was pleased to see that many specifically mentioned
MEDLINE, which is at the top of my list of useful resources for medical
translation (discussed in more detail below).
In my experience and from the responses to the survey, the editing of
medical translations appears to be a hit-or-miss proposition: most respondents
reported that their work is edited only some of the time or not at all, and, if
edited, it was not always done by a medical professional. Clearly, translators
themselves must assume the responsibility for turning out medical translations
that are clear, accurate and written in an appropriate register.

On the Other Hand...

Thus far I have looked at the question from the point of view of the medical
professional. Lest I seem to be ignoring the language side of things in favor of
the scientist's terminology, let me hasten to reassure you that I am only too
aware of the need for a strong linguistic base from which to proceed for any
translation work, medical or not! The issue of what makes a good translator
tends to be hotly debated among those in the profession, but from discussions
both virtual and real, it appears fair to say that most translators agree that in
order to translate well, there is no substitute for a thorough knowledge of the
target language (which, many go on to say, should be one's native language). At
the very least, such linguistic proficiency is a necessary, though perhaps not
sufficient, prerequisite for a good translation.
 MARLA O'NEILL  73

Writing is not usually part of the core medical school curriculum, although
scientific writing courses are available on most medical school campuses. This
general lack of writing skill has been noted by Jo Ann Cahn, a Paris-based
medical translator and editor who undertakes extensive revisions of writing (in
English) by French physicians for publication in peer-reviewed medical journals:
"I think a professional translator (by which I mean to imply, with good writing
skills) with medical knowledge is probably better than a dilettante doctor with
some linguistics knowledge. Although there are obviously translators who write
badly, in general their livelihood depends partly on their writing ability, in
contrast to that of physicians. Many physicians, even those writing in their
mother tongue, need heavy editing; translators, one would hope, require only a
light hand. Most medical journals provide neither, as far as I can see. If
translated articles (especially in English) are to fulfill their primary purpose of
providing useful scientific information to physicians throughout the world, they
need content but they also need concise, clear communication. I think that is
most likely to come from professional translators."
And Barbara Thomas, MD, who has coordinated projects using physician
translators in Spain, concedes: "Sometimes physicians have weak writing skills.
For instance, a physician with no theoretical training in medical writing is much
more likely to use an anglicism than a non-physician." Which brings us to
another issue: the hegemony of English in the scientific world.
The problem of professionals who have received much of their education
and training in a language which is not their native one is emphasized by Jussara
Simoes, a translator in Brazil: "In my country, for example, there is this
misguided idea that the person who speaks, understands and/or writes in a
foreign language can be a translator. So we see thousands of engineers, doctors,
lawyers, etc., translating in their 'areas of specialization.' Well, there's no doubt
that the technocrats are specialized in their areas, but the big question is: do they
have a solid background in Portuguese? It is far more important than their great
expertise in the foreign language. There is one sine qua non requisite to
translation: excellent knowledge of the mother tongue. If they have an excellent
knowledge of Portuguese, they'll be able to convey the foreign ideas in a
readable, intelligible manner in the mother tongue. If they have the poor notions
of Portuguese that the majority of our technocrats have, they'll write those
'Frankenstein' texts they do. And, just to make things worse, they will insist
that they are 'excellent translators'... Nobody cares about Portuguese in our
universities. When you go to the University in Brazil, it seems the language
spoken there is English and only English." Manuel Delgado, a translator in
Portugal, agrees: "Physicians themselves tend not to know their own mother
tongue: few are linguistically inclined and most prefer to use chic foreign terms,
such as 'sling-and-cuff' instead of the well-established Portuguese word
bdoleira."
74  Who Makes a Better Medical Translator?

This problem likely extends around the globe. Josh Wallace, a Canadian
medical translator, remarks, "There are only two or three bureaus specializing in
medical translation in Montréal. One told me the way in which doctors are
educated in Quebec is at the root of the problem. Most educational materials are
in English, so they have trouble writing in French. This leads to inconsistent use
when producing reports, since they don't know their medical French very well."
And Maria Teresa Cattaneo, an Italian medical translator, says, "In Italy doctors
tend to use a very peculiar language. They use a lot of English words, partly
because most medical texts are in English (and therefore quite a few words,
especially the new ones, are not translated) and partly to 'show off'. So it is not
always easy to pick what one should actually use."
Barbara Thomas adds, "[Physicians] also may have weak translation skills. I
usually find that physicians are very good at the technical concepts, but often trip
up with the simplest things." Because their expertise tends to be narrowly
scientific, medical professionals may indeed be confounded by relatively simple
items that would not daunt linguists, with their greater breadth of cultural
knowledge. One example from my personal experience occurred while
translating from French to English and involved the word amiénoise in the
phrase, Cette étude amiénoise... I could not find this term anywhere, and had
almost resigned myself to bluffing with information gleaned from the context
(something along the lines of "this poorly conducted study"), when I decided to
post a query to Lantra-L. Fortunately, an answer soon appeared: "from the city
of Amiens." Ah, of course—what could be simpler? Thus I was saved from
erroneously maligning the study in question. (In my defense, may I mention that
the author in question had previously cited close to a hundred studies without
once mentioning where the study was from? There is an axiom in medicine,
which, it has occurred to me, could apply equally to translation: "If you don't
think of it, you can't diagnose [translate] it.") If medical professionals are
scrupulously honest and humble enough to admit what they don't know, this
kind of error can generally be avoided—but that's a big " i f (especially in regard
to physicians)!

The Translation Bureau Point of View

As I formulated my questions for bureau owners (and/or employees), I

hypothesized that medical professionals would likely be less computer- and
modem-savvy than their linguist counterparts, and that they might have difficulty
treating translation deadlines with the same respect as a starting time in the
operating room. Barbara Thomas, who has worked with many physician-
translators in Spain, reports: "Although most younger physicians are computer
literate, there are still a lot of physicians who don't know how to type or use a
word processor. Many working physicians can only spare a few hours a day for
 MARLA O'NEILL  75

translation, which makes it very hard to schedule jobs, although those who
regularly do translation work are more reliable."
However, most bureau respondents did not mention these shortcomings of
specialist translators, focusing instead on the need for teamwork in the
translation process. Michael Grant, who heads a translation bureau in the Czech
Republic, says, "The more technical a document is, the more likely I will be to
assign it to a specialist, but I will also be prepared to edit the ensuing translation
for style."
Mary O'Neill, president of a U.S.-based translation bureau that handles a
high volume of medical and biomedical work, comments, "I would be really
hard put to choose between a qualified linguist and a qualified physician,
because if they both are qualified, theoretically they should be able to do the
same job. I do think we should place a lot of stress on technical qualifications,
however, because linguistic skills are the base and technical skills are the
superstructure and it is much harder to find the superstructure. Finding qualified
technical translators is a much harder challenge than finding good customers.
Translator training should be at the graduate level and should build on a four-
year program of technical skills."
She continues, "However, most independent translators are unaware of the
gaps in their technical knowledge and are frequently tempted to 'wing it.' We
virtually never receive a translation that does not contain some type of error, and
that is why we feel in-house quality control and a team approach is the key to
excellence in documentation."
Barbara Thomas, MD, agrees with the team approach, for a slightly different
reason: "I also think that after any translation is proofed there should be a sign-
off step by the translator on the proofing process. It helps to educate the
translator, and it also keeps the proofreader from replacing terminology that
'sounds odd' or isn't consistent with previous work (which may have been
incorrect) with erroneous terms."
Alessandra Caberlotto, a translator and bureau owner in Italy, comments on
editing medical texts: "Sometimes even a doctor is not enough. My sister is a
nephrologist and once I asked her to check a text where some neurological
problem was addressed. She stopped and said, 'I'm sorry, but here I'd better
ask a colleague of mine; after university I studied another five years to become
an expert on human kidneys, not on the human brain.'"
Henry Fischbach, a medical translator and translation bureau owner in the
U.S. with over forty-five years' experience in working with medical
professionals, notes that they approach medical translation somewhat differently
than linguists do: "They do not suffer fools gladly (rightfully so) and have a
very low tolerance level for the logorrhea of non-English medical professionals.
Some foreign writers tend to be unduly discursive and historical beyond any
reasonable need to underpin the essential message. Medical professionals native
to English tend to come to the point fast and, when translating, often tend to 'cut
76  Who Makes a Better Medical Translator?

through' what they consider to be non-essential information, i.e., to edit and

condense. But translation clients want their foreign texts translated in full,
without editing, however judicious, by the translator. Unless the medical
professionals are very self-disciplined on that score, I have found their
translations to be more of an abstract than a verbatim translation."
In summary, it appears that either a medical professional or a medically
knowledgeable linguist can do a good job with a medical translation; but given
the relative strengths and weaknesses of both sides, the ideal situation would be
for the medical professional who translates to be edited by a linguist, and the
linguist translating medical work to be edited by a medical professional.
However, this happens all too infrequently in the real world, due to cost and
time constraints. So, given the reality, is there any way that credible-sounding,
accurate medical translation can be done?

How to Fake It: A Modus Operandi That Works

Doug Robinson, a translator and the author of several works on the

translation process, as well as an occasional translator of medical texts, replied
succinctly to the question as to how he developed his medical register: "Faking
it, mostly." Upon reflection, it occurred to me that this is, in fact, what we all do
in translation—we assume the guise of the author and pretend that we are the
neurologist or the gastroenterologist or the engineer who wrote the text. And
even if we're lucky enough to be translating a text that happens to be in our
particular specialty, we're still "faking it" in a certain sense, in that we must
consciously adopt the writing style and conventions that are appropriate to the
subject matter and target audience. So how does one fake it convincingly?
Research is the key to success in medical translation, in my opinion.
Medicine is so highly compartmentalized that, for example, my background in
surgery and emergency medicine offers little help when I'm faced with a
dermatology translation. So research is crucial, even for a physician doing
medical translations. And when I do my research, I'm looking both for
terminology and for style (how the terms are used by native-target-language
specialists in the field).
I start a translation assignment by using whatever textbooks I have on hand
and skimming relevant chapters on the topic, although such textbook
information is usually very general compared to the specificity of the articles that
I translate. (The Merck Manual, which is also available in Spanish, French,
Italian, and German, is a useful, concise medical reference for those who don't
have textbooks available.) More helpful are the articles by native-target-language
physicians which are referenced at end of the article I'm translating, especially
review articles on the subject. Jo Ann Cahn reports, "I read at least two and
usually more of the articles written by a native-target-language physician in the
 MARLA O'NEILL  77

reference list of the article I am working on. If it's a new subject for me, I do
substantial additional research and hope that it will eventually pay off."
Reading such articles helps one to begin to get a feel for the language and
style of the specialty. Patrick Lafferty, who teaches in Georgetown University's
translation and interpretation program and frequently translates public health
texts into English, comments: "In medical translation, as for any translation, I
read materials written by native English writers in that field as I am doing the
translation. Style is not something we learn as a fact and file away; it is
something we emulate through exposure. Access to an excellent medical library
helps greatly."
Even without physical access to a medical library, one can access an
enormous collection of medical writing on MEDLINE via the Internet.3
MEDLINE is an electronic database of abstracts of medical journal articles from
1966 to the present, and is the single most valuable resource for medical
translation work into English, in my experience. I use it constantly while
translating, to check on the spelling of drug names, and for terminology and
usage that I'm not sure of. Sometimes I even check on certain things that I think
I do know (particularly when I'm answering a question for someone on Lantra-
L, where my response will be read by 900+ of my fellow translators), and I
occasionally find that what I thought I knew is not necessarily correct! Even
though MEDLINE contains only abstracts and not the full text of the articles, I
find that it suffices for my purposes about 90% of the time while translating. I
should mention that when I am verifying terminology and usage, I make sure
that I am looking at "native-English" abstracts, or even specifically U.S.-English
abstracts, by noting the institution at which the work was done. There are,
unfortunately, some poorly translated abstracts on MEDLINE which may lead
the unwary translator astray.
MEDLINE can be useful even when you don't know what you're looking
for (although I admit that this type of search might be trickier for non-medical
professionals to undertake). When I'm blocked and just can't think of the correct
English term, I sometimes search for a "translationese" version of the term. This
will often yield several translated abstracts (containing the incorrect term); and I
can then scroll down to the MeSH Subject Headings section (which contains
MEDLINE key words), and I will sometimes be able to find the correct English
version of the term I'm blocked on. Another approach that occasionally works is
to search for the foreign term itself, since the original titles of translated abstracts
are sometimes given and may contain the term; I have hit pay dirt using that
method a few times.
I have not yet mentioned the scourge of technical translation: the poorly
written source text. As we all know, source texts are not without error, and who
among us has not wasted time searching for a term that turned out to be a typo in
the original? MEDLINE can come to the rescue in this type of situation, too.
Here is an example of such a search that I carried out recently: A query was
78  Who Makes a Better Medical Translator?

posted on Lantra-L regarding "propyl anesthesia" in the context of an "inferior

alveolar nerve block." The translator wanted help on translating "propyl
anesthesia" into Spanish. I had never heard of "propyl anesthesia," but (given
my past experience) searched for it anyway: no hits. Someone else on Lantra-L
had suggested that the term might be "propylene anesthesia," so I searched for
that as well, to no avail. Having no idea what the term really should be, I
searched for "inferior alveolar nerve block" (31 hits) and then "anesthesia"
(44,191 hits) and then combined the two categories (13 hits). As luck would
have it, the very first abstract gave me the answer: "...compared with the
[inferior alveolar nerve] block, the incidence of successful pulpai anesthesia (80
reading) was significantly greater..."4 [italics mine]. Clearly, "propyl" was a
typographical error, perhaps a transcription error by someone listening to a
dictated operative summary.
Abbreviations and acronyms are further sources of aggravation for the
medical translator since they are liberally sprinkled throughout most medical
texts, often without any explanation; in addition, they may or may not actually
belong to the source language (e.g., in the body of an article in French, one may
find English acronyms being used). One can search for abbreviations and
acronyms on MEDLINE or on the World Wide Web (a good option for
languages other than English; see below), but one must exercise caution in
assigning a particular meaning to an abbreviation within a given context, since
some abbreviations have a myriad of possible meanings.
Key-word searching as described above for MEDLINE can also be done on
the World Wide Web (WWW), of course, using search engines such as Alta
Vista and Metacrawler. An advantage of the WWW is that one can search in
languages other than English. With experience, search techniques become
refined so as to reduce the total number of "hits" while increasing the odds that
any responses obtained are relevant to the topic at hand. Susan Larsson, a very
busy Swedish-to-English translator who regularly deals with medical topics,
swears by this method and often provides Web site addresses for specialty
topics (sometimes in languages she doesn't even know!) on Lantra-L.
I recently had the opportunity to try out some search engines myself (I used
problematic terms from past translations as key words), and was amazed at the
results I was able to generate virtually instantaneously—so much so that I will
be upgrading my Internet account in the very near future in order to take full
advantage of these resources. Despite my enthusiasm, however, there is one
caveat I feel I should issue pertaining to the reliability of information obtained on
the WWW. MEDLINE, as a database of abstracts from peer-reviewed medical
journal articles, is a nearly impeccable resource for medical translators. In
contrast, information gleaned from the WWW does not necessarily pass through
any editing process; therefore one must carefully scrutinize each source for
reliability and attempt to verify the information from other sources as well.
 MARLA O'NEILL  79

Another approach to problems of terminology and style is the use of text

corpora and concordancing. Michael and Ingrid Friedbichler of the University of
Innsbruck in Austria report, "Over and above the standard procedures and
resources commonly used for settling terminological problems or questions of
register-appropriate language, we rely heavily on cross-referencing in our
computer-held domain-specific text corpora with the help of concordancing
software." Essentially, this involves the use of electronic texts (corpora) which
can be searched using KWIC (key-word-in-context) concordancers which
"make it possible to instantly check the occurrence, frequency, and context of
any given word or string of words in any corpus available." They point out that
more and more medical journals are offering full-text year-end CD-ROMs, and
the use of concordancing software in conjunction with such CD-ROMs holds the
promise of enhancing both the productivity and quality of medical translation.
More information about this approach to translation can be found at <http://
[Link]/c/c613/[Link]>.
While working on a medical translation, input from acquaintances in the
medical profession can be helpful, but it is often difficult to contact these busy
professionals. Accessing fellow translators is somewhat easier now that there
are LISTSERVs such as Lantra-L and on-line forums such as FLEFO on
CompuServe, and posting a query can yield fruitful results in short order.
However, as noted above regarding the World Wide Web, some responses are
more authoritative than others; and on-line answers to terminology questions
should be confirmed by other sources, if at all possible.
It may be noticed that I have not mentioned dictionaries at all in my modus
operandi. When asked about resources, several respondents to the survey
commented that available bilingual medical dictionaries—not to speak of
multilingual ones—are largely useless. I tend to agree, since many seem to
consist largely of cognate-type translations which ignore real usage in current
practice. Although there are some good medical dictionaries and encyclopedias
available, recommendations for specific monolingual or bilingual resources are
unfortunately beyond the scope of this article.
Once a translation is completed with the help of all these research methods,
there is still no substitute for good editing as an integral part of the translation
process. As mentioned previously, having your work edited by a professional in
the specialty (or, conversely, by a linguist if you are the specialty professional
translator) is the ideal solution, though by all accounts not often the most
feasible one in the real world of cost containment and deadlines.
In any case, don't forget to ask for feedback from the client or bureau! Most
bureaus, whether or not they consult with the original translator during the
editing process, are quite willing to provide a final version of the document.
This works to everyone's advantage, since translators can thus be made aware
of not only any errors (and, conversely, correct any injudicious "corrections")
but also the stylistic preferences of their clients, enabling them to tailor their
80  Who Makes a Better Medical Translator?

future work accordingly (thereby reducing the amount of editing required on

future assignments).
In addition to all of the above, experience counts. As Neil Inglis, a staff
translator at the International Monetary Fund, has put it, "Mature judgment,
carefully acquired and reflected upon, is often the finest guide of all. Learn from
your own past ordeals and mistakes, and don't forget that in the final analysis,
you alone are accountable. The acid test for translators is less the sprawl of their
library than the breadth of their own problem-solving talents when their library
fails them. In practice, this means an ability to craft meaningful compromises
and to close in on ideal renderings through a process of successive
approximations, over time."5

Conclusion

Good medical translation can be done by both medical professionals and

medically knowledgeable linguists; but in both cases (Woody Allen
notwithstanding), a love of language, an ear for style, a willingness to pursue
arcane terminology and caring enough to get it exactly right are the keys to true
success.

NOTES
1. Hunter, K.M. 1991. Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge.
Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey.
2. To become a member of the Lantra-L mailing list, send a message to <listserv@
[Link]> (no subject line necessary) with <subscribe lantra-1 Firstname Lastname> as
the message. Warning: you may receive as many as 200 messages in a single day!
3. MEDLINE can now be accessed free of charge at the National Library of Medicine:
<[Link]
4. Childers, M. et al. 1996. "Anesthetic efficacy of the periodontal ligament injection
after an inferior alveolar nerve block." Journal of Endodontics 22(6): 317-20.
5. Inglis, Neil. 1997. "The Italian Language: Finance and Economics." The ATA
Chronicle, 26(8): 24-25.
 The Pragmatics of Medical Translation:
A Strategy for Cooperative Advantage
BARBARA REEVES-ELLINGTON

Introduction

When the first English translation of Ernest Lasègue's classic text De

l'anorexie hystérique was published in 1873, several important passages were
missing. One of the omissions involved a crucial diagnostic clue (Vandereycken
and van Deth, 1990). The American title of Wilhelm Röntgen's seminal work
Über eine neue Art von Strahlen was rendered as On a new kind of rays
(Rutkow 1993), which at best might be considered a less-than-optimum
translation, even for 1896. Though these examples are a hundred years old, the
problems they pose remain challenges for twenty-first century translators.
Although the consequences of the act of translating cannot always be
foreseen, it should be obvious that unexplained omissions may cause
considerable damage to a physician's reputation, not to mention a patient's
health. It could be argued that poor use of English in the translation of a title
neither hinders understanding nor harms the diffusion of scientific knowledge.
A recent study published by Fernando Navarro and Jeffrey Barnes (1996)
suggests otherwise, however.
These translators looked at the English translations of Spanish titles of 292
papers published in Medicina Clínica and found 458 errors in 225 (77%) of the
292 titles. Differences in meaning between the original Spanish and the English
translation were found in 100 titles (34%). In addition, 72 titles contained
orthographical, lexical, or grammatical mistakes without distortion of meaning.
Approximately one-third of the lexical and grammatical errors were caused by
Spanish interference.
The authors were surprised by their findings, stating that the comparison had
"yielded much worse results than had been expected." To highlight the potential
consequences of errors in title translation, they show how errors may be
reproduced when they are incorporated as key words in international indices
such as Current Contents, thereby hindering millions of people searching
databases around the world.
Equally direct repercussions of the translation process have been reported by
J. Wetlesen, a member of a regional Committee on Research Ethics in Norway
106  The Pragmatics of Medical Translation

(1989). He has questioned the official Norwegian translation of the Declaration

of Helsinki, calling for a revision. In his opinion, the translation presents the
document as a set of rules rather than guidelines. Apparent discrepancies in the
translation have caused confusion among committee members and affected
outside expectations of their work (Wetlesen 1989).

Expectations of Translation

Expectations are key in the world of translation. Navarro and Barnes found
translation errors "worse than expected." Wetlesen is concerned about "outside
expectations" of his committee's work. What is expected of a translation? By
whom? What should authors expect from the translation of their work, even if
only a title is translated? What should clients expect when they commission a
translation? What should readers expect when they settle down to read? What
should a translator expect when sitting down to work? Who sets the standards?
Who makes the rules? Who faces the consequences?
Matt Hammond (1995) recently described a situation in which a company
refused to pay a translator because the translation "did not resemble the source
text closely enough." In the ensuing court case, the translator's lawyer argued
that a translation could only be judged "by comparison with the specifications set
for it." But what or who determines the specifications? How are they agreed
upon? Who needs to know what they are? What responsibility should the
translator shoulder for determining them?
It is impossible for a translator to meet the specifications of a translation
without knowing what they are. At the very least, the translator needs to know
why and for whom the translation has been commissioned. The source of this
information has to be the client; yet, all too frequently, the client contact cannot
supply the information. When asking about the purpose of the translation of a
scientific article, the translator will often be told "Oh, someone in the research
department wants to know what it says."
Some translators are loathe to ask too many questions of a client with regard
to assignments. My aim in writing this paper is to encourage such questioning.
Only by establishing the specifications for a translation can a translator analyze
the translation situation and adopt an effective translation strategy. If the
translator has to educate the client in this endeavor, so be it. The opportunity
should be grasped with both hands. At the same time, the translator should learn
as much as possible about the client's business. As a result both translator and
client will understand why the translation has been requested, for whom it is
intended, and how it needs to be done. Both the client and the translator will
benefit. This is the concept of cooperative advantage (Reeves-Ellington 1993)
applied to translation.
 BARBARA REEVES-ELLINGTON  107

Pursuing Cooperative Advantage

with the Translation Situation

Much good advice has been given to translators regarding the need to obtain
contracts in writing to cover the structural, financial, and legal aspects of an
agreement to work for hire (for example, Jane Maier 1994). To the best of my
knowledge, however, the translation situation is not usually covered in these
agreements. It should be.

Get it in writing

In the medical field, as in all other spheres, translation is a function of the

translation situation. Key players in the translation situation are the party
commissioning the translation, the translator's client (who may or may not be
the commissioner), the author of the source text (who may be the client), and the
intended audience. Medical translators can be of greatest service to their clients if
they understand the relationships of the players and ascertain the information
they need to map out the translation situation at the very outset of each new
project. Some clients may not have the information. Indeed, some may not
understand the need for it. It is part of the translator's job to explain the need,
discuss any questions with the client, and confirm the answers in writing.
A written agreement on the translation situation can be included in an overall
contract if such a contract is needed for each assignment. On the other hand, if a
translator has a general contract covering all work for hire done for a client, then
each new assignment can be covered by a brief addendum describing the
translation situation and any elements specific to that particular assignment. By
coming to an agreement on the translation situation, the translator is not merely
simplifying the work process, not merely doing a better job, not merely
obtaining some protection against potential criticism, but is providing mutually
agreed upon added value, involving the client and other key players in the
translation situation to cooperative advantage.

The translator's responsibility

It is clear that the translator should take on this responsibility. It was

presumably a translator's decisions that led to the discrepancies that had such
far-reaching consequences for the Norwegian ethics committee, evidence
enough that the process of translation involves more than exchanging words in
one linguistic system for another, more than an appreciation for lexis, grammar,
and register.
The translator must, in fact, be a cultural mediator and must inhabit the
spaces between cultures and communities. The translator must have a full
understanding of the context of the source text: its function and purpose; its what
108  The Pragmatics of Medical Translation

and why (Vermeer's skopos 1990: 94); and its environment, that is, the culture
and communities (audiences) that sustain it and the expectations of those
communities (Toury's polysystem 1981), which applies to pragmatic as well as
literary texts. Similar information must then be obtained about the context and
environment of the projected target text. This will make it possible to devise a
strategy that will help the translator negotiate the hazards of the translation
process and produce a translation that meets its function and purpose while
minimizing opportunities for confusion, misunderstanding, and unintended
social or political repercussions.

The textual-contextual approach

The textual-contextual approach to translation has become well established in

recent years (Snell-Hornby 1988; Hatim & Mason 1990; Nord 1991; Neubert &
Shreve 1992). Neubert and Shreve's (1992: 69) approach is based on Richard
de Beaugrande and William Dressler's (1981) seven standards of textuality as
they apply to any text: intention, acceptability, coherence, cohesion, and
intertextuality, with the needs of situation and communication "informativity"
kept in the foreground at all times. For the purposes of my discussion, I shall
use Neubert and Shreve's coinages of "situationality," "intentionality," and
"acceptability" as the defining variables of the translation situation.
"Situationality" locates the text in a discrete sociocultural context in real time and
place. "Intentionality" refers to the impact of the author's intentions with regard
to text and audience (that is, productive intent versus receptive intent).
"Acceptability" refers to readers' expectations with regard to textual
conventions. The variables of the translation situation may or may not be
congruent for the source and target texts. My comments are directed to
translation into English.

Genres in Medical Translation

Assessment of the translation situation and the use of textual analysis can be
applied to any genre of medical text. Among the many genres a medical
translator is likely to work in, the most common include biomedical papers,
clinical reports for New Drug Applications, case reports, patient consent forms,
expert opinions, official regulations governing drug manufacturing and clinical
research, package inserts, and patient education brochures. In my experience,
biomedical papers are the daily fare of most independent medical translators. It is
in the area of journal publication of this genre that the medical translator can use
the lever of cooperative advantage to the fullest extent.
 BARBARA REEVES-ELLINGTON  109

The biomedical paper: translation f or publication

Everyone learned in high school the basic format of the scientific paper:
introduction, materials and methods, results, and discussion. It may surprise
many translators to know, therefore, that many scientists, particularly
physicians, do not follow this format as perhaps they should. Even when they
get the headings correct, some authors include appropriate information in an
inappropriate section; for example, they incorporate arguments from the
discussion section in the introduction. Moreover, the basic format excludes
important elements, specifically the title, abstract, and conclusion, to which the
translator needs to pay special attention. Given the nature of our on-line culture
and the importance of databases such as MEDLINE, the title and abstract are the
only part of a biomedical paper that many scientists will read. They must contain
clear, concise, relevant information.
Most journals publish "instructions for authors" to encourage scientists to
follow a general framework when writing papers; however, such instructions
differ from journal to journal, particularly as regards references. Moreover,
authors frequently disregard instructions and thus waste time for journal staff,
reviewers, translators and the authors themselves, all of whom become involved
in additional editing. In several attempts to remedy this, various groups of
clinical investigators, biostatisticians, and editors have joined together to make
the requirements for biomedical reports more consistent and complete
(International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, 1993; the Working Group
on Recommendations for Reporting of Clinical Trials, 1994; The Standards of
Reporting Trials Group, 1994).
Most recently, the Asilomar Working Group (1996) has combined all
previous attempts at standardization to provide an inclusive checklist of
information that should be included in biomedical papers. They suggest it be
used by clinical investigators, journal editors, and peer reviewers to ensure
consistent, complete, and useful reporting of clinical findings. I suggest that it
also be used by medical translators.
Given the complexity of clinical reporting, translators are not doing their job
if they simply translate the source text, verify that all technical and medical terms
are correct, and perform enough microediting to ensure that grammar,
punctuation, spelling, and word usage are appropriate. If translators want to
help clients achieve the goal of publication, they must take greater responsibility
for the translated text. They have to do enough macroediting to ensure that the
text is cohesive and that content, organization, and flow of information
correspond to readers' expectations. Where feasible, translators also have to
point out to the foreign-language author where the source text fails to meet the
demands of the Asilomar checklist so that any gaps can [Link] medical
texts written by American scientists and physicians in English are improved by
professional medical writers and editors prior to publication. To my mind, it is
110  The Pragmatics of Medical Translation

unthinkable that a medical translator should not also improve the organization of
a medical text in translation if it is to be published. It is simply inappropriate for
a translator to justify a sloppy English text on the basis of a sloppy German text,
unless—and this is an important caveat—the client of the translation specifically
requests, perhaps for legal reasons, that a text remain "unimproved." Here
again, it is essential for the translator to know the purpose of the translation.
As part of the discussions on the translation situation, the translator should
ascertain the journal to which the author intends to submit the paper, and
perhaps help in the selection, so that "instructions for authors" can be followed
from the outset. Before beginning the translation, the translator should review
the paper to determine whether and where the source text fails to meet the
demands of the Asilomar checklist. In cases of inconsistencies between the
Asilomar checklist and the specific journal instructions, the latter should be
followed.
Thus, when the translator confirms the translation situation for a biomedical
paper that the client intends to publish, situationality, intentionality, and
acceptability all come together in the targeted journal and the Asilomar checklist.
In providing this additional service, the translator is truly adding value to the
product and gaining cooperative advantage for the client.
Once alerted to any gaps, the author can collect the necessary information or
rewrite inadequate sections while the translator continues to work. If the author
has been invited to make a contribution to a special issue of a journal and is
working against a deadline, this obviously saves time. As the translator works
through the text, discrepancies may come to light, for example, inconsistent use
of terminology, misreferences from text to figures or references that are missing.
Such minor problems are more easily remedied when collected in a list of
translator's notes to be appended to the translated text.
Added value does not stop with the biomedical paper. Whatever genre the
translator works in, the translation situation and product specifications must be
clarified. Take, for example, a package insert. If, in thinking of American
conventions and patient expectations, a translator produces a translation of a
foreign-language package insert to meet those expectations, client expectations
may not be met. It would serve no purpose to reorganize a foreign-language
package insert if the purpose of the person who commissioned its translation
was to determine how the source text differed from an American text in
information content and organization.

The biomedical paper: translation "for information only"

A translator may be lulled into apathy by translating papers "for information

only." The knowledge that a translation will not be published is no reason not to
pursue an agreement with the client on the translation situation.
 BARBARA REEVES-ELLINGTON  111

I was recently asked to provide a rough translation of an article for

informational purposes. My client contact, a translation coordinator in a large
corporation, told me not to translate the title and abstract because they were
already in English.
Now, I am always wary of people who want rough translations and expect
to save a few dollars on abstracts. Moreover, Röntgen's title is a constant
reminder to me of the importance of titles. In response, I explained that, if
extracts from the translation were likely to be published, the final text should be
polished, not rough. Moreover, since the fee for the translation would be based
on the number of words in the final text, a rough translation was likely to be
more expensive than a properly checked and edited text. My contact easily
agreed with the logic of this position.
In an effort to ascertain some of the information for the translation situation,
I asked who had commissioned the translation and why. Apparently, a junior
research scientist had asked for the translation, but my contact did not know
why. I explained the reason for my question, and my contact agreed to call me
back with the information.
In the meantime, the text arrived. The title, a literal translation of the original
title read "The language in which cells communicate." This is how the abstract
read:

The problem for the cells' communication in the organism, as well as for
the language they use in the process of communication is discussed in the
article. This problem is not exhausted with the cyclic mononucleotids.
The abundant information is a reason to accept that such a function may
be fulfilled by the inositol phosphate, the growing factor, some
aminoacids, etc. To unveil the secrets of nature, at the basis of which is the
communication between cells and the system for their management, will
undoubtedly take us closer to the understanding of this divine secret, as
well as to the possibilities to use it in man's favour.

This was certainly the English language, but it was language devoid of
meaning. Poor syntax, bad grammar, and inappropriate register combined to
create problems of cohesion and coherence. British orthography might offend
some Americans' sense of propriety. The abstract had presumably been written
by the author of the foreign-language text or by someone for whom English was
a second language. The full article appeared in a popular scientific journal which
provided an English abstract for articles appearing in each edition but no abstract
in the source language.
Although the translation would not be published in a journai, the intended
audience (which I had yet to ascertain) had the right to expect clear English. The
readers should not have to work hard to get their information. Leaving this
abstract as it was would serve no one any purpose: the intended audience would
scarcely be able to understand it, the original author would lose some standing
112  The Pragmatics of Medical Translation

among an English-reading public, and I would surely not gain in reputation (not
the least of my considerations).
A telephone call to my contact clarified the situation. She had not actually
read the abstract, acknowledged that it was unacceptable, and agreed that I
should create a new abstract after translating the full text of the article. She also
informed me that the junior research scientist who had requested the translation
was writing a newsletter article for non-specialists focusing on the subject of cell
communication. I was now in a reasonable position to confirm the translation
situation, which I confirmed to my client by fax, as follows:

The source text deals with the subject of cell communication. Written by a
senior research scientist, it was intended as a popular scientific article for
an educated general audience. Typical of the periphrastic style of
Bulgarian researchers, the text occasionally lacks coherence and
cohesion. The translated text will be used by a scientist as the basis for a
newsletter article whose audience might be readers of Scientific American.
Structure, flow of information and style should conform to expected
English usage in a newsletter. As an example of the latter, I suggest a title
change from "the language in which cells communicate" to either "the
language of cells," "cell communication," or "cell talk." The abstract,
which does not conform to expected English usage, will be rewritten.

The cooperative advantage of this approach soon took on tangible results.

After receiving the translation, the scientist sent me a copy of the newsletter and
asked if I would be willing in the future to abstract relevant information for the
newsletter rather than translate whole texts. This is a clear example of
cooperative advantage ensuing from the translation situation by which everyone
benefits. I benefited by obtaining a new type of work; the client by saving
money; the scientist by saving time.

The Translator-Client Relationship

Of the several key players in the translation situation, the medical translator
frequently has access only to the client contact, who may be an in-house
translator, a bureau owner, a hospital librarian, a research scholar, or a product
manager. In an ideal world, in-house translators and bureau owners appreciate
the translator's need for information and usually do their own homework to
provide that information before they call an independent translator to take on an
assignment.
For several years I had the distinct pleasure of working for a client who not
only understood the language and content of the texts he sent to me for
translation, but also knew why he wanted them translated. He would often ask
me not to translate but to rewrite the original text, explaining the purpose and
intended audience. He could intelligently discuss the end product and request
changes. And he paid a time-based fee.
 BARBARA REEVES-ELLINGTON  113

intended audience. He could intelligently discuss the end product and request
changes. And he paid a time-based fee.
In a less than ideal world, the medical translator may be dealing with a client
who not only has no understanding of the language or content of the text to be
translated, but no knowledge of the business of translation. In this case, the
translator brings added value to the service by trying to understand the client's
business and educating him or her about translation.
The idea that the translator should "do what the client says" without asking
some pertinent questions is ridiculous. Not only is it bad practice that may lead
to sloppy work habits, it is also likely to lead to poor client relationships as the
client realizes that he or she is not satisfied with the translator's output. After all,
the translator has been hired as a consultant in intercultural communication.
Translators are business partners, not subordinates. It is their job to understand
the client's business as well as their own. Only then can the best professional
advice be offered. If the client chooses not to listen to that advice on a consistent
basis, the work relationship might require reconsideration.
Confirmation of the translation situation in writing not only helps avoid
miscommunication, it may also help the client to refine the purpose of the
translation. Very often, the translator's client contact may not know why the
translation has been commissioned. If the contact is unwilling or unable to get
answers to the translator's questions, and if the translator has no direct access to
the commissioner, the translation situation must still be considered, and the
translator must still analyze the source text situation, consider various options
for the target text, and set arbitrary specifications for the function, purpose and
intended audience of the target text. The translator then has a basis for a strategy.
Once the client receives a copy of the translation situation, he or she can pursue
it with the commissioner.
Choices in translation are dictated by the translation situation. In the final
analysis, a translator offers advice within a given context. Once a translation is
completed according to its initial specifications, it can always be used at some
later date for different purposes. The translator cannot be criticized at that later
date for failing to meet changed product specifications. The translator's work
can be better defended if a copy of the original specifications is retained as proof
that they were agreed to by the client contact.

Conclusion
According to Gadamer, "every translation, even the so-called literal
reproduction, is a sort of interpretation" (Gadamer 1989: 32). Determination of
the translation situation and textual analysis will not eliminate a certain element
of subjectivity in translation, but it lays the groundwork on which the translation
can proceed.
114  The Pragmatics of Medical Translation

When the translator outlines the translation situation in writing to the client,
three things are achieved: 1) the client is given the opportunity to accept or
reconsider expectations; 2) the translator's own strategy for translation is
clarified; 3) the product specifications against which the translation can be
judged are confirmed. If, at some later point, either the client or the
commissioner seeks to criticize the translation, the criticism can be handled
within the framework of the agreed upon translation situation.

REFERENCES

The Asilomar Working Group on Recommendations for Reporting of Clinical

Trials in the Biomedical Literature. 1996. "Checklist of information for
inclusion in reports of clinical trials." Annals of Internal Medicine, 124(8):
741-743.
de Beaugrande Robert and Wolfgang Dressier. 1981. Introduction to Text
Linguistics. London and New York: Longman.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. "Text and Interpretation." [Translated by Dennis J.
Schmidt and Richard Palmer]. In Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer
(eds), Dialogue and Deconstruction. The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter.
Albany, SUNY Press, 21-51.
Hammond, Matt. 1995. "A new wind of quality from Europe: Implications of the
court case cited by Holz-Manttari for the U.S. Translation Industry." In
Morris & Marshall (eds), Translation and the Law. (ATA Scholarly
Monograph Series VIII). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 233-245.
Hatim, Basil B. and Ian Mason. 1990. Discourse and the Translator. London:
Longman.
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. 1993. "Uniform
requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals." Journal of
the American Medical Association, 269: 2282-2286.
Maier, Jane. 1994. "Getting it in writing: The key to problem-free business
relationships." In Deanna L. Hammond (ed), Professional Issues for
Translators and Interpreters. (ATA Scholarly Monograph Series VII).
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 35-46.
Navarro, Fernando A. and Jeffrey Barnes. 1996. Traduction de titulos al inglés en
Medicina Clinica: calidad e influencia del castellano. Medicina Clínica,
106(8): 298-303.
Neubert, Albrecht and Gregory M. Shreve. 1992. Translation as Text. Kent, Ohio:
The Kent State University Press.
Nord, Christiane. 1991. Text Analysis in Translation. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi
B.V.
Reeves-Ellington, Richard. 1993. "Using cultural skills for cooperative advantage
in Japan." Human Organization, 52(2): 203-215.
Rutkow, Ira M. 1993. "How American surgeons introduced radiology into U.S.
medicine." American Journal of Surgery, 165: 252-257.
 BARBARA REEVES-ELLINGTON  115

Snell-Hornby, Mary. 1988. Translation Studies. An Integrated Approach.

Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
The Standards of Reporting Trials Group. 1994. "A proposal for structured
reporting of randomized controlled trials." Journal of the American Medical
Association, 272: 1926-1931.
Toury, Gideon. 1981. "Translated Literature: System, Norm, Performance.
Toward a Target-Text-Oriented Approach to Literary Translation." Poetics
Today, 2(4): 9-27.
Vandereycken, Walter and Ron van Deth. 1990. "A tribute to Lasègue's
description of anorexia nervosa (1873), with completion of its English
translation." British Journal of Psychiatry, 157: 902-908.
Vermeer, Hans J. 1990. Skopos und Trans lationsauftrag-Aufsätze. Heidelberg:
Translatorisches Handeln: 94.
Wetlesen, J. 1989. "The Helsinki Declaration: A misleading Norwegian
translation?" (in Norwegian). Tidsskr Nor Laegeforen, 109(11): 1179-80.
Working Group on Recommendations for Reporting of Clinical Trials in the
Biomedical Literature. 1994. "Call for comments on a proposal to improve
reporting of clinical trials in the biomedical literature." Annals of Internal
Medicine, 121(11): 894-895.
Vicent Montalt Resurrecció and Maria González Davies (ed.s),
Medical Translation Step by Step: Learning by Drafting
(Manchester, UK and Kinderhook, NY: St. Jerome Publishing, 2007)
Ritva Leppihalme,
Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions
(Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1997)
 Kirsten Malmkjaer, ed.
The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics
(London: Routledge, 2018)

10
Genre analysis and translation
Łucja Biel

Introduction and definitions

The term genre [Brit. /ˈʒɒ̃rə/, /ˈʒɒnrə/, /ˈʒɑːnrə/] was borrowed in the early 19th century from
French and its literal meaning is “a kind” (OED, Oxford English Dictionary [online], 2016). It
is one of the key terms of both literary studies and language studies, in particular in various
strands of functional linguistics, such as discourse analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis,
Systemic Functional Linguistics, rhetorical studies, the New Rhetoric, English for Specific
Purposes and applied linguistics. It reflects long-standing attempts to categorise texts into
larger groups and to look for regularities and abstraction above the text level. Examples of
genres include: a novel, a poem, a CV, an annual report, a contract, a user manual, a TV
commercial.
The meaning of “genre” has evolved significantly over the decades and differs depending
on the theoretical framework. First, genre was associated with text types, that is a group
of texts which share a similar form, style and content. One of the well-known definitions of
genre, proposed by Swales, stresses the importance of a communicative purpose: “a class of
communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes
which are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community” (Swales
1990, 58). What is often evoked in the definitions of genre is a conventionalised use of
language – the habitual repeated use of a set of conventions. The fixedness of patterns varies
across genres; for example, a genre of legislation is ritualised and shows a high fixedness of
form and routine formulae, while a genre of TV commercials is much less predictable, more
unconventional and creative. More recent approaches stress that genres tend to be dynamic,
evolving and subject to hybridisation. They are viewed as “flexible macrostructures” in which
obligatory and optional elements occur in a predefined order (cf. Cap and Okulska 2013, 4).
Current approaches to genre have shifted focus from a product to a process and associate
genres strongly with the social context in which they are used. A genre is thus viewed as a
“way of acting and interacting linguistically” (Fairclough 2003, 17, emphasis added), a social
process which is staged and fulfils a specific goal (cf. Martin and Rose 2007, 8) and as social
action which consists in typified ways of acting in recurring social situations (Miller 1984).
What these definitions have in common is a strong emphasis on a repeated use of relatively

151
Łucja Biel

stable, recognisable patterns in a particular discourse community for a specific commun-

icative purpose to realise a social goal. One of the consequences of the conventional use of
language in genres is that it sends recognisable signals of being “in a genre” and creates
expectations in the discourse community about communicative purpose, form and content.
Within Translation Studies the term, “genre”, is often used interchangeably with the term
“text type”, and indeed, the two concepts are related; however, “genre” evokes the social
context of use and associated concepts such as agency, power and ideology, while text types
group texts at a higher level of abstraction, e.g. rhetorical purpose (Hatim and Mason 1990),
cognitive categories (Trosborg 1997, 16) or force of a text (Tsiplakou and Floros 2013). Text
types are also referred to as prototypical text categories, text prototypes and deep structure
genres (see further Tsiplakou and Floros 2013, 121).
Genres enter into relationships and interact with each other. They tend to form larger
hierarchical and non-hierarchical clusters, known under a number of names – most notably,
systems of interdependent genres (cf. Bazerman 1994), genre chains (cf. Fairclough 2003,
216), constellations of genres (Swales 2004, 12), networks of genres (Fairclough 2006, 34) or
genre colonies (Bhatia 2004, 57). A genre cluster may be exemplified with: an invitation to
speak at the symposium, an acceptance, promotional materials with the speaker’s abstract and
biography, the speech itself, slides and handouts and an article submitted to conference
proceedings (cf. Swales 2004, 18). Genres comprised within clusters are interrelated and
linked to each other by a communicative purpose. They are arranged in a more or less fixed
chronological order or in a ranking order (cf. Swales 2004, 13) where one genre is trans-
formed into another. Such transformations may be perceived as “intralingual translation” or
“transgeneric translation” from more to less specialised genres (Ezpeleta Piorno 2012, 168,
174). Take for example the medicinal product information genre system, which includes the
central genre of the summary of product characteristics (SPS) with instructions of use for the
discourse community of healthcare professionals; this specialised document is a basis for
preparing readable documents, such as a patient information leaflet (PIL) and advertising
materials addressed to the lay community of patients (Ezpeleta Piorno 2012, 172). Some
genres within a cluster may control the form and content of other genres or of the entire
cluster – they are known as meta-genres, i.e. “genres about genres” (Giltrow 2001, 190) and
“atmospheres surrounding genres” (Giltrow 2001, 196). An example of a meta-genre is the
EU Interinstitutional Style Guide, which introduces uniform stylistic rules to be applied by the
EU institutions and translators across various genres in the institutional context, e.g. legal
acts, reports, monographs. Finally, hierarchical clusters of genres may involve evaluations –
for instance, in the humanities, monographs tend to be valued more than other academic
genres, such as research papers or reviews.
Two other types of relations which are of interest in genre analysis are intertextuality and
interdiscursivity. Intertextuality shows the relationship of a text to other texts: “how texts
draw upon, incorporate, recontextualize and dialogue with other texts” (Fairclough 2003, 17).
Interdiscursivity analyses embeddings of a text in other genres, genre mixing and hybridis-
ation: it explores “the particular mix of genres, of discourses, and of styles upon which it
draws, and how different genres, discourses or styles are articulated (or ‘worked’) together in
the text” (Fairclough 2003, 218). Thus, to be complete, genre analysis should account not
only for the structural components of a genre and its conventions, but also for the socio-
cultural context, that is, a discourse community and its expectations, communicative purpose,
social goal, as well as relationships with other texts and genres.
The term “genre” should be differentiated from the related term “register”, even though
the concepts which these terms denote overlap to a certain degree and the terms are

152
 Genre analysis

sometimes used interchangeably. Genre and register are two perspectives on analysing texts
(Biber and Conrad 2009, 15). Register may be defined as a functional variety of language
associated with a given situation type (Halliday 2004, 27; see also Biber and Conrad
2009, 6), but there are differing views on what should be comprised in register analysis as
opposed to genre analysis. Within Systemic Functional Linguistics, register analysis is
based on three situational variables: a field (what is going on), tenor (who is taking part) and
mode (the role that the language is playing) (Halliday 1978). In Biber and Conrad’s corpus-
linguistic approach, genre analysis focuses on the rhetorical structure and formatting of the
whole texts, while register analysis focuses on lower-level pervasive lexico-grammatical
patterns in text excerpts (Biber and Conrad 2009, 16). It is worth noting that the latter would
be included as a component of genre analysis in Bhatia’s approach grounded in discourse
analysis (2004, 164–167; see also Biber and Conrad 2009, 21–22 for an overview of
approaches).

Historical perspectives
Genre analysis and genre as such have generally been less prominent in Translation Studies
than within linguistics, but have been gaining in importance since the 1990s. As mentioned in
the previous section, the terms “genres” and “text types” are frequently used interchangeably
by translation scholars.
Text types appear in Holmes’s map of Translation Studies as one of the strands within
“pure” theoretical Translation Studies, that is “text-type (or discourse-type) restricted the-
ories”, which study translations within specific domains, such as legal translation or medical
translation (Holmes 2004 [1972], 187). Translation-related research into text types coincides
with the emergence and growth of the discipline of Translation Studies in the 1970s. Interest
has been particularly strong in Germany within functional theories of translation, especially
Katharina Reiss’s (2000 [1971]) work on text types (Texttyp) and text varieties (Textsorte),
which correspond to Anglo-Saxon genres (cf. Schäffner 2002, 4), in the context of translation
criticism. Reiss (2000 [1971], 17) argues that a text type is the primary determinant of
translation strategies (though not the only one). The relation between text types and trans-
lation strategies was observed by St Jerome as early as in the 4th century CE. Jerome noted that
non-religious texts should be translated more freely than religious texts (Chesterman 1997,
23). Reiss’s work is based on Bühler’s three functions of language, which she relates to the
following text types: informative/content-focused (communication of facts, i.e. a press
release), expressive/form-focused (aesthetic, creative content, i.e. a poem), operative/appeal-
focused (persuasive content, i.e. an advertisement) and audiomedial (a complementary
“hyper-type” – audiovisual texts). According to Reiss, translations should respect the function
of the source text (ST) type. Thus, translations of informative texts should completely transfer
the information content of the ST (“invariance”), translations of expressive texts should
transfer artistic aspects of the ST and translations of operative texts should have the same
psychological effect on target readers’ behaviour as they have on ST readers’ behaviour
(Reiss 2000[1971], 24–47). Although Reiss’s contribution is important in that it brought the
communicative purpose of translations into the spotlight and stimulated discussion about text
types, it has been criticised for a number of reasons. Above all, given the hybrid and mul-
tifunctional nature of texts, Reiss’s classification of text types is far too rigid and general and,
hence, it has limited applicability in practice (see Hatim and Mason 1990, 138; Fawcett 1997,
104–111; and Munday 2001, 77 for a more detailed overview of the criticism of Reiss’s
approach).

153
Łucja Biel

Research into text types was undertaken in the following decades by a number of scholars
who proposed more refined categorisations based on varied criteria. For example, Mary Snell-
Hornby’s integrated approach places text types (prototypes) along a continuum without
discrete boundaries, especially between literary and non-literary translation (Snell-Hornby
1995 [1988], 31). With genres being one of the prominent markers of lexicographical lit-
erature on specialised (LSP) translation texts (cf. Rogers 2015, 31), text typologies and genre-
based classifications have been especially prolific in specialised translation. One of these is
Göpferich’s (1995) pragmatic text typology applicable to the translation of scientific and
technical texts. Göpferich (1995, 320) criticises “the invariance requirement” to fully transfer
the information content in informative texts in so far as they apply to scientific and technical
domains. She argues that translation strategies should not be recommended for global text
categories but for text types with similar communicative functions (1995, 322).
With genre being one of the main analytical tools in discourse analysis, the growing interest
in genre (rather than text type) was a natural consequence of the application of discourse
analytical methods to Translation Studies in the late 1980s and 1990s (James 1989; Hatim and
Mason 1990; 1997; Neubert and Shreve 1992; Trosborg 1997; 2002). James (1989) was
among the first to promote the use of the concept of genre in Translation Studies, in particular
in translator training. The application of genre analysis to translation intensified, following
rapid developments stimulated by seminal books within the English for Specific Purposes
approach by Swales (1990; 2004) and Bhatia (1993; 2004). The growing interest in research
on genres is confirmed by Zhang et al.’s (2015, 229) bibliometric study of discourse-analysis
research on translation in eight major translation journals in the period 1990–2013. The study
shows that interest in genre and register analysis peaked between 1996 and 2005, before being
overtaken by interest in such extralinguistic factors as power, ideology and context. Overall,
the 1990s mark a shift in research into cross-linguistic differences between comparable genres
in the source language (SL) and the target language (TL), especially for specialised translation
purposes.
Hatim and Mason (1990; 1997), UK-based translation scholars, applied discourse analysis
and Critical Discourse Analysis to their model of translation based on the genre-text-
discourse triad which reflects the socio-textual practices of discourse communities. For Hatim
and Mason (1990, 69; 1997, 18), texts realise users’ rhetorical purposes, genres are “con-
ventionalised forms of texts” adjusted to the goals of social occasions, while discourses reflect
attitudes. Even though they note that genre may be a less important variable than the social
context of translation (1990, 13), Hatim and Mason (1990, 69–70) identify genre and genre
membership as key factors which affect the translator’s decision-making process. Generic
conventions are indices of cultures and the translator is bound by “generic constraints” in
translation related to communicative purposes, rhetorical mode and intentionality behind a
specific genre in the source and target language. Hatim and Mason (1990, 140) propose their
own typology of texts, seeing text types as “the translator’s focus” and “a conceptual
framework which enables us to classify texts in terms of communicative intentions serving an
overall rhetorical purpose”. Hatim and Mason’s (1990, 153–160) typology is based on a
continuum from “extremely detached and non-evaluative” texts to texts which are “extremely
involved and highly evaluative”. Their classification of texts (text types) for translation
purposes is based on the notions of rhetorical purpose and dominant contextual focus:
“argumentation” (which involves evaluation), “exposition” (presentation in a non-evaluative
way) and “instruction” (which intends to evoke certain behaviour; contracts, legislation).
The concept of genre was also used in translation quality assessment models, most notably
in Juliane House’s functional-pragmatic model of translation evaluation, based on Halliday’s

154
 Genre analysis

Systemic Functional Linguistics and discourse analysis. House’s (1977; 2001, 247) model
involves the assessment of the ST and target text (TT) according to the four-tiered analytical
model at the level of language/text, register, genre and textual function. As House (2001, 248)
notes, genre allocates a given ST to a higher-level category of texts with a common com-
municative purpose and provides information on “deeper” structures: “While register cap-
tures the connection between texts and their ‘microcontext,’ Genre connects texts with the
‘macrocontext’ of the linguacultural community in which a text is embedded”. Chesterman
(1997, 65) links the concept of genre with expectancy norms, arguing that evaluations of
translations are based on expectancy norms which, in turn, are shaped by target readers’
expectations about genre and discourse conventions.
Another wave of interest in genre analysis was brought about by work on corpora in the
2000s, following the rapid development of corpus linguistics in the 1980s and its introduction
to Translation Studies in the 1990s. Corpora are large electronic collections of texts which are
studied with dedicated software. Corpora show high sensitivity to genres and other categ-
orisations of texts as, in most cases, corpus design is genre based and is guided by the cri-
terion of representativeness; that is, a corpus must be representative of a genre its creator
intends to study (cf. Olohan 2004, 45–47). Translation Studies rely on two types of corpora:
comparable corpora, which are monolingual corpora of translated and non-translated texts;
and parallel corpora, which are corpora with STs aligned with their translations. Research
comparing translations against non-translations in the same language was pioneered by Baker
(1995) with a view to identifying distinctive features of translations (see also “Current
debates” section below). It inspired a number of scholars to engage in corpus-based studies
which have started to produce quantitative data on how translations differ from non-trans-
lations in terms of generic conventions in various domains, e.g. in localisation (Jim
enez-
Crespo 2012) or in legal translation (Biel 2014). Corpora are also applied in practically
oriented research into genres: for example, contrastive genre analyses conducted by the
GENTT (Textual Genres in Translation) research group (Borja Albi 2013). Overall, genre-
based corpus studies are still an emerging field, which has brought genre analysis into the
spotlight again.

Core issues and topics

While the main preoccupation of genre analysis in linguistics is to identify how genres differ
from one another, translation-oriented genre analysis has focused on identifying differences in
generic structures, conventions and expectations across languages and cultures. This area is
sometimes referred to as contrastive rhetoric, contrastive textology and contrastive analysis of
genres and it is supported by ample evidence that conventions differ not only across genres
but also within the same genre across languages and cultures as they are shaped by distinct
discourse communities (cf. Hatim and Mason 1990, 97; Nord 1991, 19; Baker 1992, 183,
186; Colina 1997, 336). Genres may be differently realised linguistically across cultures and,
hence, generic conventions are culture-specific to some extent: “For the translator it is
important to be aware of the fact that although the same genres may exist in different cultures,
they may in fact be – and often are – structured or composed in different ways” (Trosborg
2002, 14). Differences may for example concern cohesive devices (Baker 1992, 190), con-
junctions (Baker 1992, 196), tolerance of repetitions (Hatim and Mason 1990, 97), routine
formulaic phrases in patents (Göpferich 1995, 321), referencing patterns as regards the use of
pronouns instead of full names (Baker 1992, 183) or personal forms of address in school
books (Göpferich 1995, 322), to name but a few. Differences have also been noted at higher

155
Łucja Biel

levels of generic organisation, that is the conceptual organisation of content and functional
stages known as moves (Rogers 2015, 34, see also the section “Main research methods”
below). For example, the genre of legislation contains only normative provisions in some
countries (e.g. in Poland), while in other legal systems it may also contain the enacting for-
mula (the UK – BE IT ENACTED by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the
advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present
Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows), lengthy non-normative
preambles which include citations with legal grounds (Having regard to the Treaty estab-
lishing the European Union) and recitals with political considerations to legitimise enact-
ments (cf. Biel 2014, 77–78). Finally, some genres do not have any formal counterparts in a
target culture, e.g. the Arabic verse form, the qasidah, and may “resist” translation (Bassnett
2006, 90). Some genres are not only remote culturally from the target discourse community,
but may also be remote in time – see Bassnett (2006, 92) on the problem of translating a “dead
genre”, e.g. an epic poem such as the Iliad, for a new generation of readers.
A related topic is how generic differences between the SL and the TL are approached in
translation. As Baker (1992, 188) notes, the standard situation is to adjust the translation to
TL textual conventions, in order to ensure “genre-fidelity” (James 1989). However, the
recommendation to adjust to TL conventions depends on the level of generic organisation.
Hatim (2001, 123) observes that “the translator has limited scope to modify genres in
translation, possibilities nevertheless exist at the level of genre-upholding lexical selection
(collocations, imagery, etc.)”. Thus, adjustments may be expected at the level of phras-
eology and routine formulae; translators are less likely to intervene to rearrange the original
information flow and moves. It is however argued that if the translator fails to adapt the
TT to generic conventions, including changes in textual organisation, it may have an
adverse impact on comprehension: “the text’s rhetorical purpose will not be achieved, and
ultimately, processing of the text as a coherent, cohesive whole may be difficult” (Colina
1997, 337). Research into how text types are skewed or shifted in translation was identified
by Holmes (2004 [1972], 188) as early as in 1972 as an important question to be explored by
translation scholars. This topic was also raised by James (1989, 31) as “genre violation”,
resulting from distortions of the ST rhetorical structure in the translation process and by
Hatim and Munday (2004, 88) as “genre shifts”.
The degree of adaptation to TL conventions will certainly vary across genres. While
certain relatively fixed genres, such as contracts or school diplomas, do not permit much
adaptation above the phrase level, promotional genres, such as company websites or
commercials, might require a much higher degree of adaptation above the phrase level,
including the omission or reduction of some stages (functional elements of content) which
are irrelevant to the target audience. These adaptations are also referred to as transediting,
i.e. a combination of translation and editing (cf. Stetting 1989, 371). They involve what
House refers to as covert translation, that is the application of a cultural filter so as to ensure
that texts are not recognised as translations but may function as independent texts in the
target culture (cf. House 1977; 2001). Some genres, e.g. political speeches, require the
opposite – overt translation (House 1977). If a genre does not exist in the target culture,
the translator may opt for introducing a new genre or make adaptations to existing, similar
genres. As Bassnett (2006, 90) notes, such adaptations may be assessed negatively in lit-
erary translation as they would “subvert the source to fit into the horizon of expectation of
the target readers”.
This takes us to the topic of how genres impact the translator’s decision-making process.
As noted by Reiss in the early 1970s, text types affect the translator’s behaviour. With the

156
 Genre analysis

attention shifting from text types to genres, genres have been found to be among the key
determinants of the translator’s decision-making process and the choice of translation
strategies and techniques. This may be illustrated by the role of genre in journalistic
translation. Informative genres, such as a news report, where the personal style is reduced,
allow ample space for rearrangement and changes vis-à-vis the ST while argumentative
genres – such as the opinion article, the column – require more faithful renderings (Bielsa
2007, 48).
An important area of studies includes the link between translation and genre hybridity,
genre transformations, as well as the transfer of new genres via translation. As Bassnett
notes, translation has been a carrier of new genres throughout centuries, such as the sonnet
or the haiku, and has contributed to genre shifts, which may be exemplified by the
12th- and 13th-century shift from epic to lyric and romance: “[t]he history of genre shifts
is intimately bound up with translation” (Bassnett 2006, 89). Translation may also
trigger genre transformations in the target culture. It may be illustrated with the popularity
of the Harry Potter books, which “resurrected a genre that educationalists felt was
totally unacceptable for contemporary children” (Bassnett 2006, 94), namely the school
story. Another example is a CV: up till the mid 1990s a standard Polish CV was called
_
“Zyciorys” [lit. “life story”] and was a first-person narrative (I was born on : : : in : : : ).
This was transformed, influenced by the inflow of Western European CVs, into a deper-
sonalised bulleted template called “CV” with a partially different selection of personal
information.
Another area of interest is the use of genre analysis as a pedagogical tool in translator
training, especially as regards domain-restricted specialised translation. This topic will be
addressed in more detail in the section on “Implications for practice”.
The final topic to be covered in this section is translation, both literary and specialised, as
genre. Literary translation is regarded as a distinct literary genre governed by its own norms and
purposes (Ortega y Gasset 2004 [1937], 61; see also James 1989, 35); literary translation implies
loss and it “is not the work, but a path toward the work” (Ortega y Gasset 2004 [1937], 61).
Within specialised translation a related concept of transgenre was introduced, that is a genre
which is “exclusive to translation” and differs from the source genre and target genre (Borja,
García Izquierdo and Montalt 2009, 62, 68).

Main research methods

Genre analysis describes distinctive features of genres, known as generic conventions, gen-
eric structure, as well as social, communicative, cultural, cognitive and ideological factors
behind the use of genres. Genres are researched in discourse analysis and Critical Discourse
Analysis within three main approaches: English for Specific Purposes (ESP), the Sydney
School and the New Rhetoric (Flowerdew and Wan 2010, 79). The ESP approach, which is
represented by Swales (1990; 2004) and Bhatia (1993; 2004), is oriented towards preparing
learning resources for non-native speakers of English. It has developed a multi-perspective
model of genre analysis linking moves (stages) to communicative purposes of a genre. The
Sydney School, which shows similarities to the ESP approach, emerged from Hallidayan
Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin and Rose 2007; 2008) and was also interested in the
identification of “generic staging”. The New Rhetoric, which developed in North America
with interest in native writing, focuses on social purposes, shifting attention from linguistic to
ethnographic methodologies (cf. Flowerdew and Wan 2010, 79–81 for a more detailed
overview of these approaches).

157
Łucja Biel

Genre analysis is conducted with the use of mainly qualitative and, more recently, with
quantitative corpus methods, depending on the aspect of genre organisation to be studied.
The traditional qualitative approach applies top-down analysis: it starts with the conceptual
macrostructure of a genre and moves towards the microstructure, lower-level realisations in
the form of fixed patterns. The more recent quantitative approaches proceed in a bottom-up
fashion, starting with the analysis of lexico-grammatical patterns and moving towards
larger units.
Genre analysis focuses on “the conventional, formulaic, routine labour-saving aspect of
language use” as opposed to creative aspects (James 1989, 32). One of the main goals of
genre analysis is to uncover the generalisable structure/format of genres (cf. Hatim and
Mason 1990, 171) which they impose on texts. The conceptual structure of a genre
consists of functional stages known as “moves” and their steps, which were proposed as
basic units of a genre by Swales (1990). Working on research articles, Swales introduced
the CARS (Create a Research Space) model with three moves in article introductions:
Move 1: Establishing a territory; Move 2: Establishing a niche; Move 3: Occupying the
niche (Swales 1990, 140–141). Moves and their steps realise the communicative purpose
of a genre and they appear in a certain order in a text. They may be organised in a
chronological or spatial order or from general to specific or as problems-methods-solutions
structures; the conventional arrangement of content may differ across cultures (cf. Rogers
2015, 33). Some genres may have a well-defined predictable generic structure, while
less ritualised genres may be more flexible with optional and varied stages (cf. Fairclough
2003, 72–74).
Unless we study stable fixed formulaic genres, the level of lexico-grammatical patterns of
a genre is best explored quantitatively with electronic corpus analysis software rather than
through manual analysis. The advantage of electronic analysis is that it is faster, more
reliable and accurate, and can be conducted on a much larger corpus than manual analysis
allows. While discourse analysis methods involve close reading of usually a very limited
number of texts, corpus methods involve computer-assisted vertical readings of many texts.
One of the basic methods is keywords analysis, which identifies lexemes with a markedly
higher frequency in a specific genre against a reference corpus. Keywords are thus a useful
tool in identifying distinctive features of a genre (cf. Scott 2013, 199). Corpora are also
efficient in identifying genre-unique regularities at the phrase level – recurrent lexico-
grammatical patterns which are typical of a given genre. These include collocations, routine
formulae and lexical bundles (n-grams). A comprehensive framework for corpus-driven
analyses of lexico-grammatical patterns across registers/genres was proposed by Biber and
Conrad (2009, 215–246) under the name of Multi-Dimensional (MD) register analysis. The
method compares: (1) the distribution of vocabulary (common versus rare nouns), (2) part-of-
speech classes (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, personal pronouns, prepositions), (3) semantic
categories for word classes (e.g. activity verbs, mental verbs), (4) grammatical features
(nominalisations, past and present tense verbs, passive voice), (5) syntactic structures (relative
clauses, complement clauses) and (6) lexico-grammatical combinations (Biber and Conrad
2009, 226–227).
It should be remembered though that corpus-based genre analysis has been criticised for its
preoccupation with lexico-grammatical patterns at the sentence level and its failure to suf-
ficiently address certain textual, pragmatic, rhetorical or discursive phenomena, such as
interdiscursivity, intertextuality or genre hybridisation, which require qualitative rather than
quantitative analysis (cf. Olohan 2004, 425 for a more detailed overview of criticism). Despite
some attempts to annotate corpora, these aspects still pose technical and methodological

158
 Genre analysis

challenges and the analysis of features which go beyond the sentence level needs to be
complemented with traditional qualitative analysis.
Borja, García Izquierdo and Montalt (2009) propose a useful template of genre description
for researching specialised translation. The template covers both the lexico-grammatical
patterns, the macrostructure, relations to other genres and the communicative situation:

1. Name of a genre, e.g. EU legislation

2. Subgenre(s), if any, and their structure: e.g. (a) primary legislation – treaties;
(b) secondary legislation – regulations, directives, decisions, soft law (opinions,
recommendations)
3. Communicative situation: register, domain, mode, participants and the discursive com-
munity, function, social goal
4. Lexico-grammatical patterns: lexemes, terminology, collocations, typical grammatical
patterns (nouns and nominalisations; the verb group: modal verbs, auxiliaries, tenses,
passives, impersonal constructions, mood; adverbials, deixis; cohesion)
5. Macrostructure: composition of the text, moves and steps
6. Relation to other genres: systems of genres, genre chains, meta-genres
7. Comments: bibliography, websites.
(cf. Borja, García Izquierdo and Montalt 2009, 65)

This template is a basis for further analysis of three complementary dimensions of genre
analysis in this model: the formal level (conventionalised forms), the communicative and
sociocultural level and the cognitive level (the participants’ purposes) (Borja, García
Izquierdo and Montalt 2009, 65; Borja Albi 2013, 36–37).
A much more extensive model of genre analysis, proposed by Bhatia, is the multi-perspective
model of applied genre analysis (1993, revised version 2004). Bhatia’s model consists of the
following seven steps:

1. placing the given genre-text in a situational context (a genre-text is a representative

example of the genre studied) on the basis of the researcher’s prior experience and
background knowledge;
2. surveying existing literature;
3. refining the situational/contextual analysis through the following steps: defining the
author of the text, its audience, their relationship and goals; defining the historical,
socio-cultural, philosophical, and occupational situation of the discourse community;
identifying the network of related texts and linguistic traditions which influence the
genre; identifying the topic, domain and extra-textual reality of a text;
4. corpus design: defining a genre and subgenre; defining criteria for selecting texts for the
corpus;
5. textual, intertextual and interdiscursive perspective: analysis of lexico-grammatical pat-
terns; analysis of text-patterning or textualisation, cognitive or discourse structuring
(moves), analysis of intertextuality and interdiscursivity;
6. ethnographic analysis (observations, narrative accounts, etc.) of practices in the discourse
community: physical circumstances that affect the nature and structure of genre; critical
moments of engagement and interaction; the social structure, history, beliefs and goals of
the discourse community;
7. studying the institutional context and rules.
(Bhatia 1993, 22–36; 2004, 164–167)

159
Łucja Biel

This holistic model applies varied methodological tools to account for the complexity of
genres and incorporates the multi-dimensional perspective which includes the textual per-
spective, the ethnographic perspective, the socio-cognitive perspective (integrity of the sys-
tem of genres) and the socio-critical perspective (ideology and power) (Bhatia 2004, 163).
Since translation-oriented genre analysis usually involves time-consuming cross-cultural
contrasts of use of the same genre in the SL and TL culture, it may not be feasible to apply the
multi-perspective model fully in practice. Nevertheless, if the analysis is selective, a
researcher should be aware of its limitations and aspects which are left out.

Current debates
The major debate involving genre analysis concerns translation universals. It was proposed by
Baker in the 1990s that translations are marked by distinctive universal features (“translation
universals”) which may be products of translation process constraints and which are inde-
pendent of language pairs, genres, cultures and translation norms. The features were hypoth-
esised to include: explicitation, simplification, disambiguation, normalisation/conservatism,
standardisation and levelling out (Baker 1995). The major contested aspect is the universality of
the features of translated texts and their resulting independence of other variables. It has been
suggested that cross-genre comparisons are needed to determine how features of translations are
influenced by genres and text types (cf. Olohan 2004, 191). Recent studies (Delaere, De Sutter
and Plevoets 2012; De Sutter, Delaere and Plevoets 2012) seem to confirm that genre is one of
the important determinants of variation which impact features of translations: for example some
genres may trigger the use by translators of more explicitation (e.g. leaflets), while others may
be more prone to standardisation (legal genres).

Future directions
The main future direction of genre analysis is likely to be further work on genre variation and
contrastive genre analysis using electronically analysable corpora, which have already
brought new life and foci into genre analysis. This direction was suggested as early as 1995 by
Kussmaul (1995, 83): “it would be very helpful if : : : conventions and the differences
between conventions in the source and target language were known. For this reason we should
encourage corpus-based contrastive studies”. Some empirical data have been provided across
different genres over the years; however, this has mainly been for language pairs involving
English, and a great deal of work still needs to be done, especially within specialised trans-
lation and for different language pairs. House (2013, 56) observes that such empirical data are
needed if Translation Studies are to advance theoretically: “there is a deplorable lack of
systematic contrastive pragmatic work on register and genre variation, which renders a solid
theoretical underpinning of translation studies in this respect next to impossible”.

Implications for practice

Genres are of relevance not only for translation theory but also for translator training and practice.
The translator’s specialisation may be limited to certain genres within the specialised domain,
e.g. some translators may translate only novels, poems, drama, financial statements, press
releases or financial statements. In reality, however, most translators handle more than one genre.
The pedagogical value of genres has been promoted within the English for Specific
Purposes approach (Swales 1990, 213; Bhatia 1993, 18) and transplanted into Translation

160
 Genre analysis

Studies. Genre analysis and, in particular, analysis which enhances the knowledge of generic
conventions, has been a key component of (specialised) translator training for many years.
The knowledge of ST generic formats is useful for interpretative purposes while the know-
ledge of TT generic formats is important for production purposes (Rogers 2015, 32). James
(1989) argues for genre analysis to be integrated into translator training programmes. He
recommends the “text-typological” approach to syllabus design to ensure that trainees have
sufficient exposure to both central and hybrid genres. Knowledge of genres and trainees’
expectations about generic formats will help them to shift from bottom-up to more advanced
top-down textual processing during the translation process (1989, 36). Trainees should also
learn how to conduct genre identification and ST and TT genre analysis, which should take
place at the beginning of the translation task (1989, 36–37). The importance of genres (text
types) as didactic tools in translator training has been emphasised by a number of translation
scholars since the 1990s (cf. Emery 1991; Kussmaul 1995, 149; Göpferich 1995, 322; Hatim
and Mason 1997, 179–198; Chesterman 1997, 161; Colina 1997; García Izquierdo 2000; Hatim
2001, 171–183; Borja Albi 2013, 33). Göpferich (1995, 322–323) argues that being grouped
according to similar communicative-pragmatic features, text types offer similar translation
difficulties, which can be covered systematically in this approach. Experimenting with the
translation of cookbook recipes, Colina (1997) has demonstrated that trainees exposed to
explicit instruction on generic conventions (“contrastive rhetoric”) show a substantial
improvement in their translations. Borja Albi (2013, 34) emphasises that competence in genres
and genre systems enables trainees to socialise as “communication agents” in the specialised
domain and to avoid being perceived as outsiders in the professional discourse community.
The internalisation of genre knowledge is seen as an important component for professional
translators to perform effectively (cf. Trosborg 1997, 17; Rogers 2015, 32). The need to
incorporate genre analysis into training is reflected in the incorporation of genres as an
integral component of translation competence subsumed under various sub-competences:

 In the European Master’s in Translation (EMT) model of competences for professional

translators, experts in multilingual and multimedia communication, it is part of the textual
dimension of the intercultural competence which reflects the translator’s ability to com-
pare discursive practices in the SL and TL, “Knowing how to compose a document in
accordance with the conventions of the genre and rhetorical standards” (Gambier 2009).
 In the PACTE (2003, 91) model, it is part of bilingual sub-competence which comprises the
textual knowledge of the SL and the TL, including knowledge of genres and their conventions.

Genre analysis is also used in the preparation of resources for translators. These include
genre-based corpora and generic templates to be used during the translation process. A special
type of resource is DIY (ad hoc, disposable) corpora, which are genre-based and which are
built quickly by translators through web harvesting, and analysed to complete a translation
assignment (Varantola 2002). Much more complex and targeted tools based on genre analysis
were developed within the practically oriented action project, the JudGENTT online know-
ledge management system for court translators. The project applies genres as reusable tools
“for accessing and reusing conceptual, textual and linguistic information for managing
specialised communication” (Borja Albi 2013, 37). The project is grounded in corpus-based
genre system analysis and individual genre analysis in four legal systems. The value of the
project lies in the integration of all resources, including the corpora, genre matrices (tem-
plates), glossaries, bibliographies and contextual information on criminal procedure, in one
place on an online searchable platform (Borja Albi 2013).

161
Łucja Biel

Further reading
Chapter 2, “Criticism and the source language text” in: Reiss, K., 2000 [1971]. Translation Criticism –
the Potentials and Limitations: Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment. Trans-
lated by E. F. Rhodes. Manchester: St Jerome.
A classic text which proposes a translation-oriented text typology as a prerequisite of translation
criticism and a determinant of translation method.
Chapter 4 “Translating and Language as Discourse” and Chapter 8 “Text Type as the Translators’
Focus” in: Hatim, B., and Mason, I., 1990. Discourse and the Translator. Harlow: Longman.
This influential book introduced discourse analysis methods to Translation Studies. Chapter 4 discusses
the text-genre-discourse triad, as well as generic constraints in translation. Chapter 8 proposes a new
text typology based on a predominant contextual focus.
Chapter 4 “Genres and generic structure” in: Fairclough, N., 2003. Analysing Discourse. Textual
Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
This chapter focuses on how genres structure texts and links genre analysis to social action. It analyses
the relationship between a text and a genre and illustrates the analysis of generic structure.
Chapter 6 “Integrating research methods” in: Bhatia, V. K., 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse. London:
Continuum.
This chapter discusses the goals of genre analysis, proposes a holistic multi-perspective model of genre
analysis with a step-by-step procedure and integrates varied research methods to account for the complexity
of genres. The final section illustrates how the model may be applied to analyse publishers’ blurbs.
Borja, A., García Izquierdo, I. and Montalt, V. 2009. “Research Methodology in Specialized Genres for
Translation Purposes”. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 3(1), pp. 57–77.
This article presents a model of genre analysis which is adjusted to research on specialised translation. It
describes three complementary dimensions of genre analysis: the formal dimension, the communicative
dimension and the cognitive dimension, both from the monolingual and multilingual (contrastive)
perspective, and contains useful advice and ideas for researching genres for translation purposes.

Related topics
Theories of linguistics and of translation and interpreting; Semantics and translation; Rhetoric, oratory,
interpreting and translation; Discourse analysis, interpreting and translation; Text linguistics, translating,
and interpreting; Narrative analysis and translation; Stylistics and translation; Language for Specific
Purposes and translation; Sociolinguistics, translation and interpreting; Language, interpreting, and
translation in the news media; Corpus linguistics, translation and interpreting.

References
Baker, M. 1992. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge.
Baker, M. 1995. Corpora in translation studies: an overview and some suggestions for future research.
Target 7(2), pp. 223–243.
Bassnett, S. 2006. “Translating Genre”. In Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism, edited by
G. Dowd, L. Stevenson and J. Strong, 85–89. Bristol: Intellect.
Bazerman, C. H. 1994. “Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions”. In Genre and the
New Rhetoric, edited by A. Freedman and P. Medway, 79–101. London: Taylor and Francis.
Bhatia, V. K. 1993. Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Continuum.
Bhatia, V. K. 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse. London: Continuum.
Biber, D. and Conrad, S. 2009. Register, Genre and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

162
 Genre analysis

Biel, Ł. 2014. Lost in the Eurofog: The Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Bielsa, E. 2007. Translation in global news agencies. Target, 19(1), pp. 35–55.
Borja Albi, A. 2013. “A Genre Analysis Approach to the Study of the Translation of Court Docu-
ments”. In Linguistica Antverpiensia 12, special issue on Research Models and Methods in Legal
Translation, edited by Ł. Biel and J. Engberg, 34–53. Available from: [Link]
[Link]/LANS-TTS/article/view/235 [Accessed 2 January 2016].
Borja, A., García Izquierdo, I. and Montalt, V. 2009. Research methodology in specialized genres for
translation purposes. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 3(1), pp. 57–77.
Cap, P. and Okulska, U. 2013. “Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: An Introduction”. In
Analyzing Genres in Political Communication, edited by P. Cap and U. Okulska, 1–26. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Chesterman, A. 1997. Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Colina, S. 1997. Contrastive rhetoric and text-typological conventions in translation teaching. Target
9(2), pp. 335–353.
De Sutter, G., Delaere, I. and Plevoets, K. 2012. “Lexical Lectometry in Corpus-Based Translation
Studies. Combining Profile-Based Correspondence Analysis and Logistic Regression Mod-
elling”. In Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A Practical Guide to
Descriptive Translation Research, edited by M. P. Oakes and M. Ji, 325–346. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Delaere, I., De Sutter, G. and Plevoets, K. 2012. Is translated language more standardized than non-
translated language? Using profile-based correspondence analysis for measuring linguistic distances
between language varieties. Target 24(2), pp. 203–224.
Emery, P. 1991. Text classification and text analysis in advanced translation teaching. Meta: Trans-
lators’ Journal 36(4), pp. 567–577.
Ezpeleta Piorno, P. 2012. An example of genre shift in the medicinal product information genre system.
Linguistica Antverpiensia New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 11, pp. 139–159.
Fairclough, N. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, N. 2006. Language and Globalization. London: Routledge.
Fawcett, P. 1997. Translation and Language: Linguistic Theories Explained. Manchester: St Jerome.
Flowerdew, J. and Wan, A. 2010. The linguistic and the contextual in applied genre analysis: The case
of the company audit report. English for Specific Purposes 29, pp. 78–93.
Gambier, Y., ed. 2009. Competences for Professional Translators, Experts in Multilingual and Multi-
media Communication [online]. Available from: [Link]
emt/key_documents/emt_competences_translators_en.pdf [Accessed 25 September 2015].
García Izquierdo, I. 2000. The concept of text type and its relevance to translator training. Target 12(2),
pp. 283–295.
Giltrow, J. 2001. “Meta-Genre”. In The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and
Change, edited by R. M. Coe, L. Lingard and T. Teslenko, 187–206. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
Göpferich, S. 1995. A pragmatic classification of LSP texts in science and technology. Target 7(2), pp.
305–326.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as a Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and
Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Revised by Ch. M. I. M. Matthiessen.
London: Hodder Education.
Hatim, B. 2001. Teaching and Researching Translation. Harlow: Longman.
Hatim, B. and Mason, I. 1990. Discourse and the Translator. Harlow: Longman.
Hatim, B. and Mason, I. 1997. The Translator as Communicator. London: Routledge.
Hatim, B. and Munday, J. 2004. Translation: An Advanced Resource Book. London: Routledge.
Holmes, J. S. 2004[1972]. “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies”. In The Translation Studies
Reader. 2nd ed., edited by L. Venuti, 180–192. New York: Routledge.
House, J. 1977. A model for assessing translation quality. Meta: Translators’ Journal 22(2), pp. 103–109.

163
Łucja Biel

House, J. 2001. Translation quality assessment: linguistic description versus social evaluation. Meta:
Translators’ Journal 46(2), pp. 243–257.
House, J. 2013. Towards a new linguistic-cognitive orientation in translation studies. Target 25(1),
pp. 46–60.
James, C. 1989. Genre analysis and the translator. Target 1(1), pp. 29–41.
Jim
enez-Crespo, M. A. 2012. Loss in translation: a contrastive genre study of original and localised
non-profit US websites. The Journal of Specialised Translation 17, pp. 136–163.
Kussmaul, P. 1995. Training the Translator. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. 2007. Genre Relations: Mapping Culture. London: Equinox.
Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. 2008. Working with Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause. London:
Bloomsbury.
Miller, C. R. 1984. Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, pp. 151–167.
Munday, J. 2001. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. London: Routledge.
Neubert, A. and Shreve, G. M. 1992. Translation as Text. Kent, US: Kent State University Press.
Nord, C. 1991. Text Analysis in Translation: Theory, Methodology, and Didactic Applications of a Model
for Translation-Oriented Text Analysis. Translated by C. Nord and P. Sparrow. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
OED Oxford English Dictionary [online]. 2016. Oxford University Press. Available from: [Link].
com [Accessed 2 February 2016].
Olohan, M. 2004. Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. London: Routledge.
Ortega y Gasset, J. 2004[1937]. “The misery and the splendor of translation” [Translated by E. Gamble
Miller]. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, 2000, 49–53. New York: Routledge.
PACTE, 2003. “Building a Translation Competence Model”. In Triangulating Translation, edited by
F. Alves, 43–66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Reiss, K. 2000[1971]. Translation Criticism – The Potentials and Limitations: Categories and Criteria
for Translation Quality Assessment. Translated by E. F. Rhodes. Manchester: St Jerome.
Rogers, M. 2015. Specialised Translation: Shedding the “Non-literary” Tag. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Schäffner, C. 2002. “Editorial”. In The Role of Discourse Analysis for Translation and in Translator
Training, edited by C. Schäffner, 1–8. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Scott, M. 2013. WordSmith Tools 6.0. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.
Snell-Hornby, M. 1995[1988]. Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Revised ed. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Stetting, K. 1989. “Transediting: A New Term for Coping with the Grey Area between Editing and
Translating”. In Proceedings from the Fourth Nordic Conference for English Studies, edited by
G. Cale, K. Haastrup and A. Lykke Jakobsen, 371–382. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.
Swales, J. M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Swales, J. M. 2004. Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Trosborg, A. 1997. “Text Typology: Register, Genre and Text Type”. In Text Typology and Translation,
edited by A. Trosborg, 3–23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Trosborg, A. 2002. “Discourse Analysis as Part of Translator Training”. In The Role of Discourse
Analysis for Translation and in Translator Training, edited by C. Schäffner, 9–52. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.
Tsiplakou, S. and Floros, G. 2013. Never mind the text types, here’s textual force: towards a pragmatic
reconceptualization of text type. Journal of Pragmatics 45, pp. 119–130.
Varantola, K. 2002. Disposable corpora as intelligent tools in translation. Cadernos de Tradução IX –
Tradução e Corpora 1(9), pp. 171–189.
Zhang, M., Pan, H., Chen, X. and Luo, T. 2015. Mapping discourse analysis in translation studies via
bibliometrics: a survey of journal publications. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 23(2),
pp. 223–239.

164
 Kirsten Malmkjaer, ed.
The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics
(London: Routledge, 2018)

11
Text linguistics, translating, and
interpreting
Gregory M. Shreve

Introduction
Any attempt to explicate the relationship of text linguistics to translation and interpreting has to
proceed from an understanding of the nature of text, and of the key features that distinguish
texts from non-texts. This is no mean undertaking, but without engaging in an extensive review
of the scholarship on this issue some aspects of texts – features that make a text a text – can be
identified.
Texts are commonly understood as units of language larger than a single sentence, typically
comprised of several written sentences or spoken utterances grouped together in a particular
sequence. In this contribution we do not make a significant distinction between the notion of
text and the notion of discourse, using the former term to refer to both. Similarly, one could
substitute the word “utterance” for the word “sentence” in the rest of this contribution, and
hereafter we use “sentence” to mean both.
The grouping of sentences we call a text is non-random; the sentences have been brought
together deliberately for communicative purposes by a text producer in order to carry out a
“definable communicative function” (Crystal 2008, 260). The properties of the grouping can
vary according to the communicative setting in which it is used; variation in these properties
can be used to classify texts into different types for instance, an endeavour called text typology
pursued both in text linguistics and Translation Studies.
Some of the properties of a text that distinguish it from texts of other types are related to the
nature of structural or formal connections across sentence boundaries. Other properties are
semantic, involving the meanings evoked by individual sentences in the text and how those
meanings are connected to one another to produce a coherent whole. Texts also have prag-
matic properties; they are articulated in a socio-cultural setting between social actors enacting
definable social roles. Texts can thus be seen as “interaction structures” (Neubert and Shreve
1992, 43) where the formal and semantic elements of a text are intentionally structured in
alignment with the communicative purposes of situated social interactions. This extended
definition brings together the crucial elements of the notion of text as understood by linguists
who have delved into the nature of text over the past several decades (van Dijk 1972; 1977;
Werlich 1976; Halliday and Hasan 1976; de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981), founding a

165
Gregory M. Shreve

discipline called text linguistics, whose influence on translation and interpreting studies we
investigate in this contribution.

Historical perspectives
Text linguistics was not the origin of Translation Studies’ concern with the relationship
between text and translation. Relatively early on in the history of Translation Studies, scholars
such as Reiss (1971) were arguing that the proper object of Translation Studies was not the
word or sentence, but the connected sequence of sentences used in written communication,
the text. The movement towards a textual focus in Translation Studies, particularly in
Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s, was part of an explicit recognition that translation was
a pragmatically bound communicative activity. We can see a growing theoretical concern with
communicative and functional issues in translation (e.g., the skopostheorie of Katharina Reiss
and Hans Vermeer and the translatorisches handeln – translational action – theories of Justa
Holz-Mänttäri) throughout those decades, and the textual turn in Translation Studies is part of
that development.
The early adoption of the text as an object of study in translation is related to a similar
movement in linguistics to include the pragmatic, communicative, and social aspects of
language. Thus, it is no surprise that the concern with texts in Translation Studies develops to
some degree in parallel with similar concerns in text linguistics – and from some of the same
underlying theoretical sources (see Snell-Hornby 2006 for an excellent discussion of the
pragmatic turn in Translation Studies). However, in this contribution, we will not be focusing
on the history of the broader textual concern in Translation Studies, but rather on the specific
intersection of Translation Studies with text linguistics, understood as a specific theoretical
framework that developed from the same roots and with the same motivations as the prag-
matic and textual turn in Translation Studies.
Text linguistics arose in the 1970s as a sub-discipline of linguistics; it was the result of a
shift of perspective among some language scholars from the sentential to the textual. This
shift was motivated by several factors. First, as in Translation Studies, there was an increasing
recognition that isolated sentences were not generally natural units of communication. When
people use language in speech and writing, they use connected sequences of sentences. Next,
it was apparent that many important concerns of linguistic research (e.g., pragmatics and
semantics) could not be fruitfully studied without also studying the context of sentences
(Carstens 2001). By context here we mean (1) the structural and semantic relationships of a
sentence in a group of sentences to the sentences that precede and follow it, and (2) the
pragmatic situational context surrounding the production of sentences. These two meanings
of context have defined two directions in text linguistics broadly considered, one concerned
with formal description of the relationships between sentences in texts as an extension of
formal grammars (text grammars), and the other with how texts are related to their situational
and social contexts. The latter has had the greatest influence on translation and interpreting
studies.
Discourse analysis is closely related to text linguistics, in that the object of study is also
language use beyond the boundaries of discrete sentences. Both are concerned with the social
contexts of language use, with the social purposes and functions of language in social
interaction. It is, in fact, difficult to make a clear distinction between the concerns of discourse
analysis and those of text linguistics without making a distinction between discourse and text.
Some scholars have argued for a distinction based on modality (spoken vs. written). Others
have said that texts are non-interactive while discourses are interactive. But, for the most part

166
 Text linguistics

there has been no consensus, and one is inclined to agree with Crystal (2011, 1) that discourse
analysis and text linguistics are more or less the same.
In this chapter, for clarity of argument as well as limitations of space, we focus quite
narrowly on text linguistics as associated with the work of specific scholars whose frame-
works have been adopted broadly into translation and interpreting studies: Teun van Dijk,
M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, and Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler.
A common thread among these authors is the idea that speakers or writers of texts make
deliberate, patterned language choices from a potential set of available choices (the language
system) and that those choices are related to the situation in which the language is used. The
pattern of choices is recognisable in the linguistic and semantic structures of a text.
Within text linguistics broadly, so-called “text grammatical” approaches emphasise that the
“selection” of sentences that appear in a text (and their lexical and structural properties) can be
described in a formal manner as a rule system. The recourse to the notion of rules places text
grammars in the context of formal models of sentence grammars, but with a broader scope –
where the focus is not on the syntactical arrangement of words in sentences (traditional
syntax), but on the arrangement of sentences within the larger construct of the text itself and
of the semantic and lexical relationships between sentences. The earliest well-known pro-
ponent of this perspective is van Dijk, who was central in early attempts to specify the kinds of
relationships that might exist between sentences; he focused on global textual meaning
relationships between sentences as well as formal organisational ones – these patterns
of relationship were called “macrostructures” and “macropropositions” (van Dijk 2004).
Text grammatical approaches had great utility in the development of text linguistics,
because they were among the first language models to emphasise the “connectedness” of
sentences in texts, especially at the semantic level (van Dijk 2004), what text linguistics later
came to refer to as textual coherence. Van Dijk himself saw text grammars becoming a part of
and being informed by developments in text processing, and his later work (van Dijk 1977;
van Dijk and Kintsch 1983) reflects this evolution. We take up the relationship between text
linguistics and text processing again later in this chapter. Today text grammars are seen as a
specific active field of research within text linguistics, but they are no longer on the main line
of inquiry. Text grammatical approaches have had some influence on translation theory, as for
instance Neubert and Shreve’s (1992) placement of van Dijk’s notions of macroproposition
and macrosructure, as well as macrorules, in the context of translated texts.
Where text grammatical approaches were to a great extent concerned with the explication
of formal properties of texts, the main direction of theory development in text linguistics
emphasised to a much greater extent how the form of a text is a reflection of its functional role
in situated communication. This direction of study is an outgrowth of the rise of socio-
linguistics and, particularly, of systemic functional linguistics associated with the work of
figures such as J. R. Firth and M. A. K. Halliday. Functional linguistics emphasises the notion
of choice, e.g., that there is a pool of language (the language system) from which a writer or
speaker makes deliberate choices. Those choices are non-random – structured – and reflect
the socio-cultural functions that a language production has to serve.
In text linguistics the central concern with the situational context of communication derives
from the systemic functional linguistic idea of “context of situation” with its three related sub-
elements: “field of discourse”, “mode of discourse”, and “tenor of discourse”. Field generally
refers to the topic or subject matter of a text and also the particulars of the “total event in which
the text is functioning” – e.g., the pragmatic context of the text, including the time and place
where it is used (Halliday and Hasan 1976, 22). Mode focuses on the purposes and function
of a text, including what the text author intends the text to achieve and what use the text reader

167
Gregory M. Shreve

is expected to make of it (function). Mode also implies a particular way of achieving purpose –
whether by use of written or spoken language, for instance, and is thus related to the idea that
particular forms of language are associated with particular purposes. Tenor emphasises the
social relationships surrounding the use of a text and realised by the text; the notion recognises
that a text is a specific and deliberate language “structure” that manifests a particular kind of
interaction between social actors. As we look later at the “core issues” of text linguistics in
translation we can see how each of them proceeds from these fundamental notions.
A particular combination of field, mode, and tenor, e.g., a certain context of situation, can
be associated with a specific deliberate selection of meanings and lexico-grammatical choi-
ces. Said another way, the context of situation determines the language we use when we speak
or write: what we mean, and how we indicate in speech or writing what we mean. Functional
linguistics defines a register as those “linguistic features which are typically associated with a
configuration of situational features – with particular values of the field, mode and tenor”
(Halliday and Hasan 1976, 22). A register is a “text variety” that captures the relationship
between situational factors and the linguistic features of language in use (Halliday 1978, 32)
and is the conceptual foundation of text typology in text linguistics.
It is not our purpose in this chapter to review systemic functional linguistics or socio-
linguistics, but to argue that systemic functional linguistics is the historical background to
what we commonly call text linguistics proper – a movement that is to a great extent
associated, as we have indicated, with the work of Halliday and Hasan, and de Beaugrande
and Dressler.
As indicated earlier, Translation Studies and text linguistics as disciplines developed in
parallel; both had early and continuing relationships to systemic functional linguistics. For
instance Manfredi (2008) points out that J. C. Catford based some of his early translation
theory on the work of Firth and Halliday. Manfredi particularly identifies Halliday’s impact on
Peter Newmark (1987) and strong influence on Juliane House’s systemic-functional model of
translation. She also prominently cites Discourse and the Translator (1990) by Basil Hatim
and Ian Mason, who usefully brought much of Halliday’s framework into Translation
Studies. In fact, there is a very clear line of interest in Halliday and systemic functional
linguistics running through Translation Studies up until this day (see for instance the work of
Steiner 2005; Steiner and Webster 2015).
However, if we define the topic of our contribution more strictly, to text linguistics as we
have introduced it, then the area of intersection with Translation Studies is much narrower.
Only a few works, Hatim and Mason’s volume among them, actually address topics most
closely identified with text linguistics. Many works in Translation Studies that purportedly
deal with “text linguistics” end up only focusing on specific issues such as text types or text
analysis – concerns that exist both within and outside of text linguistics – and these concerns
are not sufficient to mark such work as departing from a text-linguistic framework (Reiss’
original interest in text types, for instance, derives from earlier work by Karl Bühler).
Discussing texts, text types, and the communicative nature of texts is not, in and of itself,
sufficient to imply a text-linguistic basis of argument.
Hatim (1998) argues that text linguistics in translation is concerned primarily with register
analysis – which leads to a text-linguistic perspective on text typology because it departs
from specific theoretical foundations – “texture” (which concerns itself with coherence and
cohesion) and theme–rheme analysis, related to the informativity of texts, but at the sentential
level. With this in mind only a few major early scholarly works in Translation Studies engaged
with text linguistics in a comprehensive way. Hatim and Mason’s (1990) volume certainly
engages fully with text linguistics, as does a body of work by Albrecht Neubert of the

168
 Text linguistics

University of Leipzig. Neubert was a major proponent of the de Beaugrande and Dressler
framework. After de Beaugrande and Dressler published their Introduction to Text Linguistics
in 1981, Neubert began to incorporate its ideas, most notably in the mid 1980s with the
publication of “Textlinguistik des Übersetzens” (Neubert 1985b) and Text and Translation
(Neubert 1985a) – this latter book was republished and revised with Gregory M. Shreve in
1992 as Translation as Text. In interpreting studies, early work with a text-linguistic slant is
quite sparse, although Alexieva (1994) recognised early on that there were important con-
nections between interpreting and text linguistics.
In the remainder of this chapter we will look at some of the core issues of translation,
interpreting, and text linguistics identified in these works. This short historical foray is not, of
course, intended to cite every article bringing together text linguistics, translation, and
interpreting, and will be confined to a few main bodies of influential thought. We have
recognised the role of systemic functional linguistics in translation, and of a broader arena of
discussion in discourse analysis (e.g., Critical Discourse Analysis), but those are worthy of
their own discussion.

Core issues

Texture, cohesion, and coherence

A fundamental idea of text linguistics is that sentences in a group of sentences exhibit con-
nectedness at the structural and semantic levels. Sentences have relationships to one another
at the level of the language forms employed (lexis and syntax) as well as at the level of
meaning. It is the presence of these relationships that allows the processing of texts as coherent
carriers of meaning. Halliday and Hasan (1976, 2) called this property “texture”, arguing that
“a text has a texture, and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text. It derives
this texture from the fact that it functions as a unity with respect to its environment”. The
notion of functioning as a unity is important, because it emphasises that a text is perceived by
its readers or hearers as a holistic communicative event and not as a disjointed random
sequence of sentences.
Halliday and Hasan (1976) argue that texture arises solely from the linguistic mechanisms of
cohesion (Fulcher 1989). De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) agree that cohesion is a critical
property of texture, but add to it the idea of coherence. Cohesion, as understood by Halliday and
Hasan, is created through mechanisms of lexical and grammatical cohesion. Lexical cohesion
uses devices such as repetition and collocation to mark the relatedness of words in a text, and
grammatical cohesion uses grammatical mechanisms such as reference (specifically anaphoric
and cataphoric reference), substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. The primary notion here is that
a text (as opposed to a non-text) exhibits “explicit clues that make a text a text” and those
markers are grammatical and lexical – not semantic, per se – in nature (Sanders and Maat 2006,
591). The linguistic markers are connected and sequentially interdependent – cohesion arises
“when the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another”
(Halliday and Hasan 1976, 4). Thus the sense of connectedness of a text is created solely from
the presence of language-dependent cohesive devices. Halliday and Hasan’s concept of
cohesion had a tremendous influence on text linguistics, but was not without its critics. They felt
that something more was required to understand texture: coherence.
The sense of the connectedness of text – what we have called texture – has itself also been
called coherence by some scholars, creating some ambiguity about the actual scope of the
term coherence (and indeed Halliday and Hasan also use the term, but in ways not specifically

169
Gregory M. Shreve

pertinent to the present argument). For clarity, when we use the term in this contribution, we
refer not to a more general sense such as is also covered by the word “texture”, but to a more
specific notion that recognises the contribution the reader brings to constructing the semantic
connectedness of the text. From a text-processing point of view, critics argue that previous
knowledge stored in long-term memory interacts with cohesive devices and other textual
mechanisms like tense to help the reader construct the global meaning and semantic con-
nectedness of a text. Critics of “cohesion-only” views argued that more fruitful approaches to
texture should recognise that linguistic mechanisms work in concert with a reader’s prior
knowledge to construct texture. Texture is therefore a result of both cohesion and coherence.
In this chapter, cohesion and coherence are used primarily in the sense meant by de
Beaugrande and Dressler (1981, 84). They said coherence “concerns the ways in which the
components of the textual world, i.e., the configuration of concepts and relations which
underlie the surface text, are mutually accessible and relevant” (1981, 4). If one unpacks this
statement, coherence is a framework for talking about the propositional and conceptual unity
of a text and how that unity is built up via interaction between the language of a text and the
knowledge the reader brings to the text. A coherent text, in this sense, is one that enables the
reader to understand the text by building up a mental model of what it means, or, as Neubert
and Shreve (1992, 94) put it: “A coherent text has an underlying logical structure that acts to
guide the reader through the text”.
Hatim (1998) noted that cohesion and coherence have attracted the greatest amount of
attention in Translation Studies. It is no surprise that a large number of translation scholars
have investigated the role of cohesion and coherence in translation and interpreting. We
cannot possibly discuss all of them, but of notable mention is the work of Baker (1992) who
usefully discusses the implications of cohesion and coherence using practical examples.
Hatim and Mason (1990) also take up the two topics and deal extensively with them using de
Beaugrande and Dressler’s framework; they also apply concepts of texture to interpreting
(1997) – adding to the sparse literature in that area. Neubert and Shreve (1992) similarly
adopt that framework and provide an extensive discussion of the relevance of cohesion
and coherence to the translator’s task. Niska (1999) discusses the implications of cohesion and
coherence in simultaneous interpreting at length – in fact, his work is an explicit application
of de Beaugrande and Dressler’s text linguistics to interpreting studies. A useful summary of
coherence and cohesion in Translation Studies approaches is contained in Mubenga’s (2010)
article on their role in interlingual subtitling.
Perhaps the greatest insight into the core issues of coherence and cohesion in translation
was given by Blum-Kulka (1986; 2000). Blum-Kulka describes so-called “shifts” in cohesion
and coherence as part of the translation process. Shifts in cohesion are often necessitated by
differences in the source and target grammatical systems, and as the translator accommodates
those differences it can lead to what she called “shifts in levels of explicitness” and “shifts in
text meaning”. Shifts of cohesion can result in a target text that indicates underlying semantic
relations to a greater or lesser degree than the original. But Blum-Kulka (2000, 300) makes the
important point that it is not just linguistic system differences that lead to these shifts. She
argues that they result from the “constraints” of the translation process itself, something she
calls the “explicitation hypothesis”. Shifts in text meaning, on the other hand, happen when
the “explicit and implicit meaning potential” (2000, 299) of the source is changed by the
translator’s use of particular target-side cohesive devices; her argument here is that a trans-
lator’s choice of cohesive device in the target language can intentionally (or unintentionally)
alter the meaning of the target relative to the source – thus the translator needs to be aware of
the potential for meaning shift.

170
 Text linguistics

Blum-Kulka also looks at shifts in coherence, relating them to alterations in the “inter-
pretability”. Here she distinguishes between reader-focused shifts and text-focused shifts of
coherence. The former are precipitated by the nature of the translational act – because the
situation and readership of the target relative to the source has changed. The latter kind of shift
is, similar to her argument about shifts in explicitness – again, the result of the translation
process and choices made or not made by the translator.
Blum-Kulka cuts to the core of the issue of coherence and cohesion in translation. We have
to be aware that there will be shifts, some of them derive from differences in the language
systems of source and target, and some derive from the translation process itself and the
translator’s accommodations to changes in the context of situation. Some shifts are deliberate
and others are not, but the process of translation introduces changes in the cohesion and
coherence of the target text relative to the source – and that is quite probably an inescapable
derivative of the act. The texture of the target text is induced by the source text, but is not
identical to it.

Textuality and the seven standards

So far we have been grappling with the notion of what makes a text a text, citing some key
notions such as texture, coherence, and cohesion. De Beaugrande and Dressler also intro-
duced an additional concept, that of “textuality”. Textuality turned out to be quite an influ-
ential notion, so much so that, the contributions of Halliday and Hasan notwithstanding, much
of what is understood today as text linguistics is associated with this seminal notion. As
Carstens (2001, 589) says, “it appears as if the approach put forward by de Beaugrande and
Dressler (1981) (in their well-known Introduction to text linguistics) is favoured by many
linguists when they claim to be text linguists as such”.
Where texture is essentially a text-focused concept, because coherence and cohesion are
experienced as a function of reading or hearing a text, textuality expands the notion of
textness, or being a text, to include other factors. A text does not just have texture. De
Beaugrande and Dressler (1981, 3) argue that a text is “a communicative occurrence which
meets seven standards of textuality. If any of these standards is not considered to have been
satisfied, the text will not be communicative”. Cohesion and coherence, already discussed, are
included in the seven standards, but five additional properties are specified: intentionality,
acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality. Each of these standards has
implications for translation and interpreting. Simply put, if these “standards” are necessary to
establish the communicative viability of a source text, then they apply equally to target texts.
Intentionality and acceptability are two sides of the same coin (Carstens 2001).
Intentionality refers to the fact that when writing a text an author “intends” to accomplish
something, has a purpose in mind. A text is a linguistic strategy for achieving an end;
intentionality implies that a text is structured (e.g., coherent and cohesive) in such a way as to
achieve that intent. On the other side of the textual coin, a text reader expects that a text has
been structured in such a way that the producer’s intentions can be fulfilled, or, conversely, the
user’s purpose for reading the text can be addressed. Acceptability refers in some sense to the
“fitness for purpose” of the received text. An author’s objective in writing a text, or a
translator’s in translating it, cannot be achieved if the reader cannot understand what the text
in question is intended to do (Neubert and Shreve 1992, 73). Intentionality and acceptability
are a kind of cooperation between reader and writer (or hearer and listener) in the interests of
communicative success. In the context of translation the author’s intent may or may not be
identical to the purpose for which a translation is commissioned. Thus, authorial intent and

171
Gregory M. Shreve

translational purpose may diverge. It is part of the translator’s task to understand such
divergences – but in all cases the translator has to act to support the target text’s functionality
in its new environment.
Informativity has to do with what the text communicates. It refers not just to the content of
the text, but specifically to the way that “information occurrences” (de Beaugrande and
Dressler 1981, 8–9) are presented. Texts present new or novel information in the context of
old or known information. The informativity of a text is calibrated by the writer at least
partially on the basis of an appreciation of what knowledge the reader and writer share (mutual
knowledge) and what authors expect readers already know (prior knowledge). In addition,
some information occurrences in a text have more significance or “communicative weight”
than others, something that de Beaugrande and Dressler called “orders of informativity”. A
simple example is, for instance, that terms (specialised vocabulary) in a text have a higher
information value than non-terms in the same text. The translator grapples with issues of
informativity all of the time, when deciding what can, for instance, be omitted from a text.
Issues of informativity surround decisions about what to explicitate (or alternatively impli-
citate) depending on assessments of the knowledge differences between source audiences and
target audiences.
It was mentioned earlier that Hatim (1998) identified theme–rheme analysis as a central
concern of text linguistics in translation. Regarding theme and rheme, Hatim (1998, 265) says
“the basic premise here is that sentences consist of themes, which present known, context-
dependent information, and rhemes, which present new, context-independent information”.
Themes and rhemes are components of informativity, but considered at the sentential level.
Thematic choice involves selecting a clause element as the theme in a sentence, but different
language systems may preferentially select different clause elements. So a thematic clause
choice may be unmarked or usual in a source language text but become marked and unusual in
the target text during translation. It may assume an importance it does not actually have, or
sound foreign and awkward. Conversely if the original choice is marked, for instance selected
by the author to be unusual (e.g., for emphasis), and when translated it becomes unmarked and
quite typical, it may lose meaning.
Situationality recognises explicitly that texts are produced and read in communicative
contexts (situations). As such, this standard recognises that a text is above all a commun-
icative event and not just a product (cf. de Beaugrande 1997 and his use of the phrasing “text
event”). There is a connection between the text event and its situation – texts are expected to
be relevant to their situations of occurrence. That is to say, texts are reflective of their contexts
of use, their time and place of production, the intentions of their producers, and indeed the
totality of what Halliday and Hasan (1976) called the “context of situation”.
The translator’s concern with situationality proceeds from the realisation that the translational
activity is also a text event, a situated, contextualised communicative activity. In fact, one can
see translation as a process where a particular text produced for a source culture audience in the
source language by an author is re-contextualised for a target culture audience in the target
language (Kvam 2014). The original text has a specific situationality, but in translation, that
original situationality is replaced by a new one that dislocates the text from its source circum-
stance. The text-aware translator proceeds in the production of the target text by understanding
the new context in which the translation has to operate and how it is the same or different from
the source text’s context and conditions of use. In a textual view of translation, successful
translation involves not just the successful conversion of source sentences to the conventions of
the target linguistic system, but also attention to those aspects of the textual whole – formal,
semantic, pragmatic – that have to be modified to meet a new communicative circumstance.

172
 Text linguistics

Finally, intertextuality, the last standard, is an explicit recognition of the idea that texts are
not written or read in a textual vacuum. When we read a text we do so with a previous
experience of texts, and particularly of texts associated with the specific situation in which we
are using the text. We always process texts in the wider context of other texts experienced in
our cultural milieu (cf. Neubert’s (1984) introduction of the term, “text world”). Thus,
intertextuality is a reference to the way a given text relates to other texts that are (or have been)
relevant in a particular kind of situation or to a specific kind of purpose. This notion of
“related texts” or “similarly useful” texts allows us to make an important connection between
intertextuality and the notion of text types, in the sense that situations and purposes are held in
common condition texts in such a way that they have similar configurational properties – we
often capture this notion in Translation Studies with the concept of a “parallel text”. The
translator needs to be exquisitely aware of the intertextual “demand” on the target text s/he
produces by understanding how that demand will require transformations of the target text in
line with linguistic and textual properties that target readers expect from a particular type of
text. To this extent, there is a clear relationship between intertextuality and acceptability.

The translator’s concern with textuality

Thus, in de Beaugrande and Dressler’s terms, the translator has to fully understand the
textuality of the source text and how it will resemble or differ from the textuality of the
target text. Of course, this all proceeds from the assumption that the translator wants to
produce a text on the target side that functions as, is perceived as, a text by the target reader.
Albrecht Neubert (1985a, 18) called translation, “text-induced text production”, and this
formulation quite accurately captures the text-linguistic view of translation – that we do not
really translate languages (because languages are systems, and communication proceeds via
socially embedded selection from the potential forms of the system) – and that we do not
really translate just words and sentences (because these cannot be translated independently
without concern for the textual and communicative context). Thus, the object of translation
is a text and the product of translation is a text, with all that implies about coherence,
cohesion, and the other standards of textuality.
Text linguistics is a scholarly means to examine and illuminate the transformations that a
text undergoes when it is translated, beyond the scope of the rendition of individual words and
sentences. As mentioned earlier, texts have structural and semantic features that reflect
relationships between sentences. To what extent does translation preserve, alter, or destroy
those relationships? Text linguistics in translation places our focus squarely on the nature of
texts – textuality – and how the textuality of a source text is related to the textuality of its
target. Where do they or must they coincide? Where can they or must they differ? How does
an understanding of the nature of text inform the translation process? How does translation
(as Blum-Kulka points out) precipitate changes, necessary or otherwise, to the texture and
textuality of a target relative to its source?

Current debates
Text linguistics (and a concern with texts in general) has a relatively long history in
Translation Studies, as we have seen. It is not easy to identify any strong thread of con-
temporary debate at their intersection. For instance, while there has always been some con-
tention about the theoretical status of text types in text linguistics – and how one defines and
recognises them – and that concern can bleed over into Translation Studies, it is not clear that

173
Gregory M. Shreve

this qualifies as a debate. Rather more interesting, and perhaps more thorny a question, is how
Translation Studies’ concerns with textuality can be integrated with its parallel interest in the
cognitive nature of the translation or interpreting process.
To a surprising extent these two lines of thought have developed rather independently in
our discipline; we have clear lines of research and teaching that are text-focused, and textual
issues, often from an explicitly text-linguistic perspective, are addressed quite commonly in
the translation classroom of today. But we have not really looked at the translated or inter-
preted text as a complex cognitive event. Target texts have to be produced and they have to be
read or heard; text linguistics deals with this from a product-oriented point of view, but less so
from a process-oriented point of view.
Van Dijk realised early on that text linguistics would have to grapple with how we
understand and produce texts – with text processing – hence his collaboration with Walter
Kintsch (Kintsch and van Dijk 1978; van Dijk and Kintsch 1983). While text linguistics has
focused on the structure and properties of texts as a kind of socio-communicative product, text
processing has focused on how the structures of the text (e.g., Kintsch’s “textbase”) are
processed to construct a mental representation of the meaning of a text (“situation model”) –
see Kintsch (1988; 1992). Text processing has turned out to be a powerful, influential theory
in sub-disciplines of psychology, especially in the arena of text comprehension and reading
theory.
Is this a current debate in our discipline? No. The problem is actually that it is not being
discussed. We have not yet begun to try to integrate the cognitive science of translation with
the cognitive science of text. And while this topic might not currently be a disciplinary issue, it
should certainly be one.

Future directions
The integration of text linguistics and text processing in the context of translation is the next
logical step in translation and interpreting studies. As early as the turn of this century, Blum-
Kulka (2000, 313) recognised the importance of this future direction, arguing that “the
analysis of texts should be followed by an investigation of text effects. In other words
I advocate a psycholinguistic approach to the study of translation effects”. Tellingly, she
explicitly cites the work of van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) as a foundation for the integration
she calls for. House (2012, 180) also calls for this integration when she (referring to de
Beaugrande and Dressler) argues that:

Several of these textuality standards reveal that in producing and understanding texts in
translation one must go beyond linguistic analysis and look at a text’s psychological and
social basis. In doing this one views the text in terms of the cognitive processes
underlying its production and comprehension.

Niska (1999) quite presciently understood that many of the central concerns of interpreting –
especially given its early concerns with process – could only be addressed by integrating text
linguistics and text processing; this topic is explicitly addressed in his work. Shreve and
Lacruz (2014), more recently, have looked at translation from the text-processing perspective,
trying to integrate text comprehension (and theories of reading) with text production (and
theories of writing). They argue that we have to understand the legacy notion of “transfer” in
Translation Studies not only by looking at the mechanics of a bilingual’s lexico-semantic
system, but at how processes of reading and writing across languages work in the context of

174
 Text linguistics

translation, where the situationality, acceptability, and informativity of a text are greatly
modified because of pragmatic circumstances, but also due to differences in the prior
knowledge of target readers of a translation as against those of source readers of a source text.
They conclude their exposition by arguing that translation, rather than being Neubert’s “text-
induced text production” is better viewed as “situation model induced situation model pro-
duction” via the translator’s manipulation of the target text’s textbase.

Implications for practice

As a practical matter, and we have alluded to this before when speaking of the text-aware
translator, text-linguistic approaches to translation have the potential to broaden the horizons
of the translator. In the section on core issues, we have discussed specific ways that concepts
from text linguistics impinge on the translation activity, shifting the translator’s focus from the
narrowly lexical and sentential, to include the textual.
Specifically, text linguistics implies that there is an obligation on the part of the translator to
“recreate” or rather “create anew” the textual properties of the source text for the target text. If
we want the target text to be a text – fully fledged and processed as a proxy for the source text
by the target audience – then the seven standards have to be addressed. The implications for
practice seem clear: if we pay attention to textual properties in an informed way, there will be a
corresponding improvement in the “textuality” of the translation, a quantum leap if you will,
in the “textual quality” of the translation.
However, there are complications. For instance, to what extent does the way we process
texts as translators or interpreters (e.g., sequential, step-like, sentence-by-sentence, translation
unit by translation unit) preclude us from considering the more global, textual issues? Our
current understanding of cognitive processes in translation makes it all too clear that the very
way that translation proceeds brings the translator’s focus, necessarily, down to the sentential
level, maybe even clausal level. Does this sentential dominance then necessarily push textual
concerns to pre-translation activities or post-translation revision using some kind of text
analysis as in Christiane Nord’s (1988) work, Text Analysis and Translation? How much time
will then actually be given to text analysis?
This raises the issue that I will refer to as the “good enough” syndrome. What this means is
that for any given practical translation, factoring in all of the constraints and the economics of
the translational transaction, at what point is the translation “sufficient for purpose” or “fit for
purpose” and satisfactory given the client’s requirements and the translation brief? There is
probably a tipping point beyond which pursuing the translation to the extent of trying to
address all of the aspects of textuality becomes a “losing proposition” in an economic sense,
even if the case can be made that the quality of the translation is improved. This seems crass
and mercenary, but is nevertheless true as practical matter. And in interpreting, the practical
matters and cognitive constraints of “real-time” performance preclude much target-side
attention to textual features.
Since we have raised the issue of quality and have assumed that appropriate attention to
textual issues in translation would improve translation quality at least along the textual
dimension, how would we characterise that improvement? What are the dimensions of tex-
tuality that are most likely to bring about a discernible improvement in quality if addressed?
In some cases, as for instance the effective and appropriate use of target language cohesive
devices, one could readily argue that target-text coherence is demonstrably improved – and
therefore acceptability is enhanced. Similarly, as we discussed earlier, appropriate under-
standing of informativity issues can assist in identifying when explicitation is necessary or

175
Gregory M. Shreve

not. Intertextuality can be brought into play by focusing on the utility of parallel texts in
translation practice. Situationality emerges in an emphasis on the translation brief, inten-
tionality in the emphasis on understanding the purpose of one’s target text and how it relates to
the function of one’s translation. This is a lot to bring to the translation activity without
explanation, example, and practice in application.
Ultimately, it seems most likely that the influence of text linguistics on translation practice
must necessarily be indirect, interpreted through a text-aware translation pedagogy. Decoding
the seven standards of textuality, understanding the components of texture, or realising the
utility of text typology and parallel texts, is best conferred in the translation classroom where
those notions can be unpacked and illustrated in guided practice. We want students to
understand that how we judge a translation is not just a result of whether the meanings of
words and sentences have been transferred. There are more global concerns. We might want to
teach students that we can look at the success of translation from the perspective of accuracy
(the extent to which meaning has been preserved), adequacy (the extent to which the required
function and purpose have been achieved), and acceptability (the extent to which the text user
accepts our text in his or her communicative circumstance). We have to extend notions of
accuracy in translation to include the semantic structure and content of the text as a whole – its
coherence and informativity. We have to extend adequacy to deal with situationality and
intentionality, and we have to extend acceptability to include considerations of cohesion and
intertextuality.

Further reading
de Beaugrande, R.-A. and Dressler, W. U. 1981. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman.
One of the seminal works in text linguistics, explaining the nature of textuality and introducing the
seven standards.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
A seminal work in text linguistics, but also the foundation of our understanding of cohesion and its
mechanisms.
Hatim, B. and Mason, I. 1990. Discourse and the Translator. London: Longman.
An important work that brings the work of Halliday and Hasan into Translation Studies.
Neubert, A. and Shreve, G. M. 1992. Translation as Text. Ohio: Kent State University Press.
The text-linguistic framework of de Beaugrande and Dressler is introduced at length and placed in a
translational context.

Related topics
Discourse analysis, interpreting and translation; Genre analysis and translation; Sociolinguistics,
translation and interpreting; Language processing, interpreting and translation.

References
Alexieva, B. 1994. “Types of Texts and Intertextuality in Simultaneous Interpreting”. In Translation
Studies: An Interdiscipline, edited by M. Snell-Hornby, F. Pöchhacker and K. Kaindl, 179–187.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Baker, M. 1992. In Other Words. London: Routledge.

176
 Text linguistics

Beaugrande, R.-A. de. 1997. New Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse: Cognition,
Communication, and the Freedom of Access to Knowledge and Society. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Beaugrande, R.-A. de and Dressler, W. U. 1981. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman.
Blum-Kulka, S. 1986. “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation”. In Interlingual and Inter-
cultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acqui-
sition Studies, edited by J. House and S. Blum-Kulka, 17–35. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Reprinted
2000 in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, 298–313. London: Routledge.
Carstens, W. 2001. “Text Linguistics: Relevant Linguistics?” In Poetics, Linguistics, and History:
Discourses of War and Conflict, PALA Conference Papers 1999, edited by I. Bierman and A. L.
Combrink, 588–595. Potchefstroom: Potchefstroom University.
Crystal, D. 2008. Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing.
Crystal, D. 2011. Language and Discourse [WWW Document]. Available from: [Link]
com/textbooks/9780415602679/pdfs/[Link] [Accessed 1 June 2016].
Fulcher, G. 1989. Cohesion and coherence in theory and reading research. Journal of Research in
Reading 12, pp. 146–163.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and
Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Hatim, B. 1998. “Text Linguistics and Translation”. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies,
edited by M. Baker, 262–265. London: Routledge.
Hatim, B. and Mason, I. 1990. Discourse and the Translator. London: Longman.
House, J. 2012. “Text Linguistics and Translation”. In Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by
Y. Gambier and L. van Doorslaer, 178–183. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kintsch, W. 1988. The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: a construction-integration
model. Psychological Review 95, pp. 163–182.
Kintsch, W. 1992. “How Readers Construct Situation Models for Stories: The Role of Syntactic Cues
and Causal Inferences”. In From Learning Processes to Cognitive Processes: Essays in Honor of
William K. Estes, edited by A. F. Healy, S. M. Kosslyn and R. M. Shiffrin, 261–278. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Kintsch, W. and van Dijk, T. A. 1978. Toward a model of text comprehension and production.
Psychological Review 85, pp. 363–394.
Kvam, S. 2014. Text linguistics and the translation brief: on the relevance of conversation analysis as an
operational tool in a pragmatic text linguistic approach to translation. Perspectives: Studies in
Translatology 22, pp. 21–38.
Manfredi, M. 2008. Translating Text and Context: Translation Studies and Systemic Functional Lin-
guistics. Bologna: Dupress.
Mubenga, K. S. 2010. Towards an integrated approach to cohesion and coherence in interlingual
subtitling. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics PLUS 40, pp. 39–54.
Neubert, A. 1984. “Text-Bound Translation Teaching”. In Translation Theory and Its Implementation
in the Teaching of Translating and Interpreting, edited by W. Wilss and G. Thome, 61–70. Tübin-
gen: Gunter Narr.
Neubert, A. 1985a. Text and Translation, Übersetzungswissenschaftliche Beiträge, Vol. 8. Leipzig:
Verlag Enzykopädie.
Neubert, A. 1985b. “Textlinguistik des Übersetzens”. In Beiträge Zur Englischen Textlinguistik, Lin-
guistische Studien, 15–24. Leipzig: Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR.
Neubert, A. and Shreve, G. M. 1992. Translation as Text. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
Newmark, P. 1987. “The Use of Systemic Linguistics in Translation Analysis and Criticism”. In
Language Topics: Essays in Honour of Michael Halliday, edited by R. Steele and T. Threadgold.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Niska, H. 1999. Text Linguistic Models for the Study of Simultaneous Interpreting. Stockholm: Stock-
holm University.

177
Gregory M. Shreve

Nord, C. 1988. Text Analysis and Translation: Theoretical Foundations, Method and Didactic Use of a
Translation-Related Text Analysis. Heidelberg: Groos.
Reiss, K. 1971. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik. Munich: Huber.
Sanders, T. and Maat, H. P. 2006. “Cohesion and Coherence: Linguistic Approaches”. In Encyclopedia
of Language and Linguistics, edited by K. Brown, 591–595. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Shreve, G. M. and Lacruz, I. 2014. “Translation as a Higher-Order Text Processing”. In A Companion to
Translation Studies, edited by S. Bermann and C. Porter, 107–118. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
Snell-Hornby, M. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Steiner, E. 2005. “Halliday and Translation Theory: Enhancing the Options, Broadening the Range and
Keeping the Ground”. In Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective, edited by
R. Hasan, C. Mathiessen and J. J. Webster, 481–500. London: Equinox.
Steiner, E. and Webster, J. 2015. “Halliday’s Contributions to a Theory of Translation”. In The Blooms-
bury Companion to M. A. K. Halliday, edited by J. J. Webster, 412–426. London: Bloomsbury.
van Dijk, T. A. 1972. Some Aspects of Text Grammars. The Hague: Mouton
van Dijk, T. A. 1977. Text and Context. London: Longman.
van Dijk, T. A. 2004. From Text Grammar to Critical Discourse Analysis: A Brief Academic Bibliography
[WWW Document]. Available from: [Link]
20critical%20discourse%[Link] [Accessed 1 April 2016].
van Dijk, T. A. and Kintsch, W. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic
Press.
Werlich, E. 1976. A Text Grammar of English. Heidelberg: Quelle and Meyer.

178