Channels, Fall 2020

Page 22 Beale • Equivalence in Translation an ST as one of the two foundational classifications of translation type, the other being the psycholinguistic features of the text’s speech acts (as cited in Burukina, 2009). Bakhtin (1986) distinguishes between what he calls primary (simple) genres and secondary (complex) genres, with the latter comprising what we typically think of as genres, such as research, commentaries, and novels. However, he also notes that no successful taxonomy has been created to categorize genres by their content and style, citing a lack of a unified basis in the knowledge of language styles as well as existing taxonomies being random, inexhaustive, and insufficiently differentiated. Burukina (2009) makes a similar complaint, claiming that many typologies are too broad or too narrow. The following is a sampling of various typologies offered over the last 50 years: Jumpelt (1961) with six types (aesthetic, religious, pragmatic, ethnographic, linguistic, psychological), Reiss (1981) with three (informative, expressive, operative), Hervey et. al. (2006) with five (empirical, philosophical, religious, persuasive, literary), Russian traditional styles with four (communicative-political, scientific-technical, military, artistic) (Burukina, 2009), and Burukina (2009) with nine, not including expressive works (social-political, legal, financial- economic, medical, scientific, religious, technical, military, advertising). The point of the above listing is not to disparage any of these typologies but, rather, to show a more general problem the translator faces when considering genre in trying to maintain equivalence. Further complicating matters is the fact the genres can overlap within a single text, requiring a weighing of priorities for the translation at hand (Burukina, 2009; Reiss, 1981). The complication around determining genre is made more bothersome by the fact that genre is a deciding factor in how to frame a text before setting about translating it (Hervey, et. al, 2006). Working within the bounds of her skopos theory, Reiss (1981) states that genre plays a key role in determining the author’s intention. Shapochkin (2011) cites the importance of considering the field of the text at large, such as in political discourse, and being familiar with writing and style norms and traditions of the field in which one is translating to achieve the best possible equivalence. In addition to seconding this idea, Hervey et al. (2006) recommend that translators make themselves familiar with technical terms in both the SL and TL for the field in which they work to not mistakenly translate them as everyday words as well as with the logical trends and flow of thought patterns used within a field. Related to the research at hand, some notes on the genres used for the purposes of this study are worthy of note. Reiss (1981) states that in the informational text-type, the translator should work on a basis of meaning and sense to maintain the content of the ST, which may include explicating implicit information of the ST in the TT. On a narrower scale, Hervey et al. (2006) stress the importance of accuracy and clarity of technical text (such as a linguistic journal), while allowing for a little more flourish in business texts to maintain a natural style. However, as Cozma (2019) found out in studying translations of EU legal texts, the translator must be aware of the structural complexity of the material at hand and be careful to not produce a meaningless, gibberish text. Genre clearly holds a predominant role in the process of translation, and the translator would be committing a grave error to ignore it. All the same, the research demonstrates that there is no unified consensus on what constitutes a good text-type typology, especially