Azad Mammadov,

professor, AUL

Text, translation and cross-cultural differences

In the study of language, some of the most interesting questions arise in connection with the way language is “used”, rather than what its components are. We have already introduced one of those questions when we discussed pragmatics. We ask how it is that we, as language-users, make sense of what we read in texts, understand what senders mean despite what they say, in fact we under take what is known as discourse analysis. Even a casual survey of normal linguistic communication will reveal an important fact: the unit of communication is not always a single complete sentence. Often we speak in single words, phrases and fragments of sentences:

Do you want to see a movie tonight!

Oh, well…

At other times we speak in units of two or more connected sentences.

Let me tell you about my car accident. You see, I was…

Broadly speaking, the study of text is the study of units of language consisting of more than a single sentence, but connected by some system of related topics. This study is sometimes more narrowly construed as the study of connected sequences of sentences (or sentence components) produced by a sender.

When we concentrate on the description of a particular language, we are normally concerned with the accurate representation of the forms and structures used in that language. However, as language-users, we are capable of more than simply recognizing correct versus in correct form and structure. We can cope with fragments such as trains collide, two die and we know casual relation exists between the two phrases. Moreover, we can encounter examples of texts, written in English which appear to break a lot of the rules of the English language:

We thought it was right to come to a decision when I next met them last night.

This example may serve to illustrate an interesting point about the way we react to language which contains ungrammatical forms. Rather than simply rejecting the text as ungrammatical, we try to make sense of it. That is to say, we attempt to arrive at a reasonable interpretation of what the sender intended to convey. To arrive at in interpretation and to make our messages interpretable, we certainly rely on what we know about linguistic form and structure. But, as language-users, we have more knowledge than that.

We know, for example, that texts must have a certain structure which depends on factors quite different from those required in the structure of a single sentence. Same of those factors are described in terms of cohesion, or the ties and connections which exist within texts. A number of those types of cohesive ties can be identified in the following text:

Pablo looked at her and you could tell nothing of what he was thinking by his face. He looked at her quiet deliberately and then he looked across the table at Robert Jordan. He looked at him a long time contemplatively and then he looked back at the woman again (E.Hemingway).

There are connections present her in the use of pronouns, which we assume are used to maintain reference (via anaphora) to the same people and things throughout: Pablo-he-he-he-he; Robert Jordan-him. There is also connection, however, which marks the relationship of what follows to what went before. The verb tense in the sentences are all in the past, creating a connection between those events. Temporal sequence is also strengthened via emphatic and then.

These formal signals refer to different types of references between sentences in order to get a meaningful text. These links are called as cohesion [13, 22, etc.].

However, by itself, cohesion would not be sufficient to enable us to make sense of what we read. It is quite easy to create a highly cohesive text which has a lot of connections between the sentences, but which remains difficult to interpret. Note that the following text has connections such as Moscow – the capital city, sea-side-sea; letters-a letter.

I was in London last month. The capital city was located at the sea-side. The word sea consists of three letters. She doesn’t like to write a letter.

It becomes clear from an example like this that the “connexity” which we experience in our interpretation of normal texts is not simply based on connections between the words. There must be some other factor which leads us to distinguish connected texts which make sense from those which do not. This factor is usually described as coherence.

The key to the concept of coherence is not something which exists in the language, but something which exists in people. It is people who make sense of what they read and hear. They try to arrive at an interpretation which is in line with their experience of the way world is. Indeed, our ability to make sense of what we read is probably only a small part of that general ability we have to make sense of what we perceive or experience in the world. N. Enkvist attaches special attention to the notion of interpretability and the role of the receptor in interpretation” as well as to the term connexity. He writes that “if we need a term to cover the sum total of cohesion and coherence, we might use connexity in such a sense. The term “connexity” is used as containing the properties of the notion of “coherence” in the mental representation attributed to a text, and “cohesion” as a connection of the elements of a sequence of sentences corresponding to a text.

If so, the equation is:

Connexity=cohesion+coherence” [10]

With connexity we are approaching another fundamental concept, which comes close to it or might even be synonymous with it in meaning. This concept is interpretability. To be meaningful a text must be interpretable, a text we cannot comprehend is not. Interpretability thus defines the borderline between, for example, certain modern poems that defy usual standards of grammaticality by using deviant language and the kind of absolute nonsense that defies all attempts at interpretation and thus fails to quality as modern poetry or as anything meaningful. Interpretability presupposes a certain amount of structuring.

Therefore, by cohesion some linguists mean those mechanisms which link clauses and sentences and are describable in the formal terms of linguistics; conjunctions, articles, anaphora, cataphora, substitution, ellipsis, word order, word order change and others and by coherence we could indicate those linking mechanisms that do not manifest themselves through overt linguistics elements (deictic, word order, articles), but rather through semantic relations and inference.

Analysis of the cohesive links, which ensure coherence within text gives us some insight into how sender’s structure, what the sender wants to say and may be crucial factors in our judgments on whether something is well-written or not. It has also been noted that the conventions of cohesive structure differ from one language to the next and may be one of the sources of difficulty encountered in translating texts belonging to languages of different cultural background.

According to P. Newmark when we are translating, we translate with four levels more or less consciously in mind: 1) the source level- text level, the level of language, where we begin and which we continually go back to; 2) the referential level, the level of objects and events, real or imaginary, which we progressively have to visualize and build up and which is an essential part, first of the comprehension, then of the reproduction process; 3) the cohesive level, which is more general and grammatical, which traces the train of thought, the feeling tone and the various presuppositions of the source language text; 4) the level of naturalness, of common language appropriate to the writer or the speaker in a certain situation [17].

Working on the text level, you intuitively and automatically make certain conversions; you transpose the source language grammar (clauses and groups) into their ready translation language equivalents and translate the lexical units into the sense that appears immediately appropriate in the context of the sentence.

The base level of translation is the text. This is the level of the literal translation of the source language into the target language, the level of the translations you have to eliminate, but it also acts as a corrective of paraphrase. So a part of your mind may be on the text level whilst another is elsewhere. Translation is pre – eminently the occupation in which you have to be thinking of several things at the same time.

You should not read a sentence without seeing it on the referential level. Whether a text is technical or literary, you have to make up your mind, summarily and continuously, what it is about. For each sentence, when it is not clear, when there is an ambiguity when the writing is abstract or figurative, you have to ask yourself: What is actually happening here? And why? For what reason, on what grounds, for what purpose? Can you see it in your mind? If you cannot, you have to supplement the linguistic level the text level with the referential level, the factual level with the necessary additional information from this level of reality, the facts of the matter.

The referential level goes hand in hand with the textual level. All languages have polysemous words and structures which can be finally solved only on the referential level, beginning with a few multi – purpose, overloaded prepositions and conjunctions, through dangling participles to general words. The referential level, where you mentally sort out the text, is built up out of, based on, the clarification of all linguistic difficulties and, where appropriate, supplementary information from the encyclopedia. You build up the referential picture in your mind when you transform the source language into the translation language text and being a professional, you are responsible for the truth of this picture.

So, translator works continuously on two levels, the real and the linguistic, life and language, reference and sense, but you write you compose on the linguistic level, where your job is to achieve the greatest possible correspondence, referentially and pragmatically, with the words and sentences of the source language text. However tempting it is to remain on that simpler, usually simplified level of reality (the message and its function) you have to force yourself back, into the particularities of the source language meaning.

Beyond the second factual level of translating, there is a third, generalized, level linking the first and the second level, which you have to bear in mind. This is the cohesive level; it follows both the structure and the moods of the text: the structure through the connective words (conjunctions, repetitions, articles, general words, referential synonyms) linking the sentences, usually proceeding from known information (theme) to new information (rheme); proposition, opposition, continuation, conclusion or thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thus the structure of text follows the train of thought, determiners say the direction in a text; ensure that there is a sequence of time, space and logic in the text.

The second factor in the cohesive level is mood. Again, this can be shown as a dialectical factor moving between positive and negative, emotive and neutral. It means tracing the thread of a text through its value – laden and value – free passages which may be expressed by objects or nouns, as well as adjectives or qualities. You have to spot the difference between positive and neutral in, say, “appreciate and evaluate”, “tidy and ordered”; “passed away and died”. These differences are often delicate, particularly near the centre, where most languages have words like fair, moderate, whose values cannot always be determined in the context.

The third level, this attempt to follow the thought through the connectives and the feeling tone and the emotion through expressions is admittedly, only tentative, but it may determine the difference between a misleading translation and a good one. This cohesive level is regulator it secures coherence, it adjusts emphasis. At this level, you reconsider the lengths of paragraphs and sentences, the formulation of the title, the tone of the conclusion. This is where the findings of discourse analysis are pertinent.

Cohesion and coherence are considered as main standards which may be useful in the study of texts. These concepts enter as components into a discussion of textuality and meaningfulness, and we should make an attempt of integrating these concepts into a total processual description of text organization, text analysis and translation of text.

Another fundamental problem in this regard is the role of the receiver. We know that certain texts can be perfectly meaningful to some readers and difficult or uninterpretable to others. There are people who experience modern experimental poetry as an insult. At another level, a professional text on medicine or mathematics can be readily interpretable by a person with the proper background. Thus interpretability is not only a function of the text as such but also of the knowledge the receiver brings to the text. Interpretability is not an absolute, unchangeable and permanent quality of a text but is affected by the relation of the text to a specific receiver or category of receivers. Very often the receiver must have an access to the situational context, either in its original form in connection with the speech act or in a sufficiently complete and accurate reconstruction. Lose relations exist between interpretability and connexity. If we are to establish coherence relations between parts of a text, we must first interpret the text. We receive the text, we set up various hypotheses about its proper or best interpretation and on the basis of such interpretive hypotheses we then infer what relations there must be between parts of the text, if that text is to be convex. In this sense, text interpretation is a hermeneutic process: we must have a whole, a universe of discourse, before we can see how its parts fit together and coherent.

The theory of interpreting texts focuses attention on the complex processes by which a text is produced or understood. Any interpretation of text causes producing a new text (metatext). Such approach can be applied not only to philosophy and humanities, but to all spheres of knowledge and even to social phenomena. For example, Cold war is considered as a type of metaphoric discourse. Reality disappears and many texts function as a reality. These texts can refer each to other by arbitrary way and their different configurations lead to new realities. But linguistic intuition opposes this approach as text is regarded, first of all, in its referential function, that is to say text about the world, not about language or another text. The success of a metaphor is the function of the socio-cultural format or frames of the sender and the receiver of text.

The receivers involvement in the creation of meaning gives us a strong argument to believe that the development of the general principles of the theory of interpreting text (due regard for the background knowledge shared by the sender and receiver, their world-views, cultural traditions, the mechanism of linguistics thinking, etc) can be observed in what has comparatively recently been described as cognitive linguistics. And although the latter covers a whole range of problems which have long proved to be of vital importance in humanities, the great role it plays in the sphere of contemporary research consists in its ability of attracting the researchers’ attention away from mechanical, structural approaches, thus revealing enormous possibilities for functional-communicative view.

The socio-cultural aspect of language use must be further explored to see the inseparable relationship between language and social meaning. Some functional and critical linguistic studies reveal the close interaction and dynamism of language users. In so doing, these demonstrate how dialectal relationships are maintained and how they are translated into socio-cultural structures and social practice (discourse). U. Eco (with regard to sports news) considers “a discourse on a discourse about watching others’ sport as a discourse” [9]. In fact, we can build real or metaphoric world over any word, phrase or theme such as Fire, No Smoking or Globalization. This process and its result is discourse. Context emerges as the main factor here. N.Enkvist gives the following classical definition of discourse: “Thus discourse means text + context, where context contains a situational component” [10]. Further researches have brought to understanding that discourse is based on the principle of participants or communicators cooperation. The receiver is an equal participant whose interests are equally valued. T.Van Dijk suggests that the power of discourse belongs to the power holders who often promote themselves, gain status, image and authority. As any discourse is considered in a threefold manner – as “the use of language”, as “the implantation” of certain notions into the public perception, as the interaction of social groups and individuals, the basic discourse characteristics are: 1) it is fixed in texts; 2) it has cognitive foundation; 3) it is ideologically marked [6].

Various rhetorical strategies of repetition, formal lexical – grammatical means, metonymy, metaphor, the names of person, place, literature, brand names (etc) are creatively crafted and widely employed within the text to arouse more attention of the receiver, to initiate cognitive poetic effects and somehow literary, to perform diverse communicative functions. They persuade the receiver to recognize the prominent intercultural values and furthermore construct the identity of cultural pluralism. It is important to remember that texts operate within a cultural context; that is, they are created within a particular culture, and operate within the value systems of that culture.

Thus the cognitive approach to text is based on inseparable relations between language, cross-cultural and academic knowledge. Text is viewed as “the dialogue of cultures” in the general context of intercultural communication. Intercultural communication is reflected in language choice as a means of constructing text, but also in the knowledge of its functioning in a social context which develops cognitive skills needed to understand discourse realia.

To acquire intercultural competences means to pay special attention to certain words, phrases and to find the meaning they convey. A sender then defines specific concepts in a foreign language in order to solve differences in communicative style. But it isn’t enough merely to know the meaning of words, their typical collocations, or even the contexts in which they are most frequently used. The primary use of language is for communication, and so a speaker must also know what people do with words, what they use them for. Why they are using the language is at least as important as their actual words. It also shows us how to see what words and combination of words are used to express such common functions as suggesting, ordering, apologizing, criticizing, encouraging and complimenting. It also shows how to use the language for discourse purposes such as emphasizing, focusing, downplaying, etc. So by looking at a different socio-culture domains and comparing them with his/her own culture a speaker gets closer to the culture of a foreign language.

When the complexities of intercultural communication are analyzed and acknowledged, its significance becomes a formidable challenge. It is only in recent decades that linguists have begun to think about how they can extend their understanding of communication beyond the emphasis on linguistic and sociolinguistic competence. This understanding should help us to find out how the conceptual picture of the world, inherent in each language, is formed.

In general terms, sociolinguistics deals with the inter-relationships between language and society. It has strong connections to anthropology through the investigation of language and culture and to sociology through the crucial role that language plays in the organization of social groups and institutions.

In the study of the world’s cultures, it has become clear that different groups not only have different languages, they have different world views which are reflected in their languages. In the sense that language reflects culture, this is a very important observation and the existence of different world views should not be ignored when different languages and different discourses are studied.

Bibliography and further reading

1.Abdullayev K. (1999) Azərbaycan dili sintaksisinin nəzəri problemləri Бакы

2. de Beaugrande R. (1980) Text, Discourse and Process toward a multidisciplinary Science of text. London p. 383 - 408

3.Chafe W. (1994) Discourse, Consciousness and Time. The Flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 375p.

4. Chambers J.K. (1994) Sociolinguistic Theory Blackwell

5.Clyne M. (1994) Inter-cultural Communication at Work Cambridge University Press

6. Dijk Teun A. Van (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London: Sage Publications. 1998

7. Dijk Teun A. Van (1977) Text and Context: Exploration in the semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London – New York: Academic Press. p. 261

8. Dressler W. V. (1970). Towards a Semantic deep structures of Discourse Grammar. Papers from the 6^th Regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, p. 72

9. Eco U. (1999) Kant and the Platypus: Essays on language and Cognition

10. Enkvist. N.E. (1989). From Text to Interpretability: A Contribution to the Discussion of Basic Terms in Text linguistics. Connexity and Coherence: Analysis of Text and Discourse Ed. By W. Heydrich. Berlin; New-York. p.369-382

11. Fairclough N.L., Wodak R. 1997 Critical discourse analysis. In: van Dijk Teun A. (ed.) Discourse studies. A multidisciplinary introduction. Vol. 2. Discourse as social interaction. 258-284. London: Sage Publications.

12. Givon T. (1990).Syntax: a function – typological introduction. Vol. 2. Amsterdam.

13. Halliday M.A.K., Hasan R (1976) Cohesion in English, London.

14. Hatch E. (1992). Discourse and Language Education. Cambridge University Press

15. Mann W.C.,Thompson S.A. (1980). Rhetorical structure Theory: Toward a Functional Theory of text organization // text+8. p. 243-281.

16. McCarthy M. (1994) Discourse Analysis for language teachers. Cambridge University Press. 1994. 213 p.

17. Newmark P. (1988) A Textbook of Translation. Prentice Hall, 292 p.

18. Thomas J. (1983) Cross-cultural pragmatic failure ||Applied linguistics. Oxford V.4 p. 91-112

19.Wagner R. (1985) Discourse connectives in English. Thesis (Ph.D.) New York and London, 425 p.

20. Verschueren J. Understanding pragmatics. Arnold, London,2003, 295 p.

21. Барт Р. (1980). Текстовой анализ. В кн.: Новое в зарубежной лингвистики Вып. IX Москва. стр. 307-313.

22. Гальперин И.Р. (1981). Текст как объект лингвистического исследования Москва,