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John Benjamins Publishing Company
Outlining a new linguistic theory
of translation
Massimiliano Morini
University of Udine Italy
In the following article, an outline of a new linguistic theory of translation
is given that can be of use to theorists and practitioners alike. Te linguistic
theories of the 1950s and 1960s were too normative and a-contextual to account
for all the forms and aspects of translation; while the skeptical turn of Transla-
tion Studies has succeeded in unmasking the ideological quality of all theories,
but cannot produce a cybernetics of translation, an account of how translation
is materially done. A new linguistic approach can produce such a practical ac-
count, provided that the pragmatic level of analysis is given a prominent role and
that a touch of non-scientifc skepticism is maintained.
Keywords: translation theory, translation practice, linguistics, pragmatics, text
acts, cooperation, politeness, deixis
In what follows, a practice-based, and pragmatically-oriented, linguistic theory of
translation is proposed. Formulating a linguistic theory of translation is, on the
face of it, as obvious an operation as writing an ichthyological description of fsh:
translations are linguistic objects, and all those who think about translation must
inevitably do so in terms of language. Nevertheless, the recent history of Trans-
lation Studies has made such an apparently uncontroversial expression as a lin-
guistic theory of translation controversial, and, indeed, suspect. Terefore, a brief
historical survey of the discipline is needed before a (new, practical, pragmatic)
linguistic theory is outlined.
Te pragmatic translator
Translation Studies was born as a separate discipline in the 1950s. Tough thinkers
and translators had been writing about the act of translation for at least a couple
Target 20:1 (2008), 2951. doi 10.1075/target.20.1.03mor
issn 09241884 / e-issn 15699986 John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved
30 Massimiliano Morini
of millennia (in the west: since Ciceros De optimo genere oratorum, around 52
B.C.E.), this corpus of theoretical pronouncements had never been assembled into
anything like a coherent whole. In twenty centuries of translating, only a hand-
ful of fairly exhaustive essays can be isolated: Leonardo Brunis De interpretatione
recta (around 1420), Alexander Frazer Tytlers Essay on the principles of transla-
tion (1790), and Friedrich Schleiermachers ber die verschiedenen Methoden des
bersetzens (1813). Tese full-sized treatises, as well as a number of shorter works
(Martin Luthers 1530 Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, Etienne Dolets 1540 La manie-
re de bien traduire dune langue en aultre), and a host of minor, ofen repetitive pro-
nouncements, discuss the nature of translation, the methods of translating, or the
requirements of a good translator in very general terms. In the 1950s and 1960s,
scholars within the felds of information theory and linguistics set out, in a much
more systematic manner, to defne the phenomenon of translation in its entirety.
Ultimately, these scientists aimed at excluding the operation of chance from the
translators activity. Te Zeitgeist is evident in Anthony G. Oettingers words:
Placing patterns into correspondence is one major linguistic problem of machine
translation; devising recipes for transforming source patterns into target pat-
terns is another. Of the existence of some solutions to these problems there is
little doubt, especially for closely related languages. A unique solution seems too
much to hope for. While the study of formal linguistic patterns for their own sake
interests many investigators, students of information theory in particular, the for-
mal structure of discourse is relevant to translation only as a vehicle of meaning.
Corresponding patterns, therefore, must be defned as conveyors of equivalent
meanings since, whatever meaning is or means, it is generally agreed that it must
be preserved in translation. (Oettinger 1959/1966: 248)
Patterns, correspondence, recipes, transforming: Oettingers is the language
of computers and technical manuals, and other scholars employ very similar styles.
In the interest of machine translation and in order to facilitate the task of human
translators, linguists and computer scientists tried to defne invariance (Oetting-
er 1959/1960), formal correspondence (Catford 1965), or equivalence (Nida
1964), on a descending ladder of scientifc assurance.
1
Gradually, these scholars
came to realize that no univocal solutions could be devised for the problems of
translation, and that the correspondences between even closely related languages
were too variable to be defnitively systematized.
2
In the 1970s, a revolution took place which transformed translation theory
and translation science into Translation Studies. Te term itself was coined by
James S Holmes, who proposed, in a 1972 paper, the use of a label that had already
proved productive in the general feld of humanities (Holmes 1972/1988: 70). In
Holmes wake, a number of scholars, mainly on the Tel Aviv-Leuven Axis (Her-
mans 1999: preface), started to look at translation not in normative terms, as the
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation 31
linguistic school had done, but under a descriptive light. For the frst time, trans-
lated texts were viewed not only as target texts (i.e., in relation to their sources),
but also as texts in their own right (cf. Even-Zohar 1978). Scholars adopting this
new approach challenged the normative validity of traditional terms like fdelity
and linguistic constructs like equivalence, by claiming that far from being eternal
and universal, such concepts were historically determined. Tus, translation came
to be seen as a manipulative operation rather than a simple textual substitution:
Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever
their intention, refect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate
literature to function in a given society in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation,
undertaken in the service of power, and its positive aspect can help in the evolu-
tion of a literature and a society. (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990, preface)
Tis new outlook has produced and is still producing an impressive body of work
in the feld of Descriptive Translation Studies so much so that the whole disci-
pline today seems confned to the descriptive feld. In Holmes seminal paper, how-
ever, descriptive translation studies was only one of several branches of what he
imagined to be a very leafy tree that would sprout new boughs, as well as incorpo-
rate old ones. Holmes frst distinguished between pure and applied TS: pure
TS further branched into descriptive translation studies (DTS) and translation
theory (TT), whereas applied TS would ideally produce results in the areas
of language learning, translator training, translation aids, translation policy, and
translation criticism in other words, it would be of use to language learners and
teachers, and above all to translators and translation teachers.
In Holmes map, translation theory is closely allied to translation description:
and it is not by chance that the most infuential theories of translation of the last
two decades have been descriptive rather than operative (for a quasi-defnitive
summary of twenty years of theorizing, cf. Toury 1995). Tose few scholars of the
DTS feld who have tried to set agendas for the translator have done so in an ideo-
logical vein, and their conclusions, as I have said elsewhere (Morini 20022003),
do not pass the test of close logical examination (cf. Venuti 1995, when he ex-
horts translators to fght the domesticating tendencies of their societies). For
the rest, translation training, translation aids, translation policy and translation
criticism have generally been conducted without explicit reference to a theory of
translation.
3
However, it is awkward for a practice-based discipline like Translation Stud-
ies to lack a practice-based theory by which practice can be illuminated. Even a
theoretician like Umberto Eco freely admits that translation theory must be based
on some sort of active or passive experience of translation (Eco 2003: 13) i.e.,
on the experience of translating or having ones writings translated. Conversely,
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practice needs theory to understand itself. In a recent book in dialogue form on
the practical use of translation theory, translator Emma Wagner has asked theorist
Andrew Chesterman if thinking about translation can help us to become better
translators and give us a feeling of professional self-esteem. Chestermans answer,
while apparently questioning the general validity of Wagners implicit assumptions
(Would you pose the same question of other kinds of theory, I wonder?), essen-
tially confrms that some such connection between translation theory and practice
is indeed needed, if not inevitable:
Should musicology help composers to become better musicians or composers?
Should literary theory help writers and poets to write better? Should sociol-
ogy help the people and groups it studies to become better members of society?
Should the theories of mechanics and cybernetics help engineers and computer
scientists to produce better robots? I guess your answers to these questions will
not be identical: I myself would be more inclined to answer yes to the last one
than to the others. To the sociology one, I might answer that it should at least help
people like politicians to make better decisions. But the ones on musicology and
literary theory seem a bit diferent; such theories seem more to help other people
understand these art forms, rather than the artists themselves. In particular, such
theories might help academics (theorists) to understand something better, and
hence, in some abstract way, add to the sum total of cultural knowledge. (Chester-
man and Wagner 2002: 12)
Chesterman proposes a number of theories as possible parallels with translation
theory; but the various sciences he mentions could also be taken as mirror-images
of diferent aspects of Translation Studies. While DTS provides the kind of de-
scription which is also the province of musicology and literary theory, the cyber-
netics of translation can only be studied by means of a linguistic theory. Every act
of translation is, in the Peircean sense, an act of interlingual interpretation (Jako-
bson 1959/1966: 233), and only linguistics can give us a practical understanding
of language-to-language transactions, as well as the terminology we need in order
to understand what we talk about when we talk about translation. Te skepti-
cal turn of DTS has rightly questioned the validity of such linguistic concepts as
fdelity and equivalence, but it has not provided adequate substitutes: as Kirsten
Malmkjr points out,
equivalence, or some sort of notion like it, is hard to give up in translation stud-
ies, since there must be some sort of relationship between a Target Text (TT) and
a Source Text (ST) if the former is to be considered a translation of the latter;
besides, the notion is essential if we are to make sense of certain types of trans-
lation and mistranslation and even, arguably, of diference and non-translation.
(Malmkjr 1999: 263)
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A return to linguistic Translation Studies is therefore advocated though with
none of the normative rigidity of early translation science and bersetzungswis-
senschaf. Te linguistic theorists of the 1950s and 1960s aimed to create formulae
and algorithms for something as fuid as language, and wanted to keep context out
of such a contextual activity as translation. A new linguistic theory of translation,
by contrast, will have to be operatively open (most translation situations allow for
more than one choice) and contextual.
In other words, a new linguistic theory of translation will have to be pragmat-
ic. Tere are many possible defnitions of pragmatics (cf. Levinson 1983: 132),
but all of them somehow involve the inclusion of context into linguistic obser-
vation. Of course, a general theory of translation cannot be uniquely pragmatic,
just as a translator does not work only at the pragmatic level: but the latter is the
higher rung of a hierarchical ladder comprising semantics, syntax, and phonet-
ics.
4
Te frst decisions the translator takes are of a pragmatic nature decisions
that have to do with genre (to which genre does the source text belong? should
the target text belong to the same genre? Is there a comparable genre in the tar-
get culture?), historical and geographical distance (how should a text written in
Anglo-Saxon or in Farsi be translated?), register, cooperation (is the author/nar-
rator/character following/breaching/fouting/exploiting Grices maxims?), polite-
ness (what is the relationship between the author/implied author/narrator and the
reader/implied reader/narratee? can/should it be reproduced in the target text?),
and relevance (how is the source text, or any part of it, to be relevant in the target
culture?). When these general decisions are taken, related choices follow on the
other linguistic planes (not necessarily in any order: it is only the pragmatic level
that consistently precedes the others). A theory of translation, i.e., a theory of what
translation is, of how it works and the efects it produces, should ideally follow the
same kind of hierarchy.
Tere are many reasons why it is important to develop the pragmatic aspects
of a linguistic theory of translation. First of all, pragmatics had been disregarded
by the linguists who tried to create a general theory in the 1950s and the 1960s, and
if we do not want their labour to have been in vain, we have to pick up where they
lef of. Secondly, a pragmatic theory of translation will be of greater use to trans-
lators than any semantic, syntactic, or phonetic theory: because these cannot but
be incomplete and micro-linguistic; and a micro-linguistic theory of translation
is ultimately impossible, while micro-linguistic practice is best lef to itself or to
translator trainers and teachers. Conversely, a pragmatic theory of translation has
to be illustrated, and illustration necessarily involves the micro-linguistic level.
5
It must be said that the project is not totally unprecedented. From the late
1960s onwards, the linguists working on translation had come to realize that cer-
tain contextual elements had to be introduced into the system to make it work.
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Tese linguists tried to link the methods to be used in translation with the func-
tion to be assigned to the source and the target texts. Katharina Rei frst used
Bhlers theory of linguistic functions to create a taxonomy of texts with annexed
translating methods (Rei 1969). Hans J. Vermeer realized that the target text can
have a diferent function (he spoke of skopos) from its source (Rei and Vermeer
1984/1991). Tese functionalist theories are epitomised in Mary Snell-Hornbys
Translation Studies: An integrated approach (1988), where a very fexible typology
is elaborated which allows for the overlapping of genres and methods.
Tis article stems from these theories, while also accepting that a theory of
translation can only be normative in a very negative manner it can dictate what
cannot be done, or what should not be done, or what does not work. A new lin-
guistic theory cannot but take into account the skeptical U-turn efected by De-
scriptive Translation Studies: the proven fact that the same text has been shown
to have been translated in very diferent ways, with very diferent styles, and ac-
cording to very diferent ideologies, rules out the possibility of creating translation
recipes not to mention formulae or algorithms. Tis is what translation theory
cannot do: what it can do is show the conditions in which translators work (a task
already performed by DTS), and analyze the possibilities they have in each single
translating situation.
Te three functions of translation
When they set out to create taxonomies for the use of translators and translation
scholars, the German linguists of the 1960s and 1970s (Katharina Rei, Werner
Koller, and others;
6
later, Peter Newmark (1988) popularized some of their ideas
for the Anglophone world) tried to defne a few main textual types according to
the predominance of one linguistic function or another. Drawing on Bhlers
functional model of language (Bhler 1934/1982: 2433), Katharina Rei distin-
guished between content-centred (predominance of the referential function of
language), form-centred (predominance of the expressive function), and efect-
centred texts (conative function) diferent text-types calling for diferent trans-
lation strategies (Rei 1969). Tis simplistic tripartite model was soon expanded
to account for a wider spectrum of functional possibilities: Rei herself operated
a distinction between text types and varieties (novels, poems, manuals, recipes;
Rei and Vermeer 1984/1991: 176179), while Werner Koller invited translators
to distinguish between primary and secondary text-functions (Koller 1979: 129).
Vermeers Skopostheorie contemplated the possibility of functional change in the
passage from source to target text, and indeed subjected the skopos of the former
to that of the latter (Rei and Vermeer 1984/1991: 100).
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Tese functional theories are a creditable attempt to leave the swamp of a-
contextual bersetzungswissenschaf behind, and to establish a connection be-
tween language and world, text and context. Nevertheless, their interpretation of
the term function is somewhat restrictive, even when fexibly applied (cf. Snell-
Hornby 1988). In the end, function, for all these scholars, is the same as, or closely
related to, genre: a way of functioning in certain ostensive ways which are com-
monly associated with given classes of texts.
While maintaining that afliation to genre or text-type is one of the ways
texts have of acting in and upon the world, I insist that it is not the only one or even
the most important. A pragmatic theory of translation must incorporate genre
into a wider and more systematic framework. My defnition of function, accord-
ingly, incorporates all the (inherently pragmatic) ways in which texts function in
the world.
If one were asked to defne the epistemological province of pragmatics, one
could say that it is about the where and when of peoples talk (deixis), about the
way people relate to one another through language (implicature, presupposition,
politeness), and about what people do to each other and the world when they
speak (speech acts). Since here we are concerned with the pragmatics of written
rather than spoken language, we could conceive of a text pragmatics studying
the where and when of texts, the way texts interact with people (rather than other
texts), and what texts do or try to do. In view of this tripartite defnition, three
main metatextual categories can be envisaged which I propose to call functions:
the locative, the interpersonal, and the performative function.
Since each of these functions defnes a number of means by which texts take
place in the world, interact with the contexts they evoke, create, and are produced
in, one would almost be inclined to call them metafunctions but this, together
with the use of interpersonal for the second of my three functions, would create
confusion with Hallidays grammatical system (Halliday 1985). If not intended,
however, this confusion is not totally unmotivated: just as Hallidays grammar
tries to explain how speakers and writers use language as a creative, interactive,
and organizational bridge between themselves and the world, a pragmatic theory
of translation aims at explaining how bi-texts
7
create, interact with, and (try to)
modify and organize the world outside their paper borders.
Te performative function: Text acts
When J.L. Austin refuted the descriptive fallacy of traditional linguistics in his
famous 1955 William James Lectures, he observed that words are used not only to
state or describe a state of afairs, but also to do things, to change the speakers
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world. Austin observed that every speech act has a locutionary content, an illocu-
tionary force and a perlocutionary efect i.e., that every utterance (or sentence,
in Austins somewhat dated terminology) aims at achieving something and achieves
something, intended and real efects not necessarily being equal. His ground-break-
ing observations were mainly confned to oral speech and to the limited scope of
the single sentence though the analysis of the felicity conditions to be satisfed
for the performative act to be successful ensured that there was some connection
between the single sentence, the co-text, and the context of situation.
Since 1955, however, the performative dimension of language has been in-
vestigated in relation to written as well as oral language, and it has been pointed
out that very few illocutionary acts are understandable at the level of the single
sentence or the single utterance.
8
It is evident, for instance, that in a conversational
interaction like the following, a sort of continuous illocutionary act is performed
by both speakers (roughly, the protagonist/narrator is trying to obtain a worried
reaction from Sachiko, and Sachiko is more or less covertly telling her to mind her
own business):
Sachiko turned and waited for me to catch up. Is something wrong? she asked.
Im glad I found you, I said, a little out of breath. Your daughter, she was
fghting just as I came out. Back there near the ditches.
She was fghting?
With two other children. One of them was a boy. It looked a nasty little
fght.
I see. Sachiko began to walk again. I fell in step beside her.
I dont want to alarm you, I said, but it did look quite a nasty fght. In fact, I
think I saw a cut on your daughters cheek.
I see.
As a matter of fact, I continued, Id meant to mention this to you before. You
see, Ive seen your daughter on a number of occasions recently. I wonder, perhaps,
if she hasnt been playing truant a little.
Its very kind of you to be so concerned, Etsuko, she said. So very kind. Im
sure youll make a splendid mother. (Ishiguro 1982: 14)
On a bigger scale, it can be observed that even entire texts certainly do something,
in the sense that they modify, or aim at modifying, the status quo of the world
they aim at achieving contextual efects on real people in real situations. Tis is
most evident with the text types that Rei calls operative and informative (in-
struction manuals, advertisements; Rei and Vermeer 1984/1991: 206); but it can
be argued that all texts, whether published or not, aim at performing something
and may, or may not, perform something (the purpose of a novel, for instance,
may be to entertain, or to renovate the English language, or both: if nobody reads
the novel, both purposes are frustrated).
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Te intentional/performative value of a text has been defned in various ways
by translation scholars, text linguists, and pragmatists. As has been seen, transla-
tion scholars have listed a number of functions of texts in connection with the
main function of language within the texts. Text linguists have spoken of the in-
tentional dimension of texts, whose very nature it is to reach receivers and pro-
duce an efect on them (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981). Recently, certain prag-
matists have tried to identify the evaluative pattern (the point) expressed by and
through a text (Tompson and Hunston 2000; cf. also Labov 1972). Tese are all
ways of looking at the impact of texts upon an existing state of afairs. More gener-
ally, it can be said that when a text is written and/or published, a text act is per-
formed that has an illocutionary force and may have perlocutionary efects on the
world (cf. Hatim 1998: 73).
A pragmatic theory of translation cannot do without a theory of text acts,
because translators and theorists have to look at the intended and real efects of
source texts and bi-texts in order to re-produce or analyse them. If a translator
aims at doing what the source text does in the target language with all the ob-
stacles posed by linguistic and cultural barriers he/she must translate a text act
rather than a mere text; and translation scholars must consider translations in this
light if they want to understand how they change or aim at changing an existing
state of afairs. Of course, illocutionary force and perlocutionary efect are to be
kept separated in theory as well as in practice. For the translator, the illocution-
ary forces inscribed in the text (rather than the authors intentions) are generally
more important than its perlocutionary efects: in the past, many translators and
linguists have spoken of an equivalence of efect to be obtained in the passage
from source to target language; but while it is very difcult to gauge real efects on
real readers, the source text can be analysed for the potential readings it contains
i.e., for its illocutionary forces.
9
Being bound by no practical considerations, the
theorist is freer than the practitioner in his/her pragmatic analysis of the bi-text:
a translation critic can study the illocutionary diferences between a source and a
target text, whereas a historian of translation may be interested in the perlocution-
ary efects of certain target texts in a given place at a given time. (One of the great
achievements of DTS has been the realization that translations, i.e., target texts,
can be and must be considered as texts in their own right as well as refections or
refractions of their sources.)
Inevitably, the illusory simplicity of theoretical defnition conceals a wealth of
analytical and practical difculties. For translator and translation scholar alike, it
is not at all easy to defne each single text act exhaustively, except in the above-
quoted cases (advertisements, manuals), in which the text has a very straightfor-
ward function (persuading to buy something, instructing in the use of something).
Usually, though, both the illocutionary forces and the perlocutionary efects of a
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text are multiple, complex, and difcult to isolate with any certainty: ultimately,
the weight of performative analysis rests on the translators or on the theorists
shoulders, and though interpretations may difer in degree of correctness and pre-
cision, more than one reading is possible, and Spitzers philological circle (Leech
and Short 1981/1983: 13) cannot be evaded (we make theoretical predictions
and verify them in practice, but our very predictions infuence our verifcation
procedures).
Tough there is no way out of epistemological uncertainty in sof sciences
such as Translation Studies, a route must be chosen, and the most a theorist or a
practitioner can do is explain and justify his/her choice. By explaining the premis-
es and conclusions of his/her actions, the translator gives his/her readers an idea of
the relationship between the source-text act and the target-text act. In producing
an Italian translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbons Sunset song (Gibbon 1932/2005)
a novel set in the Scottish countryside, written in a mixture of English and Scots
I have tried to isolate the illocutionary forces inscribed in the text, as well as
the perlocutionary efects produced by the appearance of this experimental Scot-
tish novel in the British book market and cultural milieu of the 1930s (and of to-
day). Gibbon did not use Scots for sentimental purposes, but because he wanted to
give it the literary dignity and prestige of other European languages: this is made
evident by the fact that both the characters and the narrator speak in a harmonic
blend of English, Scots, and Anglicized Scots (while novels by earlier northern
authors confronted an educated English-speaking narrator with rough Scots-
speaking peasants). Tis linguistic choice is therefore ideologically central to the
book it is a consequence of what the book wants to do in the world. Inevitably
and ironically, the strong national tinge of Sunset song has led to its being per-
ceived as having only local relevance in the English-speaking world: while stylis-
tically comparable texts such as Virginia Woolf s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyces
Ulysses are today catalogued as modern classics, Sunset song is mostly unknown, a
literary curiosity for Scottish initiates. In my Italian version, I have tried to give a
textual account of the forces and efects embodied in the source text (a reproduc-
tion was impossible, because the context of situation was radically diferent): in
my reading, the linguistic/nationalistic issue was crucial to a deep understanding
of Sunset song as a work of imaginative literature therefore, I tried to fashion a
synthetic Italian, made up of a number of Italian dialects, to reproduce the Scots
words, phrases, and constructions used in Gibbons original.
As this example shows, the illocutionary forces inscribed in the source can
never be exactly reproduced in the target text: while Sunset song is, amongst other
things, an act of cultural/political defance, Canto del tramonto is an account of
that act, as well as an attempt at popularizing Scottish literature in Italy; and other
strategies might have been used by other translators to obtain similar or diferent
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efects. Pragmatic barriers are, afer all, as insurmountable as phonetic or syntactic
ones: and as Vermeer understood more than twenty years ago (Rei and Vermeer
1984/1991), the skopos of a text never remains exactly unchanged in the language-
to-language transition. Analysis at the pragmatic level orientates the lower-level
choices and observations of translator and theorist: but both translator and theo-
rist must know that no faithful pragmatic copy is possible, because contexts vary
just like phonemes, morphemes, and syntactic constructions and the pragmat-
ic forces encoded in diferent grammatical systems are never exactly the same,
though in cognate languages they may reach a very high degree of similarity.
Tis pragmatic indeterminacy is inherent in the very act of translation, though
it can be masked in modern times by the translators tendency to (paradoxically)
appear invisible in order to present a fuent version which can pass as a faithful
copy of the original indeed, the original itself (Venuti 1995). However, DTS
has taught us that translation is never innocent, that it always implies some sort of
rewriting of the source. Even when the translator has no explicit ideological vi-
sion to impose upon the target text, his/her ideology is brought to bear on his/her
work: in Gideon Tourys terms, the translation norms of the translators society
infuence his/her work in one sense or another.
It is revealing to study the bi-texts of former ages as alignments of source-
text and target-text acts: from this kind of operation, we can learn a lot about the
norms of past societies as well as about the performative indeterminacy of trans-
lation. In the numerous translations produced in the European Renaissance, for
instance, it is quite ofen the case that the target text is invested with performative
forces which are only partially present in, or even totally absent from, the source:
Sir John Haringtons version of Orlando Furioso has a serious epic, Virgilian qual-
ity that is totally absent in Ariostos original; Philemon Hollands translations of
Roman and Greek classics invested the target texts with English nationalistic fer-
vour. In the Middle Ages, such pragmatic transformations are even easier to detect
in the translators attempts to turn Pagan masterpieces into pieces of Christian
or moral instruction as in the famous fourteenth-century Ovide moralis (cf.
Morini 2006). To go back to modern times, however, even the translators impulse
to subtract his/her signature from the translation is linked to a norm dictating
what the target text has to do in the target culture: the translator must be invis-
ible because readers (or so the commonplace goes) want to read a primary text,
and a translation would obtain less attention and have a weaker impact if it was
presented as secondary.
All these historical and contemporary examples show that the translation
norms of any given society are in their essence pragmatic/performative: they
primarily dictate what a translation has to do all stylistic choices at all lev-
els being both personal and subordinate to performative function. Terefore, the
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performative function of translation, though not primary in an epistemological
hierarchy, takes logical and chronological precedence over the interpersonal and
locative functions in theory as well as in practice; because the translator, or the
translator scholar, frst has to understand what the source text or the bi-text does
and that understanding guides his/her choices or intuitions as far as the other
pragmatic functions and the other linguistic levels of translation are concerned.
Te interpersonal function: Cooperation, politeness, interest
If a text does something, if it modifes and/or aims at modifying an existing
state of afairs, it cannot do so directly: a text only has an impact upon the world
through the infuence it exercises upon its readers (though that primary impact is
not necessarily the only one: one need only think of what Rushdies Satanic verses
and its translations mean to a large number of people who never read it in the frst
place). A pragmatic description of the bi-text for translational purposes, therefore,
cannot but take into account the ways in which the bi-text enters into communica-
tion with its (source and target) readers. Grices theory of cooperative communi-
cation (Grice 1967/1991), Brown and Levinsons and Leechs studies of politeness
(Brown and Levinson 1987; Leech 1983), and Sperber and Wilsons notion of rel-
evance (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) can help the translator to understand the
interpersonal relationships inscribed in and presupposed by the source text, and
the translator scholar to analyse bi-textual links on the interpersonal level. (Once
again, we must look for potential relationships realized in the text(s) rather than
actual relationships with real people.)
All the theories of communication evolved by pragmatics from the 1970s on-
wards represented an attempt to expand the code model of classical linguistics,
according to which a message is encoded and sent from a sender to a decoding
receiver through a channel (air, in the case of human speech) which may or may
not be disturbed by noise. While this model describes the passage of linguistic
signals from a sender to a receiver, it does not explain how receivers use contextual
information to interpret messages which are ofen less than completely explicit;
neither does it account for all those parts of human speech which are not strictly
functional in communicative terms. Grice frst expanded the code model by not-
ing that all speakers intuitively recognize a cooperative principle the maxims of
which (quantity, quality, relation, and manner) they can choose to follow, exploit,
or fout. Sperber and Wilson tried to simplify Grices theory by insisting that the
maxim of relation (relevance, in their defnition) was really the only one at work
in human interaction (hearers extract information by coupling speakers utter-
ances with relevant contexts). Brown, Levinson and Leech studied all the polite,
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communicatively unnecessary eforts humans make in order to maintain good
relationships with one another to maintain, in Brown and Levinsons terms,
each others face.
While an account of what a text communicates to its readers will be primar-
ily semantic (though very little communication is non-contextual), an account of
how a text communicates with its readers, of the balance between explicit and
implicit information, of the relationship between text (author, implied author, per-
sona, narrator) and readers, will necessarily be pragmatic. Te pragmatic theories
of Grice, Sperber and Wilson, Brown and Levinson, and Leech were initially con-
ceived for face-to-face interaction but textual activity also involves interperson-
al contact, and the practical diference between face-to-face and textual exchanges
(textual communication is more unidirectional and less fuid) does not detract
from their essential similarity. As Basil Hatim points out, texts behave more or less
like people:
More specifcally, Hoey focuses on the means by which writers establish a dia-
logue with their readers, anticipating their reactions and building this into the
constitution of their texts. It is this dialogic nature of the written text which has
particularly caught the attention of Literary Pragmatics: of course, speech is more
personally evaluative than writing, but some speech can be as analytic and ob-
jective as any written text designed with these communicative aims in mind. By
the same token, it is argued, writing can be casual and unceremonial and always
capable of interacting with human beings more fundamentally than any writing
(Hatim 1998: 86)
Tis dialogue between text and reader(s) can be conducted in many diferent ways,
the degrees and styles of cooperation and politeness varying along the axes of cul-
ture, genre, individual personality. First of all, texts address their readers in a vari-
ety of ways, either directly or indirectly: advertisements, for instance, ofen address
the receiver directly, whereas scientifc articles usually adopt a more impersonal
stance which conceals, but does not cancel, the relationship between text and read-
er. In literary texts, a number of fctional fgures (implied author, narrator, poetic
persona, narratee) mediate between the text, or its originator, and the reader.
Te collision between text and reader, however, is not confned to those in-
stances in which the reader is openly mentioned and addressed, or covertly evoked;
on the contrary, it permeates all texts of whatever description, for writing and
publishing a text means establishing a contact with one or more than one (actual,
potential) readers. Te quality of the relationship is defned, on the interpersonal
axis, by how the text chooses to tell its readers what it wants to tell them: one must
look at the ratio between explicit and implicit communication (presuppositions,
implicatures, implicitures, subplicit meanings, etc.),
10
at the degree of evidence
with which relevant information is signaled and distinguished from irrelevant
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details, and generally at the order in which information is given (in a scientifc ar-
ticle, an abstract sums up the main argument or hypothesis, whereas in a detective
story or in Jane Austens novels, crucial details are withheld until the denouement).
Cooperation/relevance and politeness interact in unpredictable ways, and no two
readers will feel involved by and included in a text to the same degree: in certain
cases, if the text is clear and explicative, readers will feel included; the reverse may
be true on other occasions, because extreme clarity can be felt as ofensive (readers
may feel that their decoding abilities are being undervalued) or boring (in a liter-
ary work of art, but also in a newspaper article, one must not give away ones goods
too soon). Teoretically, one would tend to assign a positive value to clarity and
perspicuity: but the changeableness of the principle of politeness and of Leechs
interest principle
11
reminds us that no linguistic quality is perceived in the same
manner by all people on all occasions.
At this juncture of cooperation/relevance, politeness and interest, the trans-
lator acts as a pragmatic mediator: the task is neither innocent nor simple, and
requires knowledge of the norms regulating cooperation and politeness in dif-
ferent cultures. Once again, perfect interpersonal equivalence is impossible to
obtain if only because languages and cultures (as well as people) vary in the
things they say explicitly or implicitly. In a perceptive article on Presumption and
translation, Peter Fawcett has noted how the Informationsangebot of a text can
never be the same when grafed onto another language/culture. If the translator
does not take into account interpersonal as well as phonetic, semantic, and other
pragmatic diferences, he/she does so at the risk of ofending or alienating his/her
readers:
We need presupposition, of course, because without it we would not get out of the
house in the morning; but it poses acute problems in translation. Most Hungar-
ians do not have to be told that Mohcs was the site of a military defeat, just as
most French people do not have to be told about a certain military difculty at
Alsia. A writer in these languages can call up powerful complexes of knowledge
and feeling very economically. Transfer these to another culture, however, and the
presupposed supply of information may not be there. Te problem then becomes
one of assessing the likely state of afairs and the possible solutions, with each step
of the way fraught with difculties. (Fawcett 1998: 120)
Even apart from these interlingual diferences, translation as a communicative ac-
tivity seems to display cooperation and politeness principles of its own. Research
in the feld of corpus linguistics has recently shown that translators from and to
all languages tend to simplify, clarify, make explicit what is implicit in the source
text (cf. Laviosa 2002: 18). Tis is probably because while translators are com-
monly seen as only partially responsible for the Informationsangebot of the target
text, any oddities in the latter are frequently attributed to them rather than to
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the source authors a translated text, to be credible as the copy of the source,
must be readable and fuent (cf. Venuti 1995). Now, while in certain textual types
(e.g. instruction manuals) simplifcation, clarifcation, etc. may be acceptable and,
indeed, desirable, on other occasions simplifcation may be equated with corrup-
tion (though that too cannot hold as a general rule; teachers of literary translation
traditionally say that one must not simplify or disambiguate what is complex or
ambiguous in the original).
Innumerable historical and contemporary examples demonstrate that transla-
tors tend to be more cooperative and polite than original authors. Once again, the
translators of the past tend to be more open and straightforward in their actions,
and their bi-texts can be used more conveniently as illustrations. Sir John Haring-
tons above-mentioned version of Orlando Furioso, besides cutting many stanzas
which the translator thought useless or irrelevant for his English readers, exhibits a
curious kind of cooperative politeness which transforms Ariostos mocking narra-
tor into a more collaborative and reassuring fgure. Ariosto frequently disappoints
readerly expectations by jumping unexpectedly from one narrative line to another,
or by cutting narration short in the thick of action. Harington seems to feel that
this is treating readers unfairly, because he adds side-notes which direct the reader
to the textual loci in which a scene is continued or concluded (Tis post overtakes
Bradamant, 2 Booke, st. 62, He follows it in the 10 booke, stafe 62; Harington
1591, I. 70; VIII. 24). And when Ariosto jokingly admits that he is only decreeing
the end of a canto because his sheet is full on both sides and he himself is tired of
writing, Harington seems to fnd that politer measures are required:
Ma prima che pi inanzi io lo conduca,
Per non mi dipartir dal mio costume,
Poi che da tutti i lati ho pieno il foglio,
Finire il Canto, e riposar mi uoglio
12
(Ariosto 1584: XXXIII. 128)
But more of this hereafer I will treat,
For now this booke begins to be to great (Harington 1591: XXXIII. 118)
A rather rude interruption is turned into a rational explanation followed by a
promise for more action to come; and while modern translators rarely allow them-
selves such microtextual deviations from their sources as Harington did, very few
of their works, if looked at in detail, would turn out to be totally devoid of similar
polite and cooperative additions.
In his bi-textual analysis, the scholar must look at the interpersonal function
as it transforms itself in the passage from the source to the target text; while the
translator can take advantage of an understanding of the interpersonal aspects of
the source text, as well as of an awareness that translation ofen displays interper-
sonal norms of its own.
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Te locative function: Time, place, and text deixis
As a pragmatic subject and a performative agent, in order to act and to exercise an
infuence upon its readers, the text must be situated in time and space. However,
the locative function of a text is no easier to identify than its performative and
interpersonal functions. A text acts and communicates within, and by connect-
ing with, various contexts of situation: frst of all, the context of production, which
may or may not be indicated within the text itself (a legal will must contain calen-
drical reference to the time and place of writing, while a fantasy novel will prob-
ably be set in the distant past of some northern country), but is usually betrayed
by style and lexicon (even a fantasy novel will bear the marks of its literary period);
secondly, the context (or the contexts) the text evokes or constructs, which may or
may not coincide with the context of production (think of the diference between
a historical essay, an instruction manual, and a science fction novel); thirdly, the
context(s) in which the text is published and read, endlessly changing with every
single reader and every new edition. All these contexts have a bearing on the way
a text acts upon readers and non-readers, and must be taken into account (or,
are implicitly considered) when a bi-text is studied or created. Furthermore, un-
like fesh-and-blood speakers, texts act and communicate in a further dimension
which we could call textual, or intertextual: whether or not it alludes to other simi-
lar or diferent texts, every text is inherently intertextual, because it is built upon a
knowledge of how other texts are built (genre is one of the most evident intertextu-
al traits). Tis third dimension of the locative function is less material but not less
important than the other two: as T.S. Eliot well knew (Eliot 1919/1975) though
his insights were limited to literary creation every new text enters into a living
relationship with all other existing texts, which it modifes and is modifed by.
When a text is translated into another language and a bi-text is created, the
locative function (which cannot be identifed with absolute precision in the frst
place) cannot be kept intact. By being grafed onto another temporal, spatial, and
textual plane, the text acquires, evokes and creates new contexts, and these con-
texts make it act and communicate in novel ways. When Orlando Furioso is trans-
lated into English by Sir John Harington, it is also translated into England (as
sixteenth-century translation theorists well knew): an Italian courtly romance and
a sophisticated long poem is turned into an English epic made up of wooden end-
stopped lines and references to Queen Elizabeth. Italian landscapes are made to
look much like the English countryside, and many English readers will fnd loca-
tive references to English places, events, and texts (intertextually, many passages of
the English Furioso, as well as of the Liberata in Edward Fairfaxs 1600 translation,
remind one of Spenser rather than Ariosto or Tasso).
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It may be objected that this is a borderline case, and that modern translators
do not take the same liberties with the source text that Harington or Fairfax did.
Borderline cases, though, are used in mathematics to demonstrate the general va-
lidity of a hypothesis: when conditions are less extreme, the application of the rule
is less evident but the rule is equally valid. In our time, when a recently-written
text is translated from a European language to another (cognate) European lan-
guage, say from English to German, or from French to Italian, the illusion is cre-
ated that nothing changes in the locative function but the changes are there all
the same. Tese changes become more evident, their treatment more crucial for
the translator and the translator critic, when the source text and the target text be-
long to contexts which are very distant either temporally, spatially, or textually. As
I have demonstrated elsewhere (Morini 2005), the problems involved in translat-
ing a source text written in the Middle Ages are analogous to those one has to face
in bringing a text from Australia to Italy: the same difculties are created when no
textual tradition exists in the target culture which can be compared with the tradi-
tion (genre, text-type) of the source text.
It is perhaps not surprising that the problems connected with locative transfer-
ence have been studied mainly by translation scholars whose specialized research
feld is literary language. In his 1975 Translating poetry, Andr Lefevere observed
that the translators freedom (what he calls, curiously enough, the freedom of the
theme) is inevitably circumscribed by the concentric circles of language, time,
place, and tradition (Lefevere 1975: 19). Lefeveres main interest is practical: he
wants to provide translators with a series of strategies to come to terms with lin-
guistically and culturally alien source texts. What is of interest here, though, is his
intuition that while language as a translational barrier can be taken for granted
and therefore need not be taken into consideration at all (his idea of language is
semantic/grammatical; I would say that language contains all aspects of a text),
time, place and tradition can be grouped together in a single defnition (tpt ele-
ments). Temporal, spatial and intertextual distances are to all interests one and the
same thing for the translator and the theorist.
Tough his solutions are less convincing than his exposition of the prob-
lem, Lefevere does try to list a series of techniques and strategies. More or less in
the same vein, a better and more efcient set of strategies is provided by James S
Holmes in his essay on Te cross-temporal factor in verse translation (Holmes
1971/1988). Holmes observes that in turning temporally distant source texts into
another language, the possibility of translating ingenuously and a-theoretically is
ruled out by the fact that even choices which would appear as neutral in other
cases (e.g. writing into the standard contemporary version of the target language)
impose one interpretation or another (if I translate Beowulf into standard con-
temporary Italian, I cancel a great part of its temporal strangeness). With such
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texts, therefore, the translator must decide whether to create a historicizing or
a modernizing version in the target language, on the linguistic, socio-cultural,
and literary or poetic levels (Holmes 1971/1988: 37). Tough the focus here is on
time, the same could be said of space: when a text is translated, an efect of loca-
tive estrangement is automatically created which can be reduced or lef untouched
by the translator.
Once again, there is no single solution to the problems posed by locative trans-
ference. Speaking of temporal distance (which seems to interest the literati much
more than geographical or textual distance), Ezra Pound understood as early as
1919 in one of those brilliant essays in which his native cunning was not blocked
by the axes he had to grind that ultimately each translator must choose a way
of alerting his/her readers to the temporal otherness of the original, and that each
translators choice will be guided by the textual elements that strike him/her as pri-
mary and substantial. Pounds choice of language in translating Guido Cavalcanti
was pre-Elizabethan English, because he thought this the only way of maintaining
Guidos unique musical quality (Pound 1919/2000: 32); but he was well aware that
his choice was not defnitive, and that many other possibilities could have been
envisaged by other individuals working with the same source text.
Conclusion
Pounds idea of personal responsibility anchored to textual evidence is central to
translation and translation theory in general: given the pressures and blandish-
ments exercised and ofered by his/her society, each translator will be attracted
to diferent qualities in the source texts he/she works with, and will render those
qualities in idiosyncratic ways. Any translation theory, whether cultural or lin-
guistic, must take that element of personal responsibility into account if it does
not want to be lured into the old traps of exhaustiveness and scientifcity. Descrip-
tive Translation Studies has avoided those traps by insisting on the ideological
pressures attending translation and, at the same time, on the individuality of the
translational activity; but being a descriptive discipline, it has not and it could not
have produced a unifed theory of translation (though many insights of DTS are
invaluable to anyone who wants to set up such a theoretical building). A general
linguistic theory of translation can be of more immediate relevance to practitio-
ners as well as theorists, but in order to be credible it has to keep in mind that not
even phonetics, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics united can explain or foresee
what has taken or will take place in any single act of translation. Ultimately, apart
from those cases in which a machine does all or almost all the work (machines
are good at working with standardized languages and text-types), translation is
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performed by one or more unpredictable humans working with that most unpre-
dictable of human products language. Tough theory can observe practice and
extract general rules out of it, it will never be able to open the little black box that
will keep translation and the other secrets of the human brain locked until the
brains doomsday.
Notes
1. Certain studies of these years, above all those produced by German bersetzungswissenschaf,
today look like monuments to epistemological presumption (e.g. Kade 1968).
2. Te 1965 ALPAC report, commissioned by the US government and claiming that machine
translation was not cost-efcient, contributed to creating a certain disillusionment.
3. One could mention a number of general translators handbooks (Samuelsson-Brown 1993;
Sofer 1996; Owens 1996; Robinson 1997; Osimo 1998; Landers 2001) and guides to using elec-
tronic tools (Trujillo 1999; Austermhl 2001; Bowker 2002) in which the description of strate-
gies, aims, social and economic conditions, and translation aids is either unaccompanied by
an explicit theoretical framework, or held together by a net of outdated and/or fragmentary
theories. Tere are obviously exceptions to this rule: corpus linguistics, when applied to Trans-
lation Studies and translator training, usually provides a frm connection between theory and
practice (cf. Aston 1999, Laviosa 2002); my own manual La traduzione: Teorie. Strumenti. Prat-
iche (Morini 2007) is an attempt at using practice to illuminate theory and applying theory to
the criticism of practice.
4. Tis is, of course, a pragmaticians view of the linguistic world (cf. Carnap 1938). My defni-
tion of semantics, in particular, is of a pragmatic nature semantics being seen as concerned
with a-contextual meaning, whereas pragmatics takes the context of situation into account. As
Levinson (1983: 32) writes: Te most promising [defnitions of pragmatics] are the defnitions
that equate pragmatics with meaning minus semantics or with a theory of language under-
standing that takes context into account, in order to complement the contribution that seman-
tics makes to meaning.
5. An attempt to teach translation at all levels is Zacchi and Morini (2002), where the decisions
of real translators are shown and illustrated on a top-down principle.
6. Albrecht Neubert can also be mentioned as one of the earliest translation scholars to link text
functions and translation methods. In his article on Pragmatische Aspekte der bersetzung
(Neubert 1968/1981) he listed four translational categories according to the (actual or potential)
functional distance between source and target texts: while in the case of scientifc literature that
distance is minimal, fction creates or presupposes a wider gap, and such textual genres as local
press articles or advertisements are specifcally source-directed.
7. I use the term bi-text as defned by Brian Harris. According to Harris (1988: 8), for the trans-
lator and the scholar, a bi-text is not two texts but a single text in two dimensions, each of which
is a language. My theory studies bi-texts as double units, in the sense that it can be applied to
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the whole bi-text, to the relationship between the two halves of the whole, or to the source/tar-
get text in isolation. Accordingly, my illustrative examples will be applied to the writers or the
translators sides of the translational divide, or to the whole transaction.
8. Cf. Hervey (1998: 13): Implicit in what has been said so far is that illocutionary function is
a property of utterances; this, however, instantly raises the question: utterances of what? In so
far as greeting refers to a particular type of illocutionary function (diferently conceived and dif-
ferently performed in diferent cultures), and because greetings vary in extent from the mono-
syllabic Hi! in English to the multi-turn exchanges in Wolof , it follows that illocutionary
function may pertain to a variety of various sizes of linguistic unit. Some of these units clearly
consist of a succession of sentences while others appear to fall below what would be consensu-
ally recognised by linguists as a complete sentence. Cf. also Ferrara (1980) for a defnition of
speech-act sequence.
9. Of course, perlocutionary efects of source texts can infuence the way translators work: the
fact that a source text has been censored, for instance, can lead the translator to sanitize parts of
it. One should also mention that some pragmatists (reproducing an ambiguity already present in
Austins seminal lectures) tend to blur the barrier separating the illocutionary and perlocution-
ary levels by distinguishing between real and potential efects. Leo Hickey writes: In studying
perlocution in translation, let us keep in mind that a translator is not concerned with real efects
(if any) produced on real readers (if any), of the TT, but only with the potential efects (Hickey
1998a: 218).
10. Bach (1994) calls implicitures all those inferences triggered by the lack of a (syntactic,
semantic) element which has to be supplied by the receiver. Bertuccelli Papi (2000: 147) defnes
as subplicit all those implicit meanings which may glide into the mind of the hearer as side
efects of what is said or not said.
11. Once again, Leech formulates this principle to account for certain uncommunicative fea-
tures of conversation, but the defnition can be easily adapted to the written word: I shall tenta-
tively propose an Interest Principle, by which conversation which is interesting, in the sense
of having unpredictability or news value, is preferred to conversation which is boring and pre-
dictable (Leech 1983: 146).
12. But before I lead him further on / so as not to stray from my habits / Since my sheet is full
on all sides / I want to stop it here, and have a rest.
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Rsum
Larticle prsente les contours dune nouvelle thorie linguistique de la traduction susceptible
dorienter tant les thoriciens que les praticiens. Les thories linguistiques des annes 1950 et
1960 taient trop normatives et dcontextualises pour rendre compte de toutes les formes et
aspects des traductions ; paralllement, si le tournant sceptique des Translation Studies a per-
mis de dmasquer la part idologique de toutes les thories, il na pas t en mesure de produire
une cyberntique de la traduction, une explication de la manire dont la traduction se droule
dans la ralit. Une nouvelle approche linguistique peut fournir une telle explication, condi-
tion daccorder un rle important laspect pragmatique de lanalyse et de conserver une pointe
de scepticisme non savant.
Authors address
Massimiliano Morini
Universit di Udine
Dipartimento di Lingue & Letterature
Germaniche e Romanze
Via Mantica 3
I-33100 UDINE
Italy
e-mail: massimiliano.morini@uniud.it

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