28.1458, Review: English; German; Ling & Literature; Pragmatics; Translation: Kranich (2016)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-1458. Thu Mar 23 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 28.1458, Review: English; German; Ling & Literature; Pragmatics; Translation: Kranich (2016)
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Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2017 12:32:01
From: Naomi Truan [truan.naomi at gmail.com]
Subject: Contrastive Pragmatics and Translation
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2414.html
AUTHOR: Svenja Kranich
TITLE: Contrastive Pragmatics and Translation
SUBTITLE: Evaluation, epistemic modality and communicative styles in English and German
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 261
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2016
REVIEWER: Naomi Truan, Université Paris Sorbonne - Paris IV
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
In “Contrastive Pragmatics and Translation. Evaluation, epistemic modality and
communicative styles in English and German”, Svenja Kranich investigates
“which pragmatic contrasts exist between English and German and “how they are
handled in English-German translations” (p. 4). Her analysis, which has been
conducted within the project ‘Covert Translation’ (1999-2011, Research Center
on Multilingualism in Hamburg) draws on empirical, corpus-based research. The
book is divided into nine chapters of unequal length. Chapters 1 to 5 deal
with methodological and theoretical issues, whereas Chapters 6 to 9 present
the main findings.
Chapter 1, entitled “Introduction”, presents the main concepts used in the
book, i.e “contrastive pragmatics” (p. 4), “covert and overt translation” (p.
5) and related terms such as “tertium comparationis” (p. 6) and “equivalence”
(p. 7), “universals” (p. 8) and finally “subjectivity” (p. 8). These concepts
already outline the communicative dimension of the study: how is
addressee-orientation, understood as “the degree of interactionality of a
text” (p. 11), expressed and translated in English and German texts? In a
brief review of the state of the art, Kranich shows that contrastive studies
between English and German long remained typological and structural rather
than based on communicative styles, which always are in jeopardy of producing
“scientifically manufactured stereotypes” (Ehlich 2000:69, cited p. 13).
In Chapter 2, “General hypotheses, data and methods”, the subcorpora used for
the contrastive analysis are presented. The first is a corpus of popular
scientific articles (the “Popular Science Corpus” or “POP”) with approximately
500,000 words, and English originals, German originals and English-German
translations only, whereas the second is a smaller corpus of corporate
business texts (approximately 90,000 words), including letters to shareholders
(which constitutes, together with additional texts, a corpus referred to as
“LeSh”) and mission statements (the “Mixed Business Corpus” or “MixB”), a
bidirectional corpus with English texts and their German translations and the
other way around (apart from the “LeSh”).
“The five dimensions of English-German communicative contrasts” are the topic
of Chapter 3, which can be described in terms of “tendenc[ies]” (p. 23). To
sum up, whereas English shows a tendency towards indirectness, person
orientation, addressee orientation, implicitness and verbal routines, German
shows a tendency towards directness, content orientation, self-orientation,
explicitness, and ad-hoc-formulations, so that English and German can be
represented as two extremities.
Chapter 4, “Contrastive perspectives on English-German pragmatic and stylistic
contrasts”, provides “an overview of the state of the art, with the focus on
the genres of the corpora (popular science and business communication)
according to the following parameters: text organisation, hedging and
impersonal expressions, deictic elements, connectivity, modality. The summary
of previous results is presented in a large table (p. 47-49).
As the author states, Chapter 5, “The impact of English-German pragmatic and
stylistic contrasts on translation”, “follows a parallel organization as the
previous one” (p. 51) with a comparison of the same parameters in popular
science, business communication, and other genres, and a summary in a table
form (p. 64-65).
After these six introductory chapters – which represent 66 pages, that is
about one third of the book –, Kranich turns to her corpus-based
investigations concerning evaluative adjectives (Chapter 6) and epistemic
modal marking (Chapter 7).
Chapter 6, “English-German contrasts in evaluative practice”, focuses on
evaluation as a result from a subjective process with regard to conventions in
the two linguacultures. Whereas evaluation is rather marginal in popular
scientific writing, it comes to the foreground in letters to shareholders,
which have “the double function of presenting information and building trust
in the company” (p. 69).
The classification of evaluative expressions seems to be the main issue: “the
appraisal framework does not offer an adequate means of classification” (p.
73), manual extraction neither (“But what does one extract?”, p. 73). After
discussing the literature on evaluation, the author finally concentrates on
positively evaluative adjectives (for the simple reason that negative
adjectives almost do not appear in this corpus “due to the special make-up of
the genre” and “its marketing-like function”, p. 75).
The results show that characterising adjectives in the genre ‘letters to
shareholders’ are dominantly (90.4% in German originals and 95.0% in English
originals) used in attributive position. On a semantic level, Dixon’s
classification (1982), which “distinguishes between seven semantic concepts
that are typically expressed by adjectives in languages that have an open
adjective class” (p. 77), is ruled out for the present study. The concept of
gradation (scalar adjectives, Paradis 1997) appears more fruitful to the
author.
The quantitative results significantly “confirm the trends apparent from
previous studies of English-German communicative contrasts” (p. 84, see also
Chapter 3): “one finds more emphatic positive evaluation in the English texts
as opposed to the German texts” (p. 85), “English makes use of much more
repetition in the domain of positive evaluative adjectives, whereas German is
characterized by more lexical variation” (p. 91). Concerning the translations,
“German translations show considerable shining through of the English source
text norms” (p. 88).
In Chapter 7 devoted to “English-German contrasts in epistemic modal marking”,
hedging (defined as “all linguistic strategies linguistic markers that allow
the speaker to weaken the force of an utterance (cf. e.g. Talbot 2010:37)”, p.
95) is at stake, in relation with content-orientation (typical for German) and
reader-orientation (typical for English). The chapter is divided according to
the corpora, i.e. letters to shareholders and popular science, concluding with
a cross-genre comparison of epistemic modality in two genres, which shows
clear differences between genres and languages.
The main results can be summarised as such: letters to shareholders, which
have to “inspire trust” (p. 154), use fewer epistemic modal markers than
popular science texts, where “speculation […] seems more permissible” (p.
154). To sum up, “genre causes stronger frequency differences than does
different linguaculture” (p. 154).
In Chapter 8, Kranich wonders if translations can be regarded “as trigger of
linguistic change” (p. 165). She first presents diachronic changes in both
corpora, and then focuses on four case studies which show an evolution: the
personal pronouns we/wir, the connectors and/und, the connectors
but/aber/doch, and epistemic modal markers.
“Conclusion and outlook” are presented in Chapter 9. The five dimensions of
contrastive preferences (indirectness/directness;
person-orientation/content-orientation;
addressee-orientation/self-orientation; impliciteness/expliciteness; verbal
routines/ad-hoc-formulations) remain valid for Kranich’s study.
EVALUATION
Despite being based on two very specialised corpora, Kranich’s findings are
very conclusive. The fact that she constantly relates her results to genre
issues (in popular science, business communication, or general writing), makes
her approach very sensitive to variations which might not be linked with the
language as such – or the linguaculture –, but with (implicit) generic rules
and constraints. It would have been possible to reflect even more on the
concept of “genre” in a given discourse community by considering “why and how
members of specific professional or disciplinary communities communicate the
way they do” (Bhatia 1993, 2004).
Moreover, the emphasis on methodological issues makes it possible for readers
and learners to not only follow the steps leading to the results very easily,
but also to apply the methodological reflexions to their own research.
Although the author does not expressly state it, the perspective is
onomasiological: it goes from a linguistic category (evaluation, modality) and
looks for its markers in the given languages. Analysis constraints as well as
the similarities between English and German often lead to a focus on a lexical
level, though, which one could regret. Despite the understandable limitations
evoked by the author (for instance on page 74), it seems extremely restrictive
to focus only on positive evaluative adjectives, especially given the fact
that the corpora are not so extensive, so that a fine-grained approach on more
levels would be conceivable. This is a pity, especially as the author presents
many evaluative markers such as semantic prosody to then fully rule them out
for the analysis. The analysis of epistemic modal marking is more diverse,
including modal verbs, modal adverbs and adjectives, lexical verbs and
stronger lexical constructions, which also makes the results more valuable.
Finally, the book sometimes conveys the impression that the study mainly tends
to confirm previous findings, as some elements of the conclusion show: “[t]he
contrasts between English and German texts again confirm the existence of the
dimensions of contrast” (p. 180), “[t]he contrastive results again confirm the
robustness of the dimensions of contrast” (p. 182). From this point of view,
it seems that the research could have benefited from a clearer presentation of
its innovative potential.
Despite this limitation, the book is very readable and well structured. It
provides useful insights into communicative practices in two linguacultures
and professional communities and convincingly indicates where translators
should concentrate when working between English and German.
FOOTNOTES:
1. As the author explains, in her study, the terms pragmatic and stylistic
“are often used together” (p. 3, footnote 4).
2. “The term linguaculture (originally coined by Friedrich (1989:307)) is used
in this work to highlight the connexion between language use and cultural
backgrounds” (p. 15, footnote 17).
REFERENCES
Bhatia, Vijay Kumar. 1993. Analysing Genre. Language Use in Professional
Settings. London: Longman.
Bhatia, Vijay Kumar. 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse. A Genre-Based View.
London: Continuum.
Ehlich, Konrad. 2000. „Wissenschaftsstile“, Wissenschaftssprache und ihre
(wissens-)soziologischen Hintergründe. In Szilvia Deminger, Thorsten Fögen,
Joachim Scharloth & Simone Zwickel (eds.), Einstellungsforschung in der
Soziolinguistik und Nachbardisziplinen. Studies in Language Attitudes, 59–71.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Friedrich, Paul. 1989. Language, Ideology, and Political Economy. American
Anthropologist 91(2). 295–312.
Paradis, Carita. 1997. Degree modifiers of adjectives in spoken British
English. Lund: Lund University Press.
Talbot, Mary. 2010. Language and Gender. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Naomi Truan is a PhD Student in Contrastive Linguistics at the Université
Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) and the Freie Universität Berlin (“cotutelle de
these”). Her research interests include Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Corpus
Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics. Her current work focuses on the
category of person, pronouns, terms of address and reported speech in
political discourse in France, Germany and Great Britain.
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