Since it is one of the social conventions of communication that an utterance must be neither trivial nor incomprehensible, the sender has to judge the situation, the general background knowledge of the addressee, and the relevance of the information that will be transmitted in the text, in order to decide which presuppositions can be made and which cannot. This convention applies not only to the relationship between the ST sender and the ST receiver, but also to that between the TT producer, i.e. the translator, and the TT receiver. The translator has to take account of the fact that a piece of information that might be "trivial" to the ST receivers because of their source-cultural background knowledge (and therefore is not mentioned in the source text) may be unknown to the TT audience because of their target-cultural background knowledge (and therefore has to be mentioned in the target text) - or vice versa.
How to identify presuppositions in the text
Since a presupposition is by definition a piece of information that is not verbalized, it cannot be "spotted" in the text. In their role as ST receivers, translators are familiar with the source culture and - ideally -understand the presupposed information in the same way as a source-culture receiver. This makes it rather difficult to discover the presuppositions which are contained in the text.
In order to identify the presuppositions, the translator has first of all to ascertain which culture or "world" the text refers to (which may have already been established in the content analysis). Here, an important distinction must be made between factual and fictional texts. Factual texts claim to make a proposition about reality (as generally accepted in the culture in question) whereas fictional texts make no such claim - or at least not in the same way as factual texts. The difference lies in the relationship between the text and the (assumed) reality. Fictional texts are, of course, as real as factual texts, and fictitious information can be contained both in fictional and factual texts.
The categorization of a text as factual or fictional does not primarily depend on the structure of the text itself. It is the author and, above all, the reader who classifies the text according to the concept of reality prevailing in their culture - a concept which is, of course, determined by philosophical and sociological conventions. A text intended to be factual by the ST sender can therefore be "understood" as fictional (and vice versa) by a TT receiver who has a different, culture-specific view of what is "real".
If the ST is "anchored" in the world of the source culture, some information on this world will usually be presupposed in the text because of the maxim of relevance, to put it in Gricean terms. If, on the other hand, the ST refers to the world of the TT receiver, which cannot be assumed to be familiar to the ST receiver, it would seem logical for the ST producer to verbalize a certain amount of information for the ST receiver which then would seem irrelevant to the TT receiver. In either case, the translator will normally adjust the level of explicitness to the (assumed) general background knowledge of the intended TT audience using, for example, expansion or reduction procedures.
If the ST refers to a world that is equally "distant" to both the ST and the TT receivers, it is less probable that translation problems will arise from the contrast of ST and TT presuppositions. In these cases the subject matter dealt with in the ST can be regarded as "generally communicable" or, at least, as "transculturally communicable", i.e. between the two cultures involved in the translation process.
The level of explicitness varies according to text type and text function. It is interesting in this context to note that in fictional texts the situation is often made more explicit than in non-fictional texts. While the comprehension of factual texts is based on the fact that sender and receiver share one model of reality, the fictional text has to start building up a model of its own, either referring explicitly to a realistic model or creating a fictitious one in the text, which can then be related in some degree to an existing realistic model. It can even be contrary to the normal truth values of non-fictional utterances (e.g. in fairy tales). A fictional text must, however, also contain some reference or analogy to the receivers' reality because otherwise they would not be able to find access to the world of the text.
If the information on the internal situation is hidden in certain elements of a fictional text, such as in proper names, regional or social dialect (e.g. Shaw's Pygmalion) etc., it is often extremely difficult to transmit it to the target text, as for instance in the following example, because in a literary text it is often not appropriate to use substitutions, explanatory translations or footnotes.
Example
In Ana Maria Matute's short story Pecado de omision the characters are socially classified by their names. The main character, a simple village boy who in spite of his talents does not get the chance to train for a profession, is only called by his Christian name Lope, whereas his class mate, whose father can afford to let him study law, is introduced by Christian name and surname: ManuelEnriquez. Lope's uncle, the village mayor, has the rather pompous name Emeterio Ruiz Heredia; the school teacher is referred to
by the respectful combination of don together with his Christian name (don Lorenzo). The simple shepherd with whom Lope has to stay in the mountains cannot even boast an individual name: he is called Rogue el Mediano (i.e. "Roque the middle one").
These hidden clues cannot be explained to the TT receiver without running the risk of losing the literary charm of the text. Fortunately, most authors do not rely exclusively on implicit characterizations, but include some explicit hints, as does Ana Maria Matute in the above-mentioned text.
Presupposition indicators
The probability of presuppositions being present can be calculated from the distance of the ST and TT receiver to the cultural environment of the subject matter, as well as from the level of explicitness and the level of redundancy. Text contains certain "elements of crystallization" which may indicate presuppositions. These elements might be attached to certain syntactic or lexical structures, such as the gerund, infinitive, or passive constructions, modal auxiliary verbs or valences of lexemes, as in the following example.
Example
"John will be picked up at the station. Peter is always in time." Since the verb to pick up requires two actants, semantically specifiable as agent and patient, the reader will automatically know that Peter has to refer to the person who is going to pick up John at the station. If the two sentences are to constitute a text, the existence of the agent is presupposed in the first sentence .
Other signals pointing to presuppositions can be provided by the intra-textual dimensions of subject matter, content, sentence structure, and suprasegmental features. The negation left out in an utterance meant to be ironic can, for example, be signalled by a certain intonation: "How very, very clever of you!" Non-verbal elements, such as a photo showing the skyscraper environment of the "immaculate garden flat", can also illustrate presupposed situational conditions.
The analysis of the extratextual dimensions of sender, receiver, time, place, and motive of communication can also reveal presupposed information, as has been pointed out above. With their TC competence, translators will be able to check the comprehensibility of the verbalized information from the TT receiver's point of view. Thus, any possible information gap or surplus in the background knowledge of the intended TT receiver, as described by the translation brief, can be localized and, if necessary, compensated for.
Checklist
The following questions may help to discover the presuppositions made in the source text:
1.Which model of reality does the information refer to?
2.Is the reference to reality verbalized explicitly in the text?
3.Are there any implicit allusions to a certain model of reality?
4.Does the text contain redundancies which might be superfluous for a TT receiver?
5.What information presupposed to be known to the ST receiver has to be verbalized for the TT receiver?
Lecture 2. Text Composition
General considerations
The text has an informational macrostructure (i.e. composition and order of information units) consisting of a number of micro-structures. The text segments forming the macrostructure are marked or delimited primarily by the continuity or discontinuity of tenses.
There are several reasons why both the macro and microstruc-ture of the text are important aspects of a translation-oriented text analysis.
1.If a text is made up of different text segments with different situational conditions, the segments may require different translation strategies according to their different functions.
2.The special part that the beginning and end of a text play in its comprehension and interpretation means that these may have to be analysed in detail in order to find out how they guide the reception process and influence the effect of the whole text.
3.For certain genres, there are culture-specific conventions as to their macro and/or microstructure. The analysis of text composition can therefore yield valuable information about the text type (and, perhaps, the text function).
4.In very complex or incoherent texts, the analysis of informational microstructures may serve to find out the basic information or subject matter of the text.
Text ranks
A source text can be part of a unit of higher rank, which we may call a text combination or hyper-text. Thus, a short story or a scientific article might be included in an anthology or a collection, in which the other texts constitute a frame of reference, and a novel might be intended to form part of a trilogy or tetralogy. The different texts can be related and linked in various ways.
In the practice of professional translating, the parts of a text combination are sometimes translated by different translators, as is shown in the following example.
Example
The German version of the textbook on linguistics edited by Andr6 Martinet (Martinet 1973) was produced by two translators: Chapters 1 to 25 were translated by I. Rehbein, and Chapters 26 to 51 by S. Stelzer. Each of the chapters is an independent text and, at the same time, part of a larger unit, whose characteristics have to be taken into account by both translators.
The inclusion of a text in a unit of higher rank is usually signalled by the title and/or the title context, which can be regarded as a sort of "hyper-sentence" or "metacommunicative utterance".
On the highest rank this hyper-sentence is often replaced by the information about the communicative situation which the receiver infers from extratextual clues. If the extratextual analysis shows, however, that the situation of the TT will differ considerably from that of the ST and that the TT receiver cannot infer sufficient information about the ST situation, the translator may feel obliged to add some kind of hyper-sentence (e.g. in the form of an introductory lead) to the translation.
Example
In German newspapers, comments taken from other papers are usually introduced by hyper-sentences, such as "President Reagan's speech before the UN is commented on by The Times (London)" (cf. Suddeutsche Zeitung, Oct. 26/27, 1985; my translation). The form of these hyper-sentences is culture-specific, and they may even be rather elliptic. In the International Herald Tribune, for example, texts quoted from other papers are printed in a special column under the heading "Other Comments" and signed with the name and place of publication of the reference paper, e.g. "Asiaweek (Hong Kong)".
Macrostructure
Metacommunicative sentences of the type "A says (to B)" can also be signals for the beginning of an embedded text (cf. example 3.1.0./1), these signals separating the different levels of communication. This is particularly important in translation, because, as was pointed out earlier, each level of communication may require a situational analysis of its own. One of the crucial aspects in the analysis of macrostructure is therefore the question of whether there are any sub-texts or in-texts embedded in the ST.
Other forms of in-texts are quotations, footnotes, and examples (e.g. in scientific texts, such as the present study). The main task of the translator is to find out which function the in-text fulfils in the embedding text. Although other extratextual factors (e.g. audience, place, time, medium) may be the same for the embedding text and the in-text, the function must be analysed separately.
Example
Quotations, like other texts, can have an informative, expressive, appellative, and phatic function. The function of a quotation is basically independent of that of the embedding text, although there seems to be a certain correlation between genre and quotation types. For example: In scientific and technical texts we find more informative quotations, whose form is rather conventional (especially where bibliographical references are concerned) than in popularizing texts or (literary) essays, which more often contain expressive quotations stressing the author's own opinion, or quotations appealing to the reader's own experience or which are intended to impress the reader by citing a famous authority, such as Aristotle or Shakespeare.
Footnotes inserted into a target text in order to provide background information or give additional explanations, can also be regarded as in-texts. Since the effect that a text with footnotes has on the reader is different from that of a text without footnotes, the translator has to consider carefully whether other procedures, such as explanatory translations or substitutions, would be more appropriate to the genre and function of the target text than footnotes.
The relationship between the in-text and the embedding text can be compared with that between titles or heading(s) and the text they belong to. A title is a metatext which tells us something about the co-text in question and can equally fulfil various other communicative functions.
Example
The title of Chapter VII of Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers not only informs the reader about the contents of the chapter but also recommends the text to the reader: "How Mr. Winkle, instead of shooting at the pigeon and killing the crow, shot at the crow and wounded the pigeon; how the Dingley Dell cricket club played All-Muggleton, and how All-Muggleton dined at the Dingley Dell expense; with other interesting and instructive matters." The metacomrnunicative function of the title is in this case signalled by the form of an indirect question introduced by how. In the title of Chapter I of Jonathan Swift's A Voyage to Lilliput it is made even more explicit: "The author gives some account of himself and family (...)".
Inclusions commenting on the text itself (e.g. so to speak or as I pointed out earlier or to put it into a nutshell) can also be regarded as metacommunicative utterances. At the same time they have the (phatic) function of giving a signal to the receiver, thus representing the (extratextual) audience orientation by intratextual means.
Within the text itself, macrostructure is defined from a semantic point of view. Hierarchical delimitations of text sections (chapter, chunk, paragraph, complex sentence, non-complex sentence, etc.) can only provide a rather superficial orientation. Since the days of classical rhetoric, the beginning and the end of a text are considered to be of particular importance in the interpretation of the whole text. This is why they should be analysed separately.
The beginning and end of a text can be marked by certain verbal or non-verbal features, which in some genres will be even conventional, such as the moral at the end of a fable or the expression once upon a time at the beginning of a fairy tale. The end tends to be less frequently marked than the beginning (the words The End at the end of a film are probably a remnant from the time when the end of a text was conventionally marked by finis). The imminent end of a text can also be signalled by the shift to a higher level of communication, e.g. a metacommunicative recapitulation like "in conclusion, let me restate...". Thus, in the fable The Lover and his Lass, for example, the moral ("Laugh and the world laughs with you, love and you love alone.") establishes a direct communication between sender and receiver.
The example of the fable shows that certain features of text composition are genre specific. Certain text types are characterized by a particular macrostructure and particular structural markers, as well as particular means of conjunction between the text parts. A good example is the text type "letter" with the conventional text segments date, address, salutation, message, and complimentary closing. In an instrumental translation the translator should observe the target-cultural convention for the text type in question.