What it is
A text arriving in a new community is read against the shape that community's own texts have: what an abstract opens with, what a judgment puts first, where the recommendation sits. The expectation is about form, and it is met by reshaping rather than by rendering.
The system constrains none of this. Any of these languages can put the finding first or last, state a result negatively or positively, carry the argument in one sentence or four. What varies is the packaging a readership is used to, and a text keeping the source's packaging is intelligible and reads as translated.
Two boundaries hold this record in place. The phraseology section's genre moves record owns the inventory of moves and the evidence for them; this record owns the expectation that a text conform, and the licence that gives a translator to reshape rather than reproduce. transediting owns the operation. Where reshaping runs through list form, that is enumeration and list punctuation, list form being one of a genre's shapes.
Where the expectation comes from
Nothing written requires an arriving text to take the target community's shape. The shape is attested and a deviation reads as foreign, which settles the tier without argument. What needed evidence was whether reshaping is licensed by the reader's expectation or only by the client's instruction.
The evidence is the translators' own account. Pahor, Smodiš and Pisanski Peterlin (2021) interviewed four experienced translators of academic texts alongside their corpus study, and the reasons given for intervening are reader-facing throughout. One described a text written in a hurry where "the text needs improvement, and you can do this to make it more fluent". Another said a translator has to transform the text "into a softer, more readable form". A third changes the author's voice where "it would risk sounding impolite or arrogant". A fourth pointed at internal consistency, that a text begun at a personal level has to continue there. Not one is a commission. Each is an expectation attributed to a prospective reader, which is the tier's own definition.
Institutional guidance points the same way and no further. The English Style Guide's introduction works the general-public case out as short paragraphs, simple syntax and highlighting devices. The Stijlgids Nederlands separates formal texts from texts for the general public and subdivides the latter into web texts, press releases and public consultations. Both state what their own department's texts are to look like, not what any readership expects.
What the interviews do not establish is a limit. Four translators, one language pair, one genre, and self-report is not observation. They establish that these translators reshaped unbidden and why they say they did. They do not establish that reshaping is generally licensed, fix no boundary, and say nothing about the genres in which reshaping would itself be the fault, which is the case a reviser most needs. The technique id is used here; the term behind it was not verified from its own literature and is not defined.
Consequences for translation
This licence is easily overstated, so what it does not cover matters as much.
- Reshaping for a target reader is attested practice in expository genres; in a sworn translation, a quoted passage or an instrument whose form is itself evidence, the same intervention is a defect.
- Ask which the text is before revising. A reviser who treats every reshaping as a deviation restores source shape into genres that do not want it, and one who treats none as a deviation flattens the genres that do.
- The adjustment is graded, so two compliant translations of one abstract may keep different amounts of the source's arrangement, and neither is checkable.
- Where reshaping is not wanted, say so in the brief. The expectation is the default and only an instruction displaces it.
Examples
SL>EN
- Source: Skupini TOT in TVT se med seboj nista statistično značilno razlikovali niti v rezultatih posega, niti v deležu zapletov po posegu.
- Target: Our retrospective study has confirmed that the efficacy and safety of TOT and TVT in the surgical treatment of SUI are comparable.
- Comment: Example 7 of the study, from medicine. The Slovene states a negative result about two groups; the English restates it as a positive confirmation credited to the study, and adds the authors. The expectation is the English-reading discipline's and no instrument's, and a translator rendering the sentence as written would produce accurate English at the wrong point in the argument.
EN>NL
- Source: a press release
- Target: een persbericht
- Comment: The department's own chapter 1 separates formal texts from texts for the general public and gives web texts, press releases and public consultations their own treatment. The holder is a named body binding its own texts, so the same content takes a different shape depending which genre it lands in.
References
- Pahor, Tadej, Martina Smodiš and Agnes Pisanski Peterlin. "Reshaping Authorial Presence in Translations of Research Article Abstracts", ELOPE 18(1), 2021, pages 169 to 186, DOI 10.4312/elope.18.1.169-186. Open access, read in full. The interview wording is the article's own rendering of what the translators said and is quoted at that remove. The study analyses authorial presence and performs no move analysis; the cross-linguistic differences it opens with are attributed there to earlier work not opened here.
- English Style Guide. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, eighth edition January 2016, file consulted 21 November 2025. Introduction. The file's pagination does not survive extraction, so no page is cited.
- Stijlgids Nederlands. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, fifth edition May 2025, last amended 21 October 2025. Chapter 1 (Algemeen), sections 1.1 (Formele teksten) and 1.2 (Teksten voor het grote publiek) with its subsections.