What it is
An illocutionary change alters the act a sentence performs. A statement is delivered as an instruction, an instruction as a statement of what is done, a question as an assertion, direct speech as reported speech. The information may survive intact while the thing the sentence does to the reader is replaced.
Chesterman lists it as Pr5 and notes that it rarely occurs alone: a change of speech act is normally carried by other strategies, since the act is realized through mood, person, voice and lexical choice rather than being a separate layer of the sentence. His own inventory includes the shift from indicative to imperative, changes to the status of a rhetorical question, and changes to the use of exemplification and of direct against indirect speech.
The boundary against interpersonal change is worth holding. Pr4 alters how the author stands towards the reader; Pr5 alters what the author is doing to the reader. A request made more politely is Pr4. A statement converted into a request is Pr5, whatever its politeness. Modulation is again a different question: modulation reframes the situation described, while illocutionary change reframes the utterance about it. The clearest test is to ask what a reader would be entitled to do on the strength of the target sentence, and whether the source sentence entitled them to the same thing.
When it applies
- The target genre fixes the speech act by convention, as safety notices, operating instructions and public signage do.
- The source realizes a directive by impersonal or nominal means that the target language reserves for description rather than for instruction.
- A rhetorical question in the source would be read as a genuine question in the target, or would import a stance the register does not accommodate.
- The source reports speech in a form the target grammar does not sustain, so direct and indirect realization have to be exchanged.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: Sigara içilmez.
- Target: No smoking.
- Comment: The Turkish is an impersonal statement of what is not done. The English notice is a prohibition. The literal "smoking is not done" is grammatical and reads as an observation about local habits, which is exactly the act the source is not performing. The conventions of the genre, not the grammar, decide the target form.
DE>EN
- Source: Es wird gebeten, die Formulare vollständig auszufüllen.
- Target: Please complete all sections of the form.
- Comment: German administrative style makes the request as an agentless statement that a request exists. English of the same genre issues the request directly. Note what is given up: the source withholds the requester, and the target's imperative implies one. Where the identity of the requesting authority is contested, that implication is not free of consequence.
FR>EN
- Source: Faut-il rappeler que le délai n'a pas été respecté ?
- Target: The deadline was not observed.
- Comment: French argumentative prose asserts by interrogation. Reproducing the question in English invites an answer and reads as an aside. The assertion is recovered at the cost of the writer's stance, which is a candidate for compensation elsewhere in the paragraph.
Watch out for
The strategy is standard practice in instructional and public-facing text and inadmissible in text where the act itself is the operative content. Performatives are the clearest case: a declaration, an undertaking, an appointment or a waiver does what it says by being said in a particular form, and altering the form alters the legal event rather than its description.
- Turkish "beyan ederim", German "erkläre hiermit" and their equivalents are performative. They become "I hereby declare" and stay declarations. Converting them into reports of a declaration having been made changes the instrument.
- Conditions and obligations in contracts are speech acts. Rendering an obligation as a statement of fact, or a permission as an obligation, is a substantive change even where the vocabulary matches.
- Where target genre convention and source act genuinely conflict in a binding document, the source act prevails and the convention is set aside.
- The change is easy to make unintentionally, since mood and modality get adjusted for fluency without deliberation. It is worth checking the modal verbs of any target sentence that carries a duty.
References
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Translation Library 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 4. Revised edition (2016), Benjamins Translation Library 123, Ch. 4.
- Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, for the underlying account of illocutionary force.