Discourse and text level

Interpersonal change

Shift the formality, distance or technicality between author and reader. Also called Change of formality level or register shift.

Reference/All techniques

Either Clause Text Chesterman (1997, Pr4)

What it is

An interpersonal change alters the relationship the text sets up between its author and its reader. Formality moves up or down, distance is increased or closed, the emotional temperature rises or falls, the density of technical vocabulary is adjusted to a different readership. The propositional content can remain untouched throughout: what changes is the footing on which it is offered.

Chesterman files this as Pr4, and defines it by its effect on the author to reader relation rather than by any single grammatical device. That matters, because the devices that carry the relation differ by language. One language encodes it in pronoun choice and verb morphology, another in lexical selection, another in clause pattern or in the presence of hedging. An interpersonal change is recognized by what happens to the relation, not by which of those layers was touched.

Two neighbours need separating. Illocutionary change, Pr5, alters the act the sentence performs: a statement becomes a request. Interpersonal change leaves the act as it was and alters the terms on which it is performed: the same request, made more or less deferentially. Variation, in Molina and Hurtado Albir's sense, concerns the marking of who is speaking, including dialect and sociolect, rather than how the speaker positions the addressee. In practice the three often move together, and the analytical question is which of them the translator intended.

When it applies

  • The source language has a grammaticalized politeness distinction the target lacks, so deference must be relocated to lexis or to clause pattern, or dropped.
  • The target genre has settled conventions of distance that differ from the source genre: correspondence formulae, official notices, patient information.
  • The text is being redirected at a lay readership, so technical density has to fall without the propositions changing.
  • The source is emotive or evaluative in a way the target register does not sustain, or the reverse.

Examples

TR>EN

  • Source: Konuyu incelemenizi saygılarımla rica ederim.
  • Target: I should be grateful if you would look into the matter.
  • Comment: Turkish carries the deference in the plural address, the formulaic verb of requesting and an explicit expression of respect. English has none of these as grammar, so the deference is rebuilt out of the conditional and the choice of verb. A literal rendering with "respectfully" attached would read as either archaic or sarcastic, which misreports the relation the source establishes.

DE>EN

  • Source: Können Sie mir das bitte schicken? / Kannst du mir das bitte schicken?
  • Target: Could you send me that, please?
  • Comment: English collapses a distinction the German maintains. In ordinary correspondence the loss is tolerable. In a transcript, a witness statement or a disputed exchange, the move from Sie to du is itself an event in the relationship, and flattening it removes evidence. The remedy is a note, not a reconstruction.

NL>EN

  • Source: Wij verzoeken u vriendelijk het bijgevoegde formulier ingevuld te retourneren.
  • Target: Please complete and return the enclosed form.
  • Comment: Dutch administrative writing sustains a level of formality that English public-facing prose has largely abandoned. The target is shorter, more direct and more courteous by its own conventions. This is a defensible interpersonal change in a form pack and an indefensible one in a document whose tone is what a reader is being asked to assess.

Watch out for

Interpersonal change is the strategy translators apply without deciding to, because register is absorbed rather than analyzed. The professional discipline is to notice that a decision was taken.

  • Deference that is grammatical in the source and lexical in the target is not preserved by preserving the grammar. Reproducing an honorific literally usually produces a marked English that the source did not have.
  • Lowering technical density is an editorial act with a readership behind it. It belongs in the brief, and it needs a subject-matter check, because simplified terms are frequently narrower or broader than the ones they replace.
  • In certified and evidential work the source register is part of what is being attested. Corporate tone guides and house style do not override it.
  • Where the source is inconsistent in register, that inconsistency is data. Smoothing it produces a text that reads better and reports less.

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.
  • Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.

Structural triggers

This technique is not always a choice. The parameters below are the structural differences between languages that call for it, the first group compulsorily and the second as a strong tendency.

Forced by

Politeness and address

Expectations this technique adjusts to

For the entries below the expectation sets a direction and not an endpoint. This technique makes the adjustment, and the entry says what the evidence for the direction is and what that evidence does not establish.

Forms of addressGender-neutral drafting

Related entries

Illocutionary change Emphasis change Variation

Translation that can be checked

Every Translyta delivery comes with a quality report and a terminology report, so the decisions described here are visible to your reviser instead of buried in the text.

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