Discourse and text level

Substitution

Exchange words for gestures and intonation, or gestures for words. Also called Linguistic-paralinguistic substitution.

Reference/All techniques

Optional Text Molina & Hurtado Albir (2002)

What it is

Substitution exchanges linguistic elements for paralinguistic ones, or paralinguistic elements for linguistic ones. A gesture becomes a spoken phrase, a spoken phrase becomes a gesture, a feature of intonation becomes a word or a punctuation mark. The technique presupposes a communicative situation with more than one channel available, which is why it belongs to the discourse level rather than to any grammatical rank.

Molina and Hurtado Albir list it among their eighteen techniques and observe that it is used above all in interpreting. Their standard illustration is the Arab gesture of placing a hand on the heart, rendered into a spoken greeting or expression of thanks. The point of the example is that the source act carries a conventional meaning within its own culture, so leaving it unrendered is not neutrality but omission: the target audience receives nothing where the source audience received a greeting.

The technique's boundary is with compensation. Compensation restores an effect at a different place in the text, typically in the same channel. Substitution moves the material to a different channel, usually at the same place. The two frequently co-occur, and the analytical question is whether the change is one of location or one of medium. Variation is again distinct: it alters how a speaker is marked, while substitution alters what carries the message.

When it applies

  • The interpreting situation includes conduct that carries conventional meaning the target audience cannot read: gestures, ritual movements, physical distance.
  • A speaker's meaning is carried by prosody, and the target channel is written, so the prosody has to be lexicalized or punctuated.
  • Subtitling for deaf and hard of hearing viewers requires audible but non-verbal material to appear as text.
  • Dubbing or performance requires words to be traded against visible action, so timing and image stay aligned.

Examples

AR>EN

  • Source: A speaker places a hand on the heart on being greeted.
  • Target: "Thank you, it is an honour."
  • Comment: The standard illustration in Molina and Hurtado Albir. The gesture is conventional rather than idiosyncratic, so rendering it as speech transfers a message rather than describing behaviour. A court interpreter would instead report the gesture, since the two situations call for different things.

TR>EN

  • Source: A witness tilts the head back with a click of the tongue in answer to a question.
  • Target: "The witness indicates no."
  • Comment: Here the paralinguistic act is turned into language and marked as an observation. The interpreter neither reports a spoken "no" that was never uttered nor leaves the record blank. In evidential settings this marked form is the correct one, because the record must show what the witness did.

NL>EN

  • Source: A speaker's audible sigh before answering, in a filmed interview.
  • Target: [sighs]
  • Comment: Substitution in the direction from paralinguistic to linguistic, under the conventions of subtitling for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. The material was always part of the message, and the change of channel is forced by the medium rather than chosen.

Watch out for

The risk in this technique is that a gesture is read as though it were a word. Conventional gestures carry conventional meanings, but many movements are personal, ambiguous or culturally variable, and rendering them as speech attributes to a speaker a statement they did not make. The safe default in any setting where the record matters is to describe the conduct and attribute the description to the observer, rather than to voice it.

  • Court and police interpreting is governed by the rule that the interpreter renders what is said. Non-verbal conduct is normally reported to the tribunal rather than converted into first-person speech, and local rules of procedure decide the form.
  • In the other direction, converting speech into gesture or into visual staging removes the words from the record. It belongs to performance and to dubbing, not to documentary work.
  • Substitution is unavailable in written certified translation, where source and target each have a single channel. What appears there are descriptions of non-textual features, which is a visibility change and a different operation.
  • Where a gesture is genuinely opaque, leave it as an observed fact and let the parties who know the context interpret it.

References

  • Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.
  • Poyatos, F. (1997). Nonverbal Communication and Translation: New Perspectives and Challenges in Literature, Interpretation and the Media. Benjamins Translation Library 17. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, for the treatment of paralanguage and kinesics in interpreting.

Expectations this technique converts to

The entries below are expectations that fully determine the target form. Where this technique applies to one of them there is one right output once the governing authority is known, and a wrong output is a finding rather than a variant, whoever holds the expectation.

Abbreviation and ordinal punctuationApostrophe and elisionCapitals in institutions and officesCapitals in instruments and preamblesCase law citationCurrency and amount notationDash and parenthesis conventionsDate and time notationDecimal and digit groupingEnumeration and list punctuationFigures versus wordsGazette and act citationItalics and foreign wordingQuotation marks and quoted matterSubdivision numbering and citationUnits, symbols and spacing

Related entries

Variation Compensation Interpersonal change

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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