Discourse and text level

Variation

Change the dialect, sociolect, tone or style that marks who is speaking. Also called Change of linguistic variation or re-oralization.

Reference/All techniques

Optional Text Molina & Hurtado Albir (2002)

What it is

Variation changes the linguistic or paralinguistic features that mark a text or a speaker as belonging somewhere: geographical dialect, social dialect, tone, style and the whole apparatus by which a voice is placed. The propositional content is not the object of the operation. What is being handled is the information a reader draws about who is speaking, from where and in what manner.

Molina and Hurtado Albir include it in their inventory of eighteen techniques and define it by its effect on elements of linguistic variation: textual tone, style, social dialect, geographical dialect. Their standard illustration is the introduction of dialectal markers for a character in a novel adapted for the stage, which brings out the point that the technique frequently accompanies a change of medium or of readership. Re-oralization, the recasting of written prose into something that can be spoken aloud, belongs here for the same reason and is the usual case in drama and children's literature.

The nearest neighbour needs separating. Interpersonal change, Chesterman's Pr4, moves the relation between author and reader: the same speaker addressing the same addressee more or less formally. Variation moves the marking of the speaker, which is to say who this person is taken to be. A translation can lower formality without touching dialect, and can neutralize a regional variety while leaving the speaker just as deferential as before.

When it applies

  • A source character or witness speaks a marked variety, and the target text has to convey that they are marked without importing a specific target geography.
  • The medium changes: prose becomes performance, a report becomes a script, a written statement is prepared to be read aloud.
  • A text written for adults is prepared for young readers, or the reverse, so syntax, sentence length and lexical range are recalibrated.
  • The source mixes registers deliberately, as when a formal document quotes informal speech, and the contrast has to survive.

Examples

NL>EN

  • Source: A play in which one character speaks a regionally marked southern Dutch and the others speak the standard language.
  • Target: That character rendered in a non-localized but clearly marked English: shorter clauses, colloquial lexis, non-standard agreement.
  • Comment: The alternative is to map the source variety onto an English regional dialect, which is legitimate and heavy. It gives the character a place in an English-speaking geography that the source never assigned, with all the associations of that place attached.

DE>EN

  • Source: A picture book whose German narrative uses long written-style sentences with final-position verbs.
  • Target: Short clauses, contractions and direct address, so the text can be read aloud at a child's pace.
  • Comment: Re-oralization in the sense Molina and Hurtado Albir describe. Nothing in the story changes. What changes is the style, and with it the implied situation of a book being read to someone rather than by them.

TR>EN

  • Source: A witness statement in which the speaker uses a rural, non-standard register throughout.
  • Target: The same account in standard written English.
  • Comment: A variation applied by default and rarely decided. It removes an indication of background and education that a court may be entitled to weigh, and it can make an unschooled speaker appear precise. Where the register is part of the evidence, the answer is a note recording it rather than an attempt to imitate it.

Watch out for

Variation carries more information than it appears to, because a marked variety tells the reader something about the speaker in every sentence in which it is maintained. Removing it is not a neutral simplification, and imitating it is a strong intervention with consequences of its own.

  • Dialect mapping is the recurring error. No target dialect is equivalent to a source dialect, only differently marked, and substituting one relocates the speaker.
  • Standardizing a marked source flattens a distinction, and where two speakers were marked against each other, the contrast disappears.
  • In witness statements, transcribed evidence and interview records the register may be probative. Preserve what can be preserved and record what cannot, rather than delivering a tidy speaker.

References

  • Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.
  • Hatim, B. & Mason, I. (1990). Discourse and the Translator. London: Longman, Ch. 2, for the underlying account of dialect and register as user and use related variation.

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.

Invited by

Politeness and address

Terminological situations that call for this

The entries below describe states of a concept or of its designation in which this technique is the operation that answers them. They are reasons of evidence and of conceptual fit rather than of grammar.

Causes of denominative variationTerminological variationTerminologization and determinologization

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.

Register height and distance

Related entries

Interpersonal change Adaptation Substitution

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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