If the ST refers to a world that is equally "distant" to both the ST and the TT receivers, it is less probable that translation problems will arise from the contrast of ST and TT presuppositions. In these cases the subject matter dealt with in the ST can be regarded as "generally communicable" or, at least, as "transculturally communicable", i.e. between the two cultures involved in the translation process.
The level of explicitness varies according to text type and text function. It is interesting in this context to note that in fictional texts the situation is often made more explicit than in non-fictional texts. While the comprehension of factual texts is based on the fact that sender and receiver share one model of reality, the fictional text has to start building up a model of its own, either referring explicitly to a realistic model or creating a fictitious one in the text, which can then be related in some degree to an existing realistic model. It can even be contrary to the normal truth values of non-fictional utterances (e.g. in fairy tales). A fictional text must, however, also contain some reference or analogy to the receivers' reality because otherwise they would not be able to find access to the world of the text.
If the information on the internal situation is hidden in certain elements of a fictional text, such as in proper names, regional or social dialect (e.g. Shaw's Pygmalion) etc., it is often extremely difficult to transmit it to the target text, as for instance in the following example, because in a literary text it is often not appropriate to use substitutions, explanatory translations or footnotes.
Example
In Ana Maria Matute's short story Pecado de omision the characters are socially classified by their names. The main character, a simple village boy who in spite of his talents does not get the chance to train for a profession, is only called by his Christian name Lope, whereas his class mate, whose father can afford to let him study law, is introduced by Christian name and surname: ManuelEnriquez. Lope's uncle, the village mayor, has the rather pompous name Emeterio Ruiz Heredia; the school teacher is referred toby the respectful combination of don together with his Christian name (don Lorenzo). The simple shepherd with whom Lope has to stay in the mountains cannot even boast an individual name: he is called Rogue el Mediano (i.e. "Roque the middle one").
These hidden clues cannot be explained to the TT receiver without running the risk of losing the literary charm of the text. Fortunately, most authors do not rely exclusively on implicit characterizations, but include some explicit hints, as does Ana Maria Matute in the above-mentioned text.
Presupposition indicators
The probability of presuppositions being present can be calculated from the distance of the ST and TT receiver to the cultural environment of the subject matter, as well as from the level of explicitness and the level of redundancy. Text contains certain "elements of crystallization" which may indicate presuppositions. These elements might be attached to certain syntactic or lexical structures, such as the gerund, infinitive, or passive constructions, modal auxiliary verbs or valences of lexemes, as in the following example.
"John will be picked up at the station. Peter is always in time." Since the verb to pick up requires two actants, semantically specifiable as agent and patient, the reader will automatically know that Peter has to refer to the person who is going to pick up John at the station. If the two sentences are to constitute a text, the existence of the agent is presupposed in the first sentence .
Other signals pointing to presuppositions can be provided by the intra-textual dimensions of subject matter, content, sentence structure, and suprasegmental features. The negation left out in an utterance meant to be ironic can, for example, be signalled by a certain intonation: "How very, very clever of you!" Non-verbal elements, such as a photo showing the skyscraper environment of the "immaculate garden flat", can also illustrate presupposed situational conditions.
The analysis of the extratextual dimensions of sender, receiver, time, place, and motive of communication can also reveal presupposed information, as has been pointed out above. With their TC competence, translators will be able to check the comprehensibility of the verbalized information from the TT receiver's point of view. Thus, any possible information gap or surplus in the background knowledge of the intended TT receiver, as described by the translation brief, can be localized and, if necessary, compensated for.
Checklist
The following questions may help to discover the presuppositions made in the source text:
Which model of reality does the information refer to?
Is the reference to reality verbalized explicitly in the text?
Are there any implicit allusions to a certain model of reality?
Does the text contain redundancies which might be superfluous for a TT receiver?
What information presupposed to be known to the ST receiver has to be verbalized for the TT receiver?
Lecture 2. Text Composition
General considerations
The text has an informational macrostructure (i.e. composition and order of information units) consisting of a number of micro-structures. The text segments forming the macrostructure are marked or delimited primarily by the continuity or discontinuity of tenses.
There are several reasons why both the macro and microstruc-ture of the text are important aspects of a translation-oriented text analysis.
If a text is made up of different text segments with different situational conditions, the segments may require different translation strategies according to their different functions.
The special part that the beginning and end of a text play in its comprehension and interpretation means that these may have to be analysed in detail in order to find out how they guide the reception process and influence the effect of the whole text.
For certain genres, there are culture-specific conventions as to their macro and/or microstructure. The analysis of text composition can therefore yield valuable information about the text type (and, perhaps, the text function).
In very complex or incoherent texts, the analysis of informational microstructures may serve to find out the basic information or subject matter of the text.
Text ranks
A source text can be part of a unit of higher rank, which we may call a text combination or hyper-text. Thus, a short story or a scientific article might be included in an anthology or a collection, in which the other texts constitute a frame of reference, and a novel might be intended to form part of a trilogy or tetralogy. The different texts can be related and linked in various ways.
In the practice of professional translating, the parts of a text combination are sometimes translated by different translators, as is shown in the following example.
The German version of the textbook on linguistics edited by Andr6 Martinet (Martinet 1973) was produced by two translators: Chapters 1 to 25 were translated by I. Rehbein, and Chapters 26 to 51 by S. Stelzer. Each of the chapters is an independent text and, at the same time, part of a larger unit, whose characteristics have to be taken into account by both translators.
The inclusion of a text in a unit of higher rank is usually signalled by the title and/or the title context, which can be regarded as a sort of "hyper-sentence" or "metacommunicative utterance".
On the highest rank this hyper-sentence is often replaced by the information about the communicative situation which the receiver infers from extratextual clues. If the extratextual analysis shows, however, that the situation of the TT will differ considerably from that of the ST and that the TT receiver cannot infer sufficient information about the ST situation, the translator may feel obliged to add some kind of hyper-sentence (e.g. in the form of an introductory lead) to the translation.
In German newspapers, comments taken from other papers are usually introduced by hyper-sentences, such as "President Reagan's speech before the UN is commented on by The Times (London)" (cf. Suddeutsche Zeitung, Oct. 26/27, 1985; my translation). The form of these hyper-sentences is culture-specific, and they may even be rather elliptic. In the International Herald Tribune, for example, texts quoted from other papers are printed in a special column under the heading "Other Comments" and signed with the name and place of publication of the reference paper, e.g. "Asiaweek (Hong Kong)".
Macrostructure
Metacommunicative sentences of the type "A says (to B)" can also be signals for the beginning of an embedded text (cf. example 3.1.0./1), these signals separating the different levels of communication. This is particularly important in translation, because, as was pointed out earlier, each level of communication may require a situational analysis of its own. One of the crucial aspects in the analysis of macrostructure is therefore the question of whether there are any sub-texts or in-texts embedded in the ST.
Other forms of in-texts are quotations, footnotes, and examples (e.g. in scientific texts, such as the present study). The main task of the translator is to find out which function the in-text fulfils in the embedding text. Although other extratextual factors (e.g. audience, place, time, medium) may be the same for the embedding text and the in-text, the function must be analysed separately.
Quotations, like other texts, can have an informative, expressive, appellative, and phatic function. The function of a quotation is basically independent of that of the embedding text, although there seems to be a certain correlation between genre and quotation types. For example: In scientific and technical texts we find more informative quotations, whose form is rather conventional (especially where bibliographical references are concerned) than in popularizing texts or (literary) essays, which more often contain expressive quotations stressing the author's own opinion, or quotations appealing to the reader's own experience or which are intended to impress the reader by citing a famous authority, such as Aristotle or Shakespeare.
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