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Alan Fu

November 30, 2022

Reflection of Text Message Genre Translation

In my genre translation of the article, “Injuries among World-Class Professional Beach

Volleyball Players: The Federal Internationale de Volleyball Beach Volleyball Injury Study”, by

Roald Bahr and Jonathan C. Reeser, I chose to shift the intended audience from older,

experienced professional Volleyball players alongside their health & wellness teams, to

younger(teens) indoor Volleyball athletes. Although the change in audience isn’t drastic, I made

sure to emphasize the difference between the two audiences through my genre of choice: Text

Messages. A major reason for this decision was due to the idea that my genre translation will still

be somewhat useful for the older Beach Volleyball players and their professional teams, but they

should already have extensive knowledge about injuries of their sport, so I wanted to primarily

enlighten the younger generation through my translation. When revising my genre translation for

the 2nd and 3rd time, I paid close attention to invoking exigency to the audience through my

work, with a goal to not only generate interest in young Volleyball players about knowledge

about injuries, but to make them understand why it’s important for them to read specifically at

this moment before they continue to progress in Volleyball. According to Quentin Viergge, “To

Capture your reader’s attention, you should surround that thesis sentence with exigent

circumstances that explain why this is an issue that matters here, now, and specifically for your

reader.”(178-179). I utilized the first strategy mentioned by author Viergge, which was to create

“Exigency through the audience’s Agenda or Concerns”, and by understanding my

persona/agenda as a student athlete passing down my own knowledge of Volleyball injuries to

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my intended audience of the same persona. I didn’t have to do much persuading to invoke

exigency to my audience as it is a given to care about injuries whilst playing a sport, so my main

focus was to connect my agenda to the intended audience, by creating a genre translation in the

same audience area, highschool Volleyball players.

I decided to translate my academic article into a series of text messages involving 3 high

school Volleyball players. I chose this specific genre because I felt that it was the perfect

opportunity for me to display my own knowledge combined with the articles’ data about the

injuries involved with Volleyball players. In the article “Genre in the Wild,” Bickmore

states,”When a writer decides or intuits that a particular genre is called for by the situation, he or

she takes up the genre and uses it to frame a written response to the situation.”(3). After reading

the entire article and through this specific quote, I felt that it was necessary to choose text

messages as my genre as it is something that myself and many other teens use on a daily basis,

therefore giving me high levels of confidence in my ability to draft and translate the academic

article to my choice of genre. A major convention of text messaging is the shortened language

and rare use of punctuations, largely because formal language is very unnecessary in those

situations. Slang words such as “lol” or “wyd” and emojis are also extremely popular and

commonly used in text messages, which are ways to enhance the excitement in the conversation

or simply due to laziness to express what they feel in words. Overall, I thought that I would have

a lot of fun translating the academic article into my chosen genre. Since my intended audience

was the younger generation of Volleyball players like myself, I thought that it would be a very

effective and unique way of learning information from the chosen genre if I translated
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information from an academic article with advanced vocabulary to everyday language spoken

through text messages.

In my opinion, the data and information from my academic article was generally

straightforward and not all that difficult to integrate into my new genre. The main focus of the

academic article was to introduce a research study of Volleyball injuries by tracking those

frequences throughout many World Championship tournaments. The results were that Volleyball

is not to be considered too much of a dangerous sport and has one of the lowest injury rates in

professional sports, which I heavily emphasized throughout my text messages translation. In the

beginning of my translation, I introduced a conversation between two teammates in the same

highschool Volleyball team, with “Benny” having suffered one of the common injuries evident

from the academic article, of an overused shoulder injury, and from there discussing about other

different kinds of injuries, severity, and their comparisons to other sports, namely contact sports

with another teammate named “Michael”. Reach, in the Starting Lines textbook

stated,”...deciding which information contributes to the piece and is worth including and which

information does not serve the intended purpose of the piece. This choice is important because

unnecessary information can distract the reader…”(96). Through this quote, I felt that I didn’t

need to include the specific data and information from the tables in the academic article of injury

rates, because most injuries were essentially insignificant as they could occur in daily life and

merely mention some of the important ones in my translation, such as the lower back and

shoulders. Although I didn’t include specific data such as the percentage of injury rate for a

specific part of the body, I did feel a need to use quotes from the coach about the information to

create different pieces of reliable information spoken between the teammates. Author Kyle
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Stedmen states that, “Sadly, a poorly introduced quotation can lead readers to a similar

exclamation: “It just came out of nowhere!”.”(244). In my genre translation, I simply used a few

quotes that came from the coach of the high school Volleyball team, and generalized the

information of the data sheets from the academic article without actually stating any of the

numerical information, and taking into account the quote and article above, I wanted to subtly

introduce the topic of the quote and have a short build up to it rather than randomly inserting the

quote from the coach to confuse the reader. An important concept that I wanted to introduce to

the genre translation that wasn’t originally apart of the academic article were ways of prevention

or precaution measures of the potential injuries. This was another strategy that I used to invoke

exigency to my audience, according to Viergge is strategy #2, “Exigency through a gap in the

Research”, as I contributed a new topic to the existing conversation of injuries. I decided to add

this part not only because younger Volleyball players don’t have much experience with this topic,

but I thought that it was important to add overall interest and make them understand that my

topic is even more important to them now that I added forms of precaution to the types of

potential injuries that they take into account.

Overall, I thought that I struggled more with overthinking and the formatting of my genre

translation rather than the actual translation itself. Reach, in the Starting Lines textbook states,”A

significant challenge in creating this genre translation was finding a balance between educational

information and entertaining content in order to generate interest…”(97). I thought that I

resonated somewhat with this quote, not much on the entertaining aspect though, because I felt

that text messaging was not too difficult of a genre to incorporate entertainment to the reader. I
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focused on not inputting too much educational information hence why I decided to leave out a lot

of the numerical information from the academic article in my translation. But overall, I tried my

best to minimize the boring educational information from the article and translate it into more

engaging and interesting content to the intended audience through the text messages. I felt that

my vision for this genre translation changed a lot, which is why I had a lot of trouble with the

formatting of it all. At first, my first ideal format of my genre translation was to have an entire

groupchat between the coach and the rest of the Volleyball team, but I wasn’t quite able to figure

out how to create the visuals for all that, so I cut it down to a conversation between just two

players. This wasn’t all that difficult to do, splitting the conversation into those two players, but

it felt quite awkward when some questions were forced to be asked between the conversants.

Throughout the 1st and 2nd revisions of my genre translations, I had a lot of trouble overthinking

about what information to include and not include, even the genre conventions such as adding

curse words or emojis. In my 3rd and last revision of this genre translation, I split the

conversation from the two players into an additional third player, who was originally just

mentioned as “Benny” who was the injured player in my 2nd revision. I felt that this allowed the

conversation to flow better because the first series of text was to introduce injuries, while the

second series of text with “Michael” was to clarify the precaution measures of injuries. I also had

to take into account the idea of invoking exigency, which I saw that I used already in my

revisions, but after reading articles and being able to deeply understand the topic, I went back to

make sure I was able to use more than one of the strategies and improve upon what I had already

did, using strategies #1 and #2 discussed of Viergge. Through this translation, I hope that I was

able to effectively communicate the risks and preventive measures of Volleyball injuries.
 Works Cited

Bahr, Roald, and Jonathan C. Reeser. “Injuries among World-Class Professional Beach

Volleyball Players: The Fédération Internationale De Volleyball Beach Volleyball Injury

Study.” Sage Journals, American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, 3 Jan. 2003,

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03635465030310010401.

Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical

(Eco)Systems.” Open English SLCC, Open English @ SLCC, 1 Aug. 2016,

https://pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-w

ithin-rhetorical-ecosystems/.

Cassell, Kevin, et al. “Exigency: What Makes My Message Indispensable to My Reader.”

Writing Spaces Readings on Writing Volume 3, Parlor Press, 1 Apr. 2020,

https://pressbooks.gvsu.edu/writingspaces3/chapter/exigency-what-makes-my-message-ind

ispensable-to-my-reader/.

Dean, Christopher, and Kathy Patterson. Starting Lines: An Anthology of Student Writing.

21st ed., UCSB Writing Program, 2022.

Stedman, Kyle. “Writing Spaces.” Writing Spaces, 2011,

https://writingspaces.org/past-volumes/annoying-ways-people-use-sources/.