(Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies) Linda Pillière, Özlem Berk Albachten - The Routledge Handbook of Intralingual Translation-Routledge (2024)

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION
The Routledge Handbook of Intralingual Translation provides the first comprehensive overview
of intralingual translation, or the rewording or rewriting of a text.
This Handbook aims to examine intralingual translation from every possible angle. The
introduction gives an overview of the theoretical, political, and ideological issues involved and
is followed by the first section which investigates intralingual translation from a diachronic
perspective covering the modernization of classical texts. Subsequent sections consider different
dialects and registers and intralingual translation from one language mode to another, explore
concepts such as self-translating, transediting, and the role of copyeditors, and investigate the
increasing interest in the role of intralingual translation and second language learning. Final
sections examine recent developments in intralingual translation such as the subtitling of speech
for the hard-of-hearing, simultaneous Easy Language interpreting, and respeaking in parliamentary
debates. By providing an in-depth study on intralingual translation, the Handbook sheds light
on other important areas of translation that are often bypassed, including publishing practices,
authorship, and ideological constraints.
Authored by a range of established and new voices in the field, this is the essential guide to
intralingual translation for advanced students and researchers of translation studies.
Linda Pillière is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Aix-Marseille Université,

France. She is co-editor of several volumes, including Standardising English: Norms and Margins
in the History of the English Language (2018), and authored Intralingual Translation of British
Novels: A Multimodal Stylistic Perspective (2021).
Özlem Berk Albachten is Professor of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul,

Türkiye. She has co-edited Perspectives on Retranslation: Ideology, Paratexts, Methods (2019)
and Studies from a Retranslation Culture: The Turkish Case (2019) and authored Translation and
Westernization in Turkey: From the 1840s to the 1980s (2004).
ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN TRANSLATION AND
INTERPRETING STUDIES
Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive overviews

of the key topics in translation and interpreting studies. All entries for the handbooks are specially
commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited,
Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies are the ideal resource for both
advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students.
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND RELIGION

Edited by Hephzibah Israel
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION, INTERPRETING, AND

BILINGUALISM
Edited by Aline Ferreira and John W. Schwieter
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY TRANSLATION

Edited by Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION THEORY AND CONCEPTS

Edited by Reine Meylaerts and Kobus Marais
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF KOREAN INTERPRETING

Edited by Riccardo Moratto and Hyang-Ok Lim
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION, INTEPRETING AND CRISIS

Edited by Christophe Declercq and Koen Kerremans
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION

Edited by Linda Pillière and Özlem Berk Albachten
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooks-

in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RHTI
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF INTRALINGUAL
TRANSLATION
Edited by Linda Pillière and

Özlem Berk Albachten
Designed cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
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© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Linda Pillière and Özlem Berk Albachten;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Linda Pillière and Özlem Berk Albachten to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-03761-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-03763-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-18887-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of illustrations ix
List of contributors xii
Acknowledgements xvii
Introduction 1
Linda Pillière, Özlem Berk Albachten
PART I
Intralingual translation: a diachronic perspective 15
1 Archaization, modernization, and representing the source

language in intralingual diachronic translation 17
Hilla Karas
2 Retrieving Belgium’s national past: 19th-century intralingual translation

and transfer practices in the legal, linguistic, and literary domains 33
Lieven D’hulst
3 Pinkeltje remains Pinkeltje: intralingual translations of a Dutch

children’s icon 48
Elke Brems
4 Forms and practices of intralingual translation in premodern China 64

Barbara Bisetto
v
Contents
5 Vergilian centos from the perspective of intralingual translation:

stealing his club and much more from Hercules 78
Ekin Öyken
6 Homer into Greek: intralingual translation in Greco-Roman antiquity 95

Massimo Cè
PART II
Intralingual translation: language varieties and ideology 111
7 Intralingual translation as a prestige-endowing activity for the

Cypriot Greek dialect 113
Vasso Giannakopoulou, Spyros Armostis
8 Intra- and interlingual translation from a diachronic perspective: the

South Slavic folk ballad Hasanaginica 130
Višnja Jovanović
9 Translation from English into Scots 145

John Corbett
10 Intralingual translation in subtitles and reception: the case of the

movie Roma 164
Laura Vilardell
PART III
Intralingual translation: Easy and Plain Language 181
11 “Issues of the same order”? The microstrategies of an expert-lay

translation compared to those of interlingual translation 183
Karen Korning Zethsen
12 A typology of the various aspects of diaphasic intralingual translation –

a systemic-functional approach 196
Aage Hill-Madsen
13 Easy Language translation and comprehensibility as a social process 217

Benjamin Schmid
14 Intralingual translation in Easy Language and in Plain Language 234

Christiane Maaß
vi
Contents
15 Intralingual translation in expert-to-lay public communication:

strategies and recurrent features in informative legal texts in the
digital environment 252
Francesca Luisa Seracini
PART IV
Intralingual translation: rewording and editing 271
16 Editing and intralingual translation: rewriting for clarity and

consistency 273
Linda Pillière
17 Two sides of the same coin: the American version of a British

medical dictionary 290
Marta Gómez Martínez, Carmen Quijada Diez
18 “The rule is no fuss”: an analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s shift to

unnatural narration from the perspective of intralingual translation
and editing 308
Enora Lessinger
19 Intralingual variation and transfer in legal and institutional translation:

the case of pluricentric languages 329
Fernando Prieto Ramos
PART V
Intralingual translation: education and language acquisition 345
20 Expanding translation studies: a functionalist approach to the use of

intralingual translation in language education 347
Georgios Floros
21 Intralingual audiovisual translation as a foreign language aid: a

methodological proposal for application at different levels 360
Noa Talaván, Alberto Fernández-Costales
22 Graded readers as instances of intralingual translation 377

Manuel Moreno Tovar
vii
Contents
PART VI
Intralingual translation: accessibility from a practical perspective 393
23 Intralingual interpretation: simultaneous Easy Language interpreting

as a new form of simultaneous interpreting 395
Judith Rubanovsky-Paz, Hilla Karas, Shira Yalon-Chamovitz
24 Respeaking as a form of intralingual translation: intersections between

linguistics and respeaking in the live subtitling of parliamentary debates 411
Dan McIntyre, Zoe Moores, Hazel Price, John Vice
25 Intralingual translation and media accessibility at a crossroads:

a museum project 434
Cláudia Martins, Cláudia Ferreira
26 Translation into Easy Language: the unexplored case of podcasts 453

Elisa Perego
Author index 472

Subject index 481
viii
ILLUSTRATIONS
Appendices
18.1 Ishiguro’s notes on The Unconsoled’s “back story” 321
18.2 Ishiguro’s 23 “dream techniques” 322
18.3 Ishiguro’s notes on the “warped frame time frame” technique 323
18.4 Excerpt from the elevator scene in the first draft of “Experiment 2” 324
18.5 Excerpt from the reception scene in the first draft of “Experiment 2” 325
Figures
5.1 Basic schema of translation types and threefold levels of source/target
differentiation in Proba’s cento 84
5.2 Limestone slab with a fossilized fish and lines 307–312 of Proba’s
Cento Vergilianus 89
12.1 The “architecture” of language according to SFL 198
12.2 A typology of aspects of Diaph-intra 200
12.3 Options in CHANNEL in Diaph-intra 200
12.4 Diaph-intra distinguished according to source text location 201
12.5 Diaph-intra distinguished according to domain 201
12.6 Options in PRESUPPOSED EXPERTISE in Diaph-intra 202
12.7 Possibilities of tenor changes in Diaph-intra 203
12.8 Options in RHETORICAL FUNCTION 207
12.9 Types of variation in rhetorical function in Diaph-intra 208
12.10 A complete overview of parallel sets of options in Diaph-intra 210
12.11 The taxonomic “ecology” of the medical term psoriasis 212
13.1 The safe use of electrical devices (excerpt from a fire prevention brochure) 219
13.2 Translation of Figure 13.1 into Easy Reading, level A2 220
14.1 Hildesheimer Treppe (“Hildesheim Steps”, the Hildesheim school’s accessible
communication model) 236
14.2 Easy and Plain Language as pillars in the Easy Language/standard language
continuum 237
ix
Illustrations
14.3 NDR news in Easy Language 240

14.4 Expert Language source text and Plain Language target text 243
14.5 Trade-off between Easy Language and Plain Language 245
14.6 “Patient Decree in Easy Language” 246
20.1 Schematic depiction of language education (LE) as a polysystem 350
22.1 Paratextual self-descriptors in English 387
22.2 Paratextual self-descriptors in Spanish 387
22.3 Paratextual self-descriptors in German 388
24.1 Lords Business, Monday 23 February 2018 426
24.2 Respeaking via Dragon voice recognition software 430
25.1 Language varieties continuum 439
Tables
5.1 Lines 307–312 of Proba’s Cento Vergilianus 82
5.2 A selection of parallel motifs in Vergil and Proba 85
5.3 Lines 613–620 of Proba’s Cento Vergilianus 86
5.4 Lines 101–109 of Ausonius’s Cento nuptialis 86
5.5 The anonymous cento De panificio [On bread-making] from the
Anthologia Latina 87
14.1 Transcript and translation of the Easy Language news text 240
14.2 Transcript and translation of “Patient Decree in Easy Language” 247
15.1 Nouns referring to stakeholders in the Legislation Corpus and the
Guidance Corpus 258
15.2 Nouns referring to the object of legislation in the Legislation Corpus and
the Guidance Corpus 261
15.3 Nouns referring to conditions, tools, and measures in the Legislation Corpus
and the Guidance Corpus 262
15.4 Nouns referring to documents/sections in the Legislation Corpus and
Guidance Corpus 263
15.5 Key 2–3-grams in the Guidance Corpus compared to the Legislation
Corpus 264
16.1 A typology of editing modifications 279
16.2 Copyediting suggestions for Amsterdam made by Pascal Cariss 281
19.1 Procedural concepts corresponding to “due process” in most populated
Spanish-speaking countries 332
19.2 Examples of California’s civil jury instructions before and after rewriting in
plain English 336
19.3 Intralingual translations of Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of
the Child into Hungarian for three different age groups 337
19.4 Functions of the European Commission as expressed in EU law and their
rewordings in EU webpages 338
19.5 Overview of intralingual variation and transfer in legal and institutional settings 339
21.1 Chart showing intralingual didactic AVT possibilities 365
21.2 Chart showing a sample lesson plan structure for a 60-minute session
using AVT 366
21.3 Chart showing didactic intralingual subtitling options 366
x
Illustrations
21.4 Chart showing didactic intralingual dubbing and voice-over options 368
21.5 Intralingual dubbing lesson plan (example 1) 370
21.6 Didactic potential of example 1 371
21.7 Intralingual subtitling lesson plan (example 2) 371
21.8 Didactic potential of example 2 372
22.1 Restructuring of information in GRs 383
22.2 Explicitation of information in GRs 383
22.3 Controversial themes in GRs 384
22.4 GR series covered by the paratextual study 386
23.1 ELI analysis 407
24.1 3-grams in Corpus A 418
24.4 3-grams in Corpus B 419
24.7 Dragon entry for “noble lord” 424
24.8 Macros for sound labels 425
24.9 Macro for the phrase “Hear, hear” 425
24.10 Macros for formulaic phrases 425
24.11 Dragon entries for key words 427
24.12 Recognition of names in Dragon 427
24.13 Example 1: Modifications in sentence structure to allow for smoother respeaking 428
24.14 Example 2: Serious recognition error 428
24.15 Example 3: Serious edition error related to dates 428
24.16 Example 4: Serious edition error related to a content word 429
24.17 Example 5: Another serious edition error related to a content word 429
24.18 Example 6: Rephrasing of a name for more accurate recognition 429
24.19 Example 7: Using editing to reduce latency 429
24.20 Example 8: Respeaking pragmatic content 430
25.1 Differences between Easy and Plain Language 439
25.2 Details on the translation process 442
25.3 Corpus of texts 442
25.4 Readability level of the original and final texts 444
25.5 Linguistic and formal criteria for the translation of the texts 446
26.1 Format and internal organization of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda 459
26.2 Main figures of the script of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda 460
26.3 Frequency list of the script of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda 461
26.4 Original and Easy English versions of the INTRO of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda 464
26.5 Main figures regarding the original and Easy English INTRO of
She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda 465
26.6 Customizable template for Easy Language podcast INTROs 466
26.7 Original and Easy English versions of a SEGMENT excerpt of
26.8 Main figures regarding the original and Easy English SEGMENT excerpt of
xi
CONTRIBUTORS
Spyros Armostis is Lecturer in Linguistics at the Department of English Studies, University of

Cyprus. His publications lie mainly in the fields of phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, and
clinical linguistics with Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Arabic being focal points of his work.
Özlem Berk Albachten is Professor of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University and a recipient of
the British Academy Visiting Fellow 2023 (University of Reading). She is the author of Translation
and Westernisation in Turkey (2004) and Açıklamalı Çeviribilim Terimcesi (Annotated Translation
Terminology, 2005). She co-edited Perspectives on Retranslation: Ideology, Paratexts, Methods
(2019), Studies from a Retranslation Culture: The Turkish Context (2019), and the Special Issue:
Retranslation, Multidisciplinarity and Multimodality for The Translator (2020).
Barbara Bisetto (PhD) is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the Univer-
sity of Verona, Italy. She has published in Études Asiatiques/Asiatische Studien and AUC: Philo
logica and has co-organized the international workshops “Intralingual translation, diglossia and
the rise of vernaculars” (2017) and “Dynamics of knowledge transmission and linguistic transfor-
mation in Chinese textual cultures” (2021). She is on the editorial board of Sungkyan Journal of
East Asian Studies.
Elke Brems is Full Professor of Translation Studies and Dutch Culture at KU Leuven, Belgium.
She is a board member of the Centre for Reception Studies (CERES), the Centre for Translation
Studies (CETRA), and the Centre of Expertise for Literary Translation (ELV). She has published
articles and book chapters on many topics regarding literary translation and cultural transfer and
in journals such as Perspectives.
Massimo Cè (BA Oxford, PhD Harvard) is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Bavar-
ian Academy of Sciences. He has published several academic papers on Greco-Roman epic and
reception studies and is the author of more than 20 lexicographical articles, including nervus and
rhetor, in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.
John Corbett is Professor of English at BNU-HKBU United International College in Zhuhai,
China. He has published widely on Scottish literature and the Scots language; his books include
Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: A History of Literary Translation into Scots (1999).
xii
Contributors
Lieven D’hulst is Professor Emeritus at KU Leuven, Belgium. His research addresses Franco-
phone literatures of the 19th and 20th centuries and translation history. He is a member of the
editorial committees of several international journals in translation studies, including Target. He is
an elected member of the Academia Europaea.
Alberto Fernández-Costales is Associate Professor in TESOL at the University of Oviedo
(Spain). His research interests include content and language integrated learning, English-medium
instruction, language attitudes, language teaching methodology, and didactic audiovisual transla-
tion. He is as an associate editor for two international journals: Perspectives: Studies in Transla
tion Theory and Practice and Porta Linguarum.
Cláudia Ferreira is a graduate in Translation studies (I.S.T.I. – Brussels) and holds a master’s
degree in terminology and translation from the University of Oporto. She is currently pursuing her
doctoral research (on subtitling and science dissemination) at the University of Aveiro, Portugal,
where she has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses since 1997.
Georgios Floros is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Cyprus. He
received a PhD in translation theory in 2001 from Saarland University. He is the author of the
monograph Kulturelle Konstellationen in Texten and co-editor of a volume on Translation in Lan
guage Teaching and Assessment.
Vasso Giannakopoulou is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies, University
of Cyprus. Her research interests and publications include translation and adaptation in theatre and
comics, translation sociology, Shakespeare reception, and translation history. She has organized
two conferences on intersemiotic translation. Her current work focuses on translation in transmedia.
Marta Gómez Martínez is a graduate in Spanish and English philology and holds a PhD in Span-
ish language. She is Assistant Lecturer at the University of Cantabria and her areas of research
interest cover the history of specialized vocabulary and lexicography. She has contributed to the
scientific vocabulary for the Diccionario histórico de la lengua Española (DHLE) at the Real
Academia Española.
Aage Hill-Madsen is Associate Professor in modern English Language and Linguistics at the
University of Aalborg, Denmark. His main research interests are translation, knowledge com-
munication, and register and genre studies. He has published in international journals such as
Meta – Journal des Traducteurs, Perspectives – Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, and
Fachsprache – Journal of Specialized Communication.
Višnja Jovanović is an independent researcher and translator and holds a master’s degree from the
University of Warwick and a master’s and PhD from the University of Belgrade. She has recently
published a monograph Intra- and Interlingual Translation in Flux (Routledge, 2023), based on
her PhD dissertation. Jovanović is based in the USA.
Hilla Karas is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Department of Translation and Interpreting Stud-
ies at Bar-Ilan University. Her research focuses on intralingual and interlingual diachronic trans-
lation, heterolingualism, and non-prototypical translations. She has published in journals such
as Target, Journal of Language and Politics, and Translation and Interpreting Studies and is the
secretary of the Israeli Association of Applied Linguistics.
Enora Lessinger is Senior Lecturer in Modern Languages and Translation at Oxford Brookes
University. She holds a PhD from Sorbonne Nouvelle University on the translation of narrative
xiii
Contributors
silence in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction. Additional research interests include audiovisual translation,
gender in translation, and the translation of humour.
Christiane Maaß is Professor for Media Linguistics at the University of Hildesheim, Managing
Director of the Institute for Translatology and Specialised Communication, and Director of the
Research Centre for Easy Language. She is the author of five monographical works on Easy Lan-
guage as well as editor of the German Handbook of Accessible Communication.
Cláudia Martins holds a PhD in translation studies, with a thesis on museum accessibility for
people with visual impairment. Her studies also focus on terminology, translation and modern
languages and literatures. Since 2001, she has been teaching English as a Foreign Language and
English Linguistics, Terminology and Audiovisual Translation at in the Polytechnic Institute of
Bragança, Portugal.
Dan McIntyre is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has pub-
lished widely in stylistics, corpus linguistics, the history of English, and applied linguistics. He
co-edits Babel: The Language Magazine (babelzine.com), and his most recent book is Communi
cating Linguistics: Language, Community and Public Engagement (Routledge, 2023; co-edited
with Hazel Price).
Zoe Moores is a researcher, trainer, and freelance subtitler. Her main areas of research include
translation, accessibility, and inclusion, with a particular focus on live subtitles created through
respeaking. Based at the universities of Roehampton and Warwick, she is also a member of
GALMA, the Galician Observatory for Media Accessibility.
Manuel Moreno Tovar is a researcher at the University of Tartu, in Estonia. His doctoral project
focuses on the intralingual translation of literature for language learners. In 2022, he participated
in the 10th EST Congress as a convener for the panel “Advancing Intralingual Translation”.
Ekin Öyken is Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin Language and Literature at Istanbul
University, where he teaches Latin grammar, Latin poetry, and Roman religion. In 2013, he held a
one-year postdoctoral research position in the Department of Classics at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley. His current research interests cover a range of topics from ancient musical thought
to classical reception.
Elisa Perego is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of
Pavia, Italy. She is the author of Accessible Communication (Frank & Timme, 2020) and Audio
Description for the Arts (Routledge, 2024), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Audio
Description (Routledge, 2022). She has published on audiovisual translation, language simplifica-
tion, and media accessibility, and is currently partner in the European project SELSI (Spoken Easy
Language for Social Inclusion).
Linda Pillière is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Aix-Marseille Université,
France. She has published extensively on intralingual translation and stylistics. Her mon-
ograph Intralingual Translation of British Novels: A Stylistic Multimodal Perspective was
published by Bloomsbury in 2021, and she has co-edited several volumes including Stand
ardising English: Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language published by
CUP in 2018.
Hazel Price is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Salford, UK. Her recent pub-
lications include The Language of Mental Illness: Corpus Linguistics and the Construction of
xiv
Contributors
Mental Illness in the Press (Cambridge University Press, 2022), the co-authored Babel Lexicon
of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and the co-edited Communicating Linguistics:
Language, Community and Public Engagement (Routledge, 2023).
Fernando Prieto Ramos is Full Professor and Director of the Centre for Legal and Institu-
tional Translation Studies (Transius) at the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Translation and
Interpreting. He regularly publishes on legal and institutional translation and has also trans-
lated for various organizations, including several years of in-house service at the World Trade
Organization.
Carmen Quijada Diez holds a PhD in translation and interpreting from the University of Sala-
manca. She is currently Assistant Lecturer at the University of Oviedo, Spain. She specializes in
German-Spanish medical translation and has experience as a professional translator, reviewer, and
proofreader. Her research focuses on specialized translation, mainly in the medical field, and sci-
ence reception in 19th-century Spain.
Judith Rubanovsky-Paz is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Department of Translation and
Interpreting Studies at Bar-Ilan University and Head of the English-Hebrew Translation Program
at Beit-Berl Academic College.
Benjamin Schmid holds a PhD in translation studies from the University of Vienna. His research
interests cover Easy Language translation, theoretical aspects of intralingual translation, science
communication, and intersemiotic translation and music. He is a staff translator, terminologist, and
language specialist at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business).
Francesca Luisa Seracini holds a PhD in linguistic sciences and is a research fellow in Eng-
lish language and translation at the Faculty of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures at
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan). Her research focuses on specialized discourse
and translation, professional and institutional communication in English, specialized English
in movie language, and metaphor studies. Her output in specialized translation includes The
translation of European Union legislation, A corpus-based study of norms and modality (LED,
2020).
Noa Talaván is Full Professor in Translation and English for Specific Purposes at the Uni-
versidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain. Her main research interest is
didactic audiovisual translation, and she has published more than 40 papers on the topic in
national and international journals and collected monographs. She serves as an associate edi-
tor of two international journals: Encuentro Journal and Verbeia, Journal of English and
Spanish Studies.
John Vice worked for 32 years in parliamentary reporting before retiring in December 2022. He
began working in the House of Commons Hansard team in 1989 and moved to the Lords in 2001,
where he ended his career by spending 12 years as Editor of Debates, managing the Hansard team
there. John was awarded the OBE in 2023 in recognition of his services to Parliament.
Laura Vilardell holds a PhD from the Universitat de Vic and is Assistant Professor at North-
ern Illinois University. Her research explores literary translations and the history of publishing
through the lens of reception, censorship, eco-translation, translation studies, and attention studies.
Her latest book, Books Against Tyranny (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022), explores the vicis-
situdes of Catalan publishers under the Franco regime in Spain.
xv
Contributors
Shira Yalon-Chamovitz is Dean of Students at Ono Academic College and Head of the Israeli
Institute on Cognitive Accessibility. She has developed a unique model of cognitive ramps, and
her main current research areas are cognitive accessibility and simultaneous simplification.
Karen Korning Zethsen is Professor of Translation Studies at Aarhus University. Her primary
research interests include translation studies (in particular intralingual translation) and health com-
munication. She has published in journals such as Target, the Translator, TTR, Meta, Across,
Jostrans, Text & Talk, Communication & Medicine, and the Journal of Pragmatics.
xvi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank all those who have contributed in one way or another to this handbook. The
chapters in this handbook are the direct or indirect result of a series of conferences and workshops
that we have organized over the past six years or so, and we would like to thank all our colleagues
who contributed to the fruitful discussions at those events. Special thanks go to all our authors, for
their patience in replying to emails and queries and for respecting the different deadlines during a
difficult period due to the global pandemic of Covid-19. The pandemic affected us all in different
ways, causing subsequent delays and some authors to sadly withdraw.
We are also grateful to Louisa Semlyen at Routledge for believing in this project and support-
ing us from the very start, and to Eleni Steck and Katya Porter for their invaluable expertise and
prompt responses to our numerous questions.
Our two universities supported us in our organization of conferences and panels, and Linda
Pillière extends special thanks to the Laboratoire des Etudes du Monde Anglophone (LERMA EA
853) for its generous support.
Last but far from least, we would like to thank our families for their continual support during
this project.
xvii
INTRODUCTION
Although intralingual translation has long been seen as a neglected area within translation stud-
ies (Baker, 1998/2020; Berk Albachten, 2014; Hill-Madsen, 2015; Pillière, 2021; Zethsen, 2009),
recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the field, accompanied by a growing num-
ber of conferences and workshops on the topic. The first international workshop on intralingual
translation was organized by Berk Albachten at Boğaziçi University in 2014, followed by another
workshop at the Universities of Tel Aviv and Bar-Ilan in 2021; panels on intralingual translation
were also organized by Berk Albachten and Zethsen at the Congress of the EST (European Society
for Translation Studies) in 2016, and by Moreno Tovar, Zethsen, and Pillière in 2021, with other
panels organized by Pillière and Berk Albachten at the ESSE (European Society for the Study of
English) conferences in 2018 and 2021. In addition, workshops on specific languages have been
held, such as the one organized by Bisetto and Lanselle on intralingual translation and East Asian
classical and premodern cultures in 2017 and the 2019 workshop on intralingual translation and
the Greek language at Ionian University, organized by Karvounis and Seel.
This growing interest in intralingual translation can be linked to the changes in translation
theory and practice at the end of the twentieth century. While early translation theory focussed
on a “linguistics-oriented” approach to translation (Venuti, 1998, p. 22) and on the role of the
translator, the latter half of the twentieth century marked a change in focus with the emergence of
translation studies (Holmes, 1972/2004) that addressed a broader range of questions and embraced
other theoretical frameworks, such as sociology, cultural studies, and new emerging technologies.
New translation practices such as audiovisual translation (AVT), subtitling, and dubbing emerged,
with an increased emphasis on accessibility, and new forms of rewriting such as Easy Language
and Plain Language were developed. It is against this background of the expanding discipline of
translation studies that traditional labels such as “intralingual translation” have been re-examined,
encouraging scholars to resituate the term in relation to newly coined terms such as transediting
(Stetting, 1989), translanguaging (García, 2009), transculturation (Rodríguez Murphy, 2015), and
transcreation (Ray & Kelly, 2010).
Yet, in spite of this renewed interest there is still no handbook on intralingual translation and
only a mere handful of full-length works on the topic. Although some handbooks or collections
of essays contain one chapter on intralingual translation (Berk Albachten, 2014; Kajzer-Wietrzny,
2019; Maronitis, 2008; Whyatt, 2017), others, such as The Palgrave Handbook of Literary
1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-1
Translation and The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, mention it only in passing. The
aim of this handbook is both to offer an overview of the theoretical questions raised by intralingual
translation and to present current research in the field, focussing on different languages and diverse
sociocultural contexts.
Some key issues and concepts

Most scholars writing on intralingual translation begin with Jakobson’s (1959, p. 223, origi-
nal emphasis) tripartite division of translation in his seminal essay “On Linguistic Aspects of
Translation”:
Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other

signs of the same language.
Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means
of some other language.
Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
signs of nonverbal sign systems.
In investigating the nature of translation, Jakobson was working from the Peircean tradition, and
his definitions are based on the interpretation of signs, albeit verbal signs. Jakobson’s tripartite
division is essentially “word-oriented” (Sturrock, 1991, p. 318); he uses the term “rewording” and
comments that “intralingual translation of a word uses either another, more or less synonymous,
word or resorts to a circumlocution”. This emphasis on the verbal sign has been questioned by
later scholars (see Zethsen, 2007, for a detailed analysis; see also Schmid, Chapter 13, this volume
for a discussion on the criterion of “linguality”), and as the “cultural turn” (Bassnett & Lefevere,
1990/1995) in translation gained ground, it became apparent that factors other than linguistics,
such as the sociocultural context, needed to be considered.
Despite Jakobson’s presenting three categories of translation, research and teaching has long
tended to focus on only one of the categories, interlingual translation, to the detriment of the other
two. This was probably due in part to the role of translation in the teaching of foreign languages
(Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990/1995, p. xviii) as a means to improve linguistic proficiency, but per-
haps due also to Jakobson’s use of the term translation proper in his definition. As Hermans (1997,
p. 17) points out, while intralingual and intersemiotic translation are explained through rephras-
ing, interlingual translation is qualified by an adjective, proper, suggesting no further explanation
is required. Moreover, the use of proper for one category suggests that in some way or other,
intralingual and intersemiotic translation are not “proper” translations. As a result, for many years
intralingual translation was neglected as a field of research, and the focus was on translation as a
linguistic exercise, to such an extent that Baker, writing at the end of the twentieth century, con-
tended (Baker, 1998/2020, p. xvii) that there is “no research that looks specifically at the phenom-
ena of intralingual or intersemiotic translation”.
The first question that arises from Jakobson’s definition is whether the boundaries between
the three categories are as clear-cut as the definition would lead us to believe. As several chap-
ters in this book point out (see in particular, Giannakopoulou and Armostis, Chapter 7; Corbett,
Chapter 9; Jovanović, Chapter 8), the distinction between intralingual and interlingual trans-
lation “presupposes that one can know in the final analysis how to determine rigorously the
unity and identity of a language, the decidable form of its limits” (Derrida, 1985, p. 173). The
2
Introduction
unity and identity of a language is closely bound up in the concept of nationhood and political
boundaries, but neither language nor boundaries are fixed stable entities. Labels such as “lan-
guage” and “dialect” are not necessarily permanent. Berk Albachten (2014, p. 574) points out
that the Turkic languages such as Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Turkoman, Uzbek, Tatar, and
Turkish are sometimes treated by academics as dialects and sometimes as varieties of the Turkic
language family. Similarly, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian have not always been
considered as national languages, and translation from one to another is neither clearly inter-
lingual nor intralingual (Longinović, 2011; Jovanović, Chapter 8 in this volume). Jakobson’s
distinction, based on the belief that national languages are monolingual with clear distinct sys-
tems, also led to a neglect of multilingualism and plurilingualism, effectively excluding them
from translation studies:
First, most obviously, the keepers of the canon rather strenuously insisted on the linguistic
purity of its foundational figures, such as Chaucer and Dante, and they routinely ignored the
founders’ youthful translations of foreign texts . . . It is clear that well before the German
Romantics extolled the mother tongue in such decisive terms, leaving translation theory
with some heavy baggage, Renaissance commentators had already cleared the way for the
West’s long embrace of nationalistic monolingualism. For centuries, theories of nation and
genius erased the intercultural origins of literary innovation.
(Hokenson & Munson, 2007, pp. 1–2)
Moreover, not only are nations multilingual, heterogeneous states; many have exported their
languages during periods of colonization and migration resulting in varieties such as English
or Spanish (see Vilardell, Chapter 10 in this volume) being spoken across the world in diverse
forms, and again underling the fuzzy boundary between intra- and interlingual translation. Pil-
lière (2021) questions whether the adaptation of British novels for the North American reader be
considered intra- or interlingual translation. By investigating the relationship between intra- and
interlingual translation notions of source and target text become blurred. Similarly, the mono-
lingual approach that underlies Jakobson’s definitions also ignores multivoiced text, works that
contain heteroglossia and combine different languages. As Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa (2013,
p. 237) observe:
Moving beyond the longstanding view that translation involves two languages: L1, the lan-
guage translated from, and L2, the language translated into, generally regarded as interlin-
gual translation or translation proper (Jakobson, 1959), is a first step for translation theory
to start accounting for heterolingual texts. The traditional L1-to-L2 view implies that texts
and their translations are monolingual, and regards the non-verbal (and even paralinguistic)
features as unimportant contextual features rather than as essential textual elements.
In their study of the German and Spanish dubbed versions of Bender and Tarantino’s 2009 film
Inglourious Basterds, Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa thus prefer the term “intertextual translation” to
that of “interlingual translation” or “intralingual translation”.
Jakobson’s neat division also poses problems from a diachronic perspective. Some languages
are divided into clear periods such as Old English, Middle English, and Modern English, suggest-
ing a clear continuity and lending credence to the monolingual state. Thus, for those scholars who
wish to promote the unity of language and nation, the translation of Beowulf from Old English
3
into Modern English is a case of intralingual translation. Yet the Germanic variety known as Old
English, or Anglo-Saxon, with its complex declensions and conjugations, is near impossible to
understand for the modern reader despite much of its vocabulary having persisted down the ages
into Modern English, thus encouraging others (Birkett, 2022) to challenge the idea that such
translations are intralingual ones. The practice of translating between different historical lay-
ers of the same language, sometimes referred to as diachronic intralingual translation, has been
more precisely termed “intralingual intertemporal translation” (Karas, 2016). As Karas points
out (2016, p. 453, emphasis original), there may be a correlation “between the perceived intel
ligibility of the historical layer and the label translation”. Whether new translations of Beowulf
are identified as interlingual or intralingual translations is based less on linguistic criteria than on
political and sociocultural ones. For Karas (2016, p. 453) intralingual intertemporal translations
“mark a sort of liminal state where the codes ‘belong’ to the same language but ‘are not’ the same
language”.
Despite these difficult beginnings and the underlying questions surrounding the label of “intra-
lingual translation”, recent years have seen increased interest in the field, with fresh attempts to
redefine the concept.
Exploring the concept

The first major reworking of the relationship between intralingual and interlingual translation is
to be found in Zethsen’s 2009 article where she studies five Danish translations of a biblical text
and concludes “the microstrategies applied in intralingual translation (the additions, omissions,
restructuring, etc.) are taken more to the extreme than is often the case within interlingual trans-
lation” (Zethsen, 2009, p. 809). The microstrategies that she studies include omission, addition,
explicitation, restructuring, and paraphrase. This leads Zethsen (2009, p. 805) to propose four
principal factors that play an influential role in intralingual translation: Knowledge, time, culture,
and space. Intralingual translation thus occurs when the original text contains elements that are
considered to be beyond the comprehension of the target reader. The most obvious examples
would be the adaptation of scientific texts for the layperson and children’s versions of classical
texts, and the typical microstrategies involved are explicitation, explanation, and addition. The
factor of time comes into play when a text needs updating. The factor of culture is illustrated by
the Americanization of British novels (Pillière, 2010, 2021), and space refers to abridgements
or extensions of the original text. Zethsen (2009) thus initiates a useful discussion on the char-
acteristics of intralingual translation and in doing so argues for a more open-ended definition of
translation.
Recent years have seen further attempts to define intralingual translation, including Petrilli
(2003) who proposes three sub-types: Diamesic, diaphasic, and diglossic. Diamesic intralingual
translation can be found in the translation between written and oral modes as in subtitling. Diapha-
sic intralingual translation covers translation between different registers and diglossic between a
standard language and a dialect. Hill-Madsen’s study (2019) defines intralingual translation as the
“the language-internal rewriting of a source text (ST) into a target text (TT) with the purpose of
neutralizing a comprehension barrier” and focusses on dialectal, diaphasic, and diachronic intra-
lingual translation as illustrations of the variety to be found within the category of intralingual
translation. This wide variety is even more apparent in Gottlieb’s (2018) taxonomy where 34
types of translation are presented with the aim of expanding “the notion of translation in order
to accommodate not only the nonverbal channels present in much modern communication, but
also the types of communication not involving language in a traditional sense” (Gottlieb, 2018,
4
Introduction
p. 46). Under the title of intralingual translation is to be found synchronic translation (when the
source text is abridged, for example), dialectal translation (e.g., rendering the standard variety into
a localized variety), diaphasic translation (e.g., adapting a scientific text for the lay reader), dia-
chronic translation (updating a text), transliteration (as in the modernizing of a font or resetting of
Arabic letters into Latin), and diamesic translation (as in subtitling). Gottlieb’s detailed taxonomy
applies the same categories to both intralingual and interlingual translation (which he relabels as
intrasemitoic, following Toury) and to intersemiotic translation. This has the advantage of exam-
ining non-verbal modes of communication as part of translation. However, the problem of what
constitutes a language is not really analysed and what exactly is covered by dialectal translation is
once again problematic.
Expanding the field

At the same time the terms employed by Jakobson have come under scrutiny and the distinction
between interlingual and intralingual translation challenged, scholars have also been investigating
various types of intralingual translation through specific case studies. There have been a number
of studies that analyse specific types of intralingual translation, such as the rewriting of classics
for a different generation or target reader (Delabastita, 2016; Maronitis, 2008); the adaptation of
scientific texts for the layperson (Hill-Madsen, 2015; Meyer, 2001), the adaptation of the written
text for reading aloud or audio books (Jobert, 2010); the use of Plain English guidelines in improv-
ing a text’s readability (Nisbeth Jensen, 2015); the comparison of audio dialogue and subtitles for
the deaf and hard-of-hearing (McIntyre & Lugea, 2015); and the connection between intralingual
translation and ideological norms (Berk Albachten, 2013, 2015; Pillière, 2021). These topics are
also addressed by some of the authors in this handbook, but the handbook also includes some
lesser-known areas in intralingual translation, such as the connection between intralingual transla-
tion and editing (whether that be carried out by the author themselves or by the publishers) and the
live subtitling of parliamentary debates.
PART I. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION:

A DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE
The handbook is divided into six sections that reflect the main themes and concepts of cur-
rent research in intralingual translation. The opening section explores perhaps one of the most
researched areas of intralingual translation – diachronic intralingual translation. The chapters in
this section investigate intralingual translation of a wide range of text types in various languages
in modern and premodern periods, as well as in antiquity. These contributions demonstrate that
the borders between intra- and interlingual translation are often minimal, if not artificial, and thus
enlarge the definition and boundaries of (intralingual) translation.
The first chapter by Hilla Karas, “Archaization, modernization, and representing the source lan-
guage in intralingual diachronic translation”, discusses the challenges and complexities of translat-
ing texts that are separated by a significant time gap. It especially draws attention to what Karas
calls the “internal paradox”, that is, finding an equilibrium between archaization and moderniza-
tion in intralingual diachronic translation. Karas explores the strategies used to balance between
these two strategies (including literal translations, conventionalized substitutions, and standard-
ized representation of old morphosyntactic forms), discussing at the same time various factors,
such as the prestige of the source text’s historical layer, ideology, language planning, layout, and
script, that can influence the choice of the translation strategy.
5
In the second chapter of this section, “Retrieving Belgium’s national past: 19th-century intra-
lingual translation and transfer practices in the legal, linguistic, and literary domains”, Lieven
D’hulst provides a historical approach to the role of intralingual translations in nineteenth-cen-
tury Belgium, focussing on translations carried out for administrative, legal, and cultural pur-
poses. He underlines the diversity of the language exchanges that took place in a multilingual
context (Flemish and French), the tensions between the different language communities, and the
impact of language policies on language rights, standardization, and literacy. The term “intralin-
gual translation” serves as a basic tool “to identify past practices that would otherwise remain
unnoticed” and also to locate these practices “within co-occurrent sets of practices of textual
transmission”.
Elke Brems’s chapter, “Pinkeltje remains Pinkeltje: Intralingual translations of a Dutch chil-
dren’s icon” is the only contribution in the volume that focusses on children’s literature where
intralingual translation is a common practice. It investigates a specific case, the intralingual trans-
lations of the Pinkeltje books by the Dutch author Dick Laan by Suzanne Braam between 1995
and 1999 in Belgium. Based on Karen Zethsen’s (2009) often quoted main factors – knowledge,
time, culture, and space – proven to be influential in intralingual translation, and Brems’s (2017)
suggestion of “cultural politics” as a fifth factor, the chapter investigates eight aspects (direction
of the translation, field, medium/genre, stakeholders, paratexts, illustrations, reception, translation
shifts) of intralingual translations that need to be taken into account to clarify which of the five
factors were “influential in the creation of this translation, and therefore why the translation was
considered useful or necessary”. Brems’s detailed analysis of Pinkeltje’s intralingual translations
reveals various translation shifts and leads her to suggest two more important factors, those of
“changing norms and values” and “preservation”.
The following three chapters in this section deal with intralingual translations of classical texts,
produced in antiquity and the premodern period, two understudied eras in studies on diachronic
intralingual translation. Barbara Bisetto’s contribution, “Forms and practices of intralingual trans-
lation in premodern China”, focusses on premodern China and looks at intralingual translation as
popularization of ancient canonical texts in the educational context. Bisetto analyses three tex-
tual genres, jujie (explication by sentence), zhijie (direct explication), and yanyi (elaboration of
the meaning), from the twelfth century onwards from a historical and sociocultural perspective.
Through the various examples Bisetto demonstrates the significance of the practices of intralin-
gual translation “to promote the intelligibility and popularisation of canonical texts in favour of
common and non-scholarly readers”, and, at the same time, fills a gap in studies on (intralingual)
translation in Chinese history.
In a chapter entitled “Vergilian centos from the perspective of intralingual translation:
Stealing his club and much more from Hercules”, Ekin Öyken explores the genre of cento,
more specifically Vergilian centos, as instances of intralingual translation. Öyken specifically
focusses on two Latin centos from the fourth century by Proba and Ausonius, respectively.
The two centos differ insofar as one is playfully erotic while the other is Christian in almost
every respect, and the comparison of these two examples suggests that this particular type of
ancient collage poetry qualifies as an interesting case of intralingual translation where there is
minimal change in form but a significant change in context. The source culture is pagan Rome
in the broad sense, while the target is the multicultural world of the Late Roman Empire in the
process of Christianization.
The final chapter of this section, “Homer into Greek: Intralingual translation in Greco-Roman
antiquity” goes even further back in time and discusses the practice of rendering the Homeric
epics into different forms of ancient Greek. In this contribution to the volume, Massimo Cè looks
6
Introduction
at the translations of the Iliad and Odyssey dating from the seventh century BCE onwards and
demonstrates “moments of intralingual translation in the poetic genres of lyric, tragedy, and epic;
glossographic and lexicographic materials; and prose paraphrases”. By further examining ancient
Greek terminology of intralingual translation, Cè argues that Greek sources did not differentiate
“between intralingual and interlingual translation, using the same set of terms for both textual
practices”.
PART II. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION: LANGUAGE

VARIETIES AND IDEOLOGY
This section focusses on the intralingual translation between language varieties and deals with the
complex question of defining what separates a language from a dialect or language variety. The
chapters all underline the role of ideology in identifying what constitutes a language variety and,
consequently, challenge the idea of a clear-cut definition of intra- and interlingual translation.
The section opens with a chapter by Vasso Giannakopoulou and Spyros Armostis: “Intralin-
gual translation as a prestige-endowing activity for the Cypriot Greek dialect”. The authors focus
on the unique case of the island of Cyprus and its two main ethnic groups and languages: Greek
Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot. Concentrating on the relationship between translation and nation,
the authors argue that intralingual translation has been under-researched because it inadvertently
undermines the ideal of a monolingual nation by foregrounding the existence of other varie-
ties (dialectal intralingual translation) or by underlining the need to translate older forms of the
language (diachronic intralingual translation). Despite the intricate and hierarchical relationship
between Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek, Giannakopoulou and Armostis demonstrate
how intralingual translations of many cultural products in various genres and media helped pro-
viding visibility, prestige, and legitimacy to Cypriot Greek. The authors argue that two cases of
intralingual translation, The Little Prince and the staging of Waiting for Godot into Cypriot Greek
and Cypriot Turkish, played an active role in bringing the two communities together by evoking
a (bicommunal/bilingual) common Cypriot cultural identity. The authors’ main methodological
reservations in relation with strict taxonomies, objections to clear-cut boundaries between lan-
guages and dialects, and categorizations of translation, are echoed by most of the contributions
in this volume.
The following chapter, “Intra- and interlingual translation from a diachronic perspective: The
south Slavic folk ballad Hasanaginica” by Višnja Jovanović, also deals with the complex issue
of language and nation, and more specifically, the examples of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and
Montenegrin, once (in former Yugoslavia) regarded as different varieties of the Serbo-Croatian
language, now regarded as separate languages. Within this historical framework, she discusses the
genealogy of the South Slavic folk ballad Hasanaginica that precedes “standardization of any of
these South Slavic languages”, thus making its “linguistic classification ambiguous and complex”.
Consequently, Jovanović challenges Roman Jakobson’s categorization of translation types, spe-
cifically the distinction of intra- and interlingual translation, as these categories are dependent on
the definition of languages and their borders.
The complicated relationship between English and Scots is the focus of John Corbett’s chap-
ter, “Translation from English into Scots”. Corbett discusses the role of English-Scots trans-
lations from different angles: as a resistance against “global English”, as an effort to claim
key texts in the Anglo-American literary canon for Scotland, as an assertion of the linguistic
status of Scots in the political arena, and as an educational project to promote literacy in Scots.
Based on the intricate cultural and linguistic relationship between English and Scots, Corbett
7
argues that unless literacy levels in Scots improve and Scots as a legitimate language has greater
acceptance, translations from English into Scots do and will continue to function as intralingual
translations.
The last chapter in this section by Laura Vilardell takes us to Alfonso Cuarón’s renowned movie
Roma of 2018 and discusses Netflix’s decision of translating its subtitles from Mexican Spanish
to Iberian Spanish. In “Intralingual translation in subtitles and reception: The case of the movie
Roma”, Vilardell questions the reasoning behind this decision and analyses the translated subtitles.
But Vilardell’s main contribution is her fresh perspective on intralingual translation with a study
of immediate reception (of subtitles) in social media that became a platform to understanding the
ideological issues that exist between Spain and Latin America.
PART III. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION:

EASY AND PLAIN LANGUAGE
The chapters in this section are devoted to a growing field of research: Intralingual translation
into Easy and/or Plain Language. The contributors to this section present a number of contexts
and reasons for this type of translation: Scientific, technical, and legislative texts are all frequently
modified for lay readers who need to access information and/or want to educate themselves on the
relevant subjects. Since the 1960s the Easy/Plain Language movements have grown in importance
in European countries with the realization that there is a need for “easy” written texts for readers
with cognitive impairments (cognitive or learning disabilities) or insufficient proficiency in the
respective language.
Translations in the field of health care is an important area where there are constant expert-lay
translations, and the first two chapters focus on this subject. In the opening chapter, “‘Issues of the
same order’? The microstrategies of an expert-lay translation compared to those of interlingual
translation”, Karen Korning Zethsen argues that further research is needed on the similarities and
differences between intra- and interlingual translation in various areas and media. Using the field
of health communication, Zethsen analyses the intralingual translation of an expert medicinal
product summary in English expert language into English layperson language in the form of the
patient information leaflet. She demonstrates that the microstrategies used extensively in interlin-
gual translation are also used in intralingual translation. Following her previous study (Zethsen,
2009), Zethsen argues that the differences in microstrategies are “more a question of degree and
frequency than of kind”.
The following chapter by Aage Hill-Madsen, “A typology of the various aspects of diaphasic
intralingual translation – a systemic-functional approach”, also looks at the field of health care.
Hill-Madsen analyses diaphasic intralingual translation from a theoretical and empirical perspec-
tive based on systemic functional linguistics. After elaborating a model of six different aspects
of diaphasic intralingual translation and presenting some of the microstrategies involved, Hill-
Madsen calls for further research on the typology of diaphasic intralingual translation in fields
other than health care where intralingual translations commonly occur. He also points out the need
to investigate the topic within educational settings.
Benjamin Schmid’s chapter, “Easy Language translation and comprehensibility as a social
process”, adopts a practical approach and looks at Easy Language intralingual translation from
the translators’ perspective. It uses data collected from paratextual analysis and expert interviews
to demonstrate that Easy Language translation is a collaborative process involving translators,
their clients, and the target readers. Based on a case study focussing on a franchise network of
8
Introduction
accessibility service providers in German language, Schmid sheds light on how “informational
texts for target groups such as people with cognitive disabilities or people who speak German as
a second language” were translated into Easy and Plain German and on the multimodal nature of
these translations.
In the following chapter, “Intralingual translation in Easy Language and in Plain Language”,
Christiane Maaß analyses the principal characteristics of Easy and Plain Language and their main
similarities and differences. Like interlingual translation, Maaß argues, intralingual translation
into Easy and Plain Language functions to overcome communication barriers, and accordingly,
professional translators are the necessary intermediary language experts to facilitate comprehen-
sion not only for people who do not know the source language but also for those with reading and
comprehension difficulties.
Francesca Luisa Seracini discusses another area in expert-to-lay public communication, that
is, the translation of informative legal texts in the digital environment. Her chapter, “Intralingual
translation in expert-to-lay public communication: Strategies and recurrent features in informative
legal texts in the digital environment”, is based on a comparison of two online corpora from the
UK. Seracini examines the intralingual translation of UK Coronavirus legislation for the non-
specialized audience in the form of popularized informative texts on the institutional website of
the UK government, shedding light on the strategies of the popularization of legal knowledge as a
form of intralingual translation in a digital environment.
PART IV. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION: REWORDING AND EDITING

In Part IV, the focus is on intralingual translation from the perspective of rewriting, with all four
chapters offering a varied approach to editing as a form of intralingual translation. The first chapter
in this section by Linda Pillière, “Editing and intralingual translation: Rewriting for clarity and
consistency”, examines the rewriting practices of editors and more specifically copyeditors. A par-
allel is drawn between the modifications they make to works of literary fiction and the strategies
commonly identified with interlingual translation, thus underlining once again the fuzzy bounda-
ries that exist between intra- and interlingual translation and supporting evidence for Zethsen’s
claim that the same microstrategies are to be found in intra- and interlingual translation. Finally, a
typology of copyediting modifications is proposed, which reveals that copyeditors’ modifications
are motivated principally by a desire to improve a text’s clarity and consistency for the potential
reader and are often optional style-based choices.
Marta Gómez Martínez and Carmen Quijada Diez’s chapter “Two sides of the same coin: The
American version of a British medical dictionary” is a study on the rewriting of Hoblyn’s A Dic
tionary of Terms Used in Medicine and the Collateral Sciences. Originally written in the nine-
teenth century for British practitioners, the dictionary was revised by Isaac Hays for publication
in the United States. The authors demonstrate that far from being a word for word substitution,
the new edition also contained extensive rewriting due both to the geographical context (diatopic
variation) and to the sociocultural context. Not all the changes made can be simply labelled as
dialectal; others are due to content editing, providing fresh evidence for the need to study more
closely the relationship between translation and editing.
In Enora Lessinger’s chapter, “‘The rule is no fuss’: An analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s shift to
unnatural narration from the perspective of intralingual translation and editing”, the concept of
intralingual translation as rewriting is expanded to include self-translation. Through a close analy-
sis of Ishiguro’s rewriting of The Unconsoled, Lessinger demonstrates that the microstrategies
9
of omission and shortening, accompanied by the removal of rational explanations, contribute to

the fictional world’s dream logic. Self-translation in this instance reveals that explicitation is not
necessarily a translation universal when narrative strategies are based on implicitness. The chapter
opens the way for further research on the norms of literary self-translation.
Finally, in “Intralingual translation in expert-to-lay public communication: The case of pluri-
centric languages”, Fernando Prieto Ramos analyses intralingual variation and intralingual inter-
actions between national and international legal orders and the creation of pluricentric languages,
that is, languages that are official in more than one jurisdiction. Rewriting is required to avoid
national singularities and to provide translations that are understandable for the global community.
Prieto Ramos’s chapter develops some of the points raised in Part IV, but explores the topic from
an international perspective.
PART V. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION: EDUCATION AND

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Part V investigates the increasing interest in the role of intralingual translation and second lan-
guage learning. This covers the role of intralingual translation as a teaching tool as well as the role
of monolingual subtitling in language acquisition.
The opening chapter, “Expanding translation studies: A functionalist approach to the use of
intralingual translation in language education” by Georgios Floros, looks at the use of intralin-
gual translation in language acquisition, not only for learning a foreign language, particularly
within the context of translanguaging in mixed classrooms, but also for learning older forms
of a language, as in this case, teaching Ancient Greek in the Greek educational system. In that
context, the chapter also contributes to diachronic intralingual translation discussed at length in
the first section.
The didactic application of different audiovisual translation modes – both intra- and interlin-
gual – by the students in the foreign language learning setting is the focus of Noa Talaván and
Alberto Fernández-Costales in their chapter “Intralingual audiovisual translation as a foreign lan-
guage aid: A methodological proposal for application at different levels”. The authors argue for the
positive outcomes of the active use of different audiovisual translation modes in language teach-
ing. With specific tasks and lesson plans, they illustrate the potential and pedagogical possibilities
of intralingual audiovisual translation at various educational levels.
The final chapter in this section, “Graded readers as instances of intralingual translation”, is
by Manuel Moreno Tovar and focusses on graded readers, “rewriting and shortening” of liter-
ary works, as instances of intralingual translation aimed at language learners. Moreno Tovar’s
comparative textual and multilingual paratextual analysis of a corpus of graded readers of
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray reveals varied self-descriptors for graded readers
and the significance of time as the main parameter that influences the production of graded
readers.
PART VI. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION: ACCESSIBILITY

FROM A PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVE
The final section of the handbook offers an insight into some of the new professional settings
where intralingual translation can be found. As with many of the chapters in this handbook,
the cases to be found in this section underline the fact that the very concept of “intralingual
10
Introduction
translation” is influenced by context and the boundaries with other forms of translation
are fuzzy.
The first chapter in this section, “Intralingual interpretation: Simultaneous Easy Language
interpreting as a new form of simultaneous interpreting” by Judith Rubanovsky-Paz, Hilla Karas,
and Shira Yalon-Chamovitz, explores Easy Language interpreting (ELI) – also referred to as
simultaneous language simplification. ELI is presented as an intralingual form of simultaneous
interpreting (SI). However, while the two practices share points in common, they differ in terms
of lexical and syntactic features as ELI interpreters will necessarily omit or add information and
practise more rewording. These strategies are at odds with the interpreting standards of simultane-
ous interpreting that interpreters have been trained to practise, thus presenting professional and
personal difficulties for ELI interpreters.
The three chapters that follow describe specific projects within the field of intralingual transla-
tion. In the next chapter, “Respeaking as a form of intralingual translation: Intersections between
linguistics and respeaking in the live subtitling of parliamentary debates”, Dan McIntyre, Zoe
Moores, Hazel Price, and John Vice look at the live subtitling of parliamentary debates in the
United Kingdom and the intralingual translation strategies used to provide a viewer reliant on
subtitles with an experience as close to that of the hearing viewer as possible. This involves going
beyond word substitution as associated paralinguistic features such as pitch, prosody, and polite-
ness features also need to be taken into account, thus underlining the need to complement Jakob-
son’s original definition based on the verbal sign with other factors.
The chapter by Cláudia Martins and Cláudia Ferreira, “Intralingual translation and media
accessibility at a crossroads: A museum project”, presents the project on museum accessibility
at the Museum of the Abbott of Baçal in Bragança, Portugal, and the rewriting of the panels and
labels into more accessible language. The chapter picks up on topics explored in Part III and, as
with the chapter by Schmid, underlines that translation into Easy or Plain Language is a collabora-
tive enterprise that at times is far from easy.
The final chapter in the handbook by Elisa Perego, “Translation into Easy Language: The
unexplored case of podcasts”, looks at a relatively under-researched area in intralingual trans-
lation: Podcasts. While the medium has become increasingly popular, little research has been
carried out to consider how it may be rendered more accessible for low-language-proficiency
users, or individuals with cognitive or intellectual difficulties, and language learners. Perego
explores the simplification strategies that could be implemented through intralingual trans-
lation into an easy-to-understand version of the same language – while also enhancing its
listenability, through a case-study based on the episode “Jane Fonda” from the She’s So Cool
podcast.
We are grateful to all our contributors for producing the chapters that make up this handbook.
They represent a wide range of origins and institutional affiliations, thus reflecting the interna-
tional interest in intralingual translation. We are proud to be able to bring together both experi-
enced researchers in the field and younger scholars, as well as academics and professionals. No
handbook can ever be fully comprehensive, and we would have liked to have had more contribu-
tions in other areas and from different cultures and languages. However, the current handbook is
still the first comprehensive volume on various aspects of intralingual translation that should not
only be exceptionally valuable to scholars working on the topic itself or in Translation Studies,
but also to researchers in many other fields from subtitling to history to comparative culture. We
hope that this handbook will contribute to the ever-widening debate on intralingual translation and
provide thought-provoking ideas for translation studies in general. The variety of the contributions
11
in this handbook also demonstrates the need for more research on intralingual translation. This
further research will certainly change the way we see intralingual translation and Translation Stud-
ies as a discipline.
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org/10.7202/038904ar
13
PART I
Intralingual translation
A diachronic perspective
1
ARCHAIZATION,
MODERNIZATION, AND
REPRESENTING THE SOURCE
LANGUAGE IN INTRALINGUAL
DIACHRONIC TRANSLATION
Hilla Karas
Introduction
When the source and target texts of a translation are separated by a considerable time gap, this
may be reflected in various features of the target text, such as its language (lexicon, morphol-
ogy, syntax), poetic characteristics (genre, style) and cultural and ideological references to period-
indicative items (Jones & Turner, 2004). One common strategy to emphasize the diachronic gap
between the reader and the source is archaizing the target text. Intralingual translations however
raise a distinct question, since often the very reason for the translation is precisely time-induced
language change (Robinson, 1998). Indeed, phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic
changes frequently lead to several retranslations. To correctly decipher or recreate classic pieces
from historical periods, or to present them in an accessible manner for contemporary readers,
many linguistic, historical and textual skills are required (Alvstad & Assis Rosa, 2015; Brownlie,
2006). The text may be adapted for the different norms of the target readership not just when it
is (first) translated, but also every time it is retranslated, or even just edited or reprinted for later
generations (Buridant, 2015; Pym, 1998/2014, pp. 79–85).
It was probably this gap between historical layers of a language which motivated Mossop
(2016) to claim that what we refer to here as diachronic intralingual translation is indeed transla-
tion. This is opposed to many other intralingual transfer operations such as simplification, report-
ing and subtitling (cf. Hill-Madsen, 2019; Zethsen & Hill-Madsen, 2016) which scholars such
as Mossop and Schubert (2005) consider to be non-translation. A former état de langue typically
relies on a distinct repertoire of rules and items, barely intelligible, or even unintelligible, to speak-
ers of a later period. It can be argued that the treatment of the original code, and consequently
the attitude towards the axis of linguistic archaization versus modernization, constitutes the main
particularity of intralingual diachronic translation. Archaizing the target text might converge, fully
or partly, with the original linguistic material which has evolved in different ways over the decades
or centuries, possibly to the extent of rendering the translation pointless.
This chapter discusses the internal paradox of translating and simultaneously reproducing
the same linguistic material, taking into consideration questions related to the ways in which the
17 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-3
Hilla Karas
proportions between necessary modernization and possible archaization are determined. It also
addresses the values assigned to this elusive balance in different settings, looking into the types of
contexts and presentation which seem to impact a translator’s choices and reception.
Preliminary remarks
We need to remember that the very question of representing the original language relies on the
assumption that a translation attributes some attention to form and smaller text units, rather than
opting for free interpretation or paraphrasing. Indeed, a translation which does not aspire to provide
a complete version of the source text, but rather a summary, an imitation or an amplified version,
is far less likely to represent its source language to begin with. However, a convention-derived
representation of the source language may be required by norms, as shall be explained later.
The meaning of the term translation varies in different languages or periods, reflecting the
change in norms and ways of understanding the relation between the source and target, or the
production of the target text (Toury, 1995/2012, pp. 93–95). In antiquity and in the Middle Ages,
for example, translations could include paraphrases, non-marked comments and explanations as
part of the text itself, as well as eliminations and additions aimed at improving the text’s perceived
aesthetic, historical or political value (Grammenidis & Floros, 2019; Rizzi, 2008; on medieval
views on translation: Copeland, 2006; and Toury’s remark, 1995/2012, p. 94).
Moreover, a source text often cannot be simply categorized as belonging to a single état de
langue. Firstly, the very delimitation of a historical layer is far from obvious and can be closely
entangled with issues of literary stylistics (Delabastita, 2017, pp. 193–194). In addition, various
segments in a work may combine different historical layers as embedded texts or as indices of
diachronic change in the narrative itself. Neologisms may also be introduced into a text as samples
from imagined futuristic periods and constructed languages (e.g., in science fiction or dystopic
novels, cf. Cheyne, 2008). Conversely, a writer may use outdated linguistic elements throughout
their text for narratological or stylistic reasons, creating a gap between authorial time and the
time of the narrated event. If the plot takes place across several epochs, translators may search for
devices ensuring the preservation of the different temporal layers, for instance by using a cultur-
ally marked intralingual diachronic contrast. Some examples would be Modern Hebrew vs. Bibli-
cal Hebrew or Modern English vs. Shakespearean English (Torop & Osimo, 2010).
Another important point is that diachronic translations, both intra- and interlingual, can take
place “backwards”, i.e., using a target language older than the source language, as illustrated
by translations of Max and Moritz into medieval German and English (Busch, 1982; Görlach,
1986) or The Little Prince into Old French and Sanskrit (Saint-Exupéry, 2013, 2017). This type
of translation may entail challenges beyond those covered in the following discussion, since the
representation of older linguistic strata in more recent texts is relatively common and partly con-
ventionalized in modern languages, while ancient linguistic layers very rarely need to represent
newer ones in their texts.1
Between reduplication and translation: diplomatic transcriptions

and critical editions
An important aspect to consider before studying more conventional translations would be that
several transfer procedures used in philology are actually very close representations (rather than
simple copies) of the original text as written, for example, on the ancient plate, papyrus and parch-
ment. In fact, the versions discussed in the present segment often serve as sources for intralingual
18
Archaization, modernization, and representing source language
modernizing translations. Thus, a “diplomatic transcription” (or a “diplomatic edition”) is a ver-

sion which reproduces as many traits of the transcribed document (the “diploma”) as allowed by
the characters used in modern print, as well as line breaks, page breaks, abbreviations and differ-
entiated letter shapes. Strictly speaking, diplomatic transcriptions conserve the original spelling
and punctuation, however irregular and inconsistent they may be, as well as capitalization, word
division and variant letter forms. At times, even original slips of the pen are retained (Driscoll,
2006; Pierazzo, 2011). Various degrees of normalization may gradually take these diplomatic tran-
scriptions further down the road towards critical editions.
Indeed, “critical –” or “scientific editions” reflect their source material quite differently to dip-
lomatic ones, since they attempt to improve and facilitate reading for modern audiences. A critical
edition also methodically inserts word divisions, expanded abbreviations, normalized punctuation,
accents and standardized spelling. Of course, the edition may also collate several manuscripts
from the same tradition, creating a compilation based on aesthetic and philological considerations
(Altschul & Nelson, 2007; Dembowski, 1993; Driscoll, 2010). Importantly, the interrelated French
and German traditions of textual editing (ecdotics) have emphasized the “critical apparatus” pro-
viding information on the history of the language or literature, sometimes in separate publications
for each focus of interest (Wilhelm, 2015). This type of information is placed in footnotes, end-
notes, tables, bibliographies and complete chapters presenting detailed scientific discussions. Con-
sequently, many linguistic issues are both presented and explicitly discussed in critical editions.
In fact, new philology (Cerquiglini, 1983; Nichols, 1990) paid great attention to linguistic and
textual variation in manuscripts, also known as “mouvance”. This was opposed to earlier editing
conventions, which preferred dialectal normalization or reconstruction based on various specula-
tions, rather than the representation of specific manuscripts (see Bak, 2012, pp. 25–27; Tanselle,
1983). Indeed, many critical editions constitute a representation of the source language which
neither purports to adhere completely to modern linguistic norms nor provides the exact wording,
spelling or dialect of the original (cf. Foulet & Speer, 1979; Lepage, 2001).
Based on the broadly designed definition of intralingual translation suggested by Zethsen and
Hill-Madsen (2016), scientific editions can indeed be seen as intralingual translations: While not
directly discussed by the aforementioned scholars, such editions fulfil their criteria of mediating
meaning across a potential comprehension gap, a semiotic barrier. Even diplomatic transcriptions
may be considered as a borderline case, since they do sometimes bridge differences in alphabetical
systems.2
Reduplication as archaization
In addition to these newly suggested members for the category of intralingual translations, some
long acknowledged translations adhere to a norm encouraging the reduplication of many linguis-
tic elements in the target text, even if their semantic or morphological properties have changed.
This is the case for what was known in France as the “style troubadour”,3 which in the current
context denotes more specifically the imitation of medieval literary and linguistic writing styles.
This was demonstrated in Corbellari’s (2015, pp. 147–160) discussion of modern French intra-
lingual translations, where target texts would include particular obsolete lexemes which became
accepted as indicating the medieval period and its linguistic layer, within a generally more mod-
ernly worded text.
The medievalizing expressions typically belonged to categories (Buridant, 2005) such as period
realia items, for example, transportation, navigation or social status; literary formulaic expressions;
specific lexemes conventionally used to emphasize a medieval nuance (such as occire (“slay”)
19
Hilla Karas
instead of tuer). In addition, the word order of the original was also partly imitated although it may
have seemed uncommon, or marked, to modern-day speakers.
These reduplications, using fragments of source text material just as they are without adjusting
them to modern language standards, became so normalized that when translators started to steer
away from these tendencies, particularly in terms of vocabulary, they were criticized for seemingly
patronizing their readers, to whom they allegedly did not attribute even basic familiarity with the
medieval style (see Trachsler, 2004).
In some cases, translations avoiding easily recognizable archaisms are even deemed too mod-
ern and free to be considered real translations, and can be accused of adopting a “post-modern
jargon which cultivated people would shy away from” (Trachsler, 2004, p. 256). The need to be
well-versed in an earlier form of the language, to recognize its markers and use them in text pro-
duction can also be found in some Bible translations (Karas, 2016b; Nida, 1994). Critics of this
approach (such as Jonin [“Chanson de Roland”, 1979, p. 31] in France or Shalev [in Sapir-Wietz,
2011] in Israel) emphasize the need to cater to the common ground among present day speakers as
opposed to encouraging linguistic skills signalling higher cultural proficiencies and tastes. Indeed,
in France, early and particularly typical examples of the aforementioned translation style, also
known as Marot-style translation4 or macaronic translation, have encountered increasing levels of
criticism since the beginning of the 20th century (see Buridant, 2005).
The tendency to embed antiquated expressions is not limited to obsolete vocabulary;5 it is
also practised through the integration of words identified as archaic but which are still used by a
modern-day speaker or found in the dictionary (Buridant, 2005). These present-day-but-marked
alternatives are often outdated, technical, archaeological or regional terms and are still prone to
affect the text’s readability (Buridant, 2005). Other examples are the creation of new items through
applying outdated morphological rules on modern lexemes (for example, thu has as a fake repre-
sentation of Anglo-Saxon English rather than thu hafst or simply the modern you have) or using
the latter in contexts that are suitable for their older etymological form (English happy in the sense
of “fortunate” rather than its modern one). Clearly, the reduplication of the source language mate-
rial is particularly suitable for highbrow readers who are vastly familiar with the older language
variety and its specificities. The practice may actually serve as a sociological marker, signalling
the translator’s or their readers’ belonging to the intelligentsia (see Baer, 2006; Sela-Sheffy, 2005).
Understandably, a generally modern text with obsolete terms sprinkled throughout produces
heterolinguality, enjoys a higher readability than the source, but still unambiguously points at its
original historical time frame and source language (Jones & Turner, 2004; Karas, 2016a). The term
“heterolingualism”, introduced by Rainier Grutman (1997), refers to the use of foreign languages
or social, regional and historical language varieties in texts. The heterolingual status of this type of
intralingual diachronic translation is yet another reminder of the fact that no language is a single,
monolithic entity. In the present context, it also serves as a reminder that the border between source
and target language can be blurred and that the two may actually converge at some points, in spite
of their apparent clear and binary opposition (see also Meylaerts, 2006).
Literal or conventional substitutions for source language items

It is important to note that while there is certainly an affinity between the two tactics, the redupli-
cation of exact source language terms is distinct from their substitution by literal translations or
specific and conventionalized modern items. Indeed, in some cases the differentiation between the
older item and its modern counterpart is debatable, as it may depend on a single letter or diacriti-
cal mark setting them apart. At other times, the more recent term evolved from the earlier one,
20
or constitutes its cognate, and it now covers several meanings, within which readers are expected
to choose the archaic one given the appropriate context. Beyond lexical items such as nouns and
verbs, these literal translations may also include fixed expressions such as forms of address, for-
mulas for reinforcing statements or the literal copying of longer syntactic structures which are
no longer acceptable in present language, genre or stylistics. Examples may include binomials,
outdated diction, kennings6 rendered literally or intralingual inkhorn terms (see Magennis, 2015,
pp. 7–13; Tolkien, 1997). It can also cause confusion if the original item covered a wider semantic
range than its modern version but is still reproduced as is rather than replaced by the appropriate,
specific contemporary alternative for the given context. For example, Old French fier kept in a
modern translation may be interpreted as “proud” rather than also covering the senses of “wild” or
“intense” (Buridant, 2005, pp. 50–51).
All of these instances may prove non-problematic for the informed reader, but a less knowl-
edgeable person would have to spot the stylistic difference, then resort to reference books and
perhaps attribute either a mysterious or a less cultivated character to the text, depending on the
prestige of the represented period in their culture. As noted earlier, if prestige is high, these liter-
ally-translated-but-presently-opaque expressions may be interpreted as traces of the older linguis-
tic layer with which modern-day readers need to familiarize themselves and correctly identify. The
historical variety is then considered to belong to a verbal and aesthetic heritage which comprises a
key to present-day high culture, as exemplified in the case of the Modern Hebrew Bible translation
(Karas, 2016b, 2019). A clear and consistent representation of the source language is then required
by those who support this view, who would object to more modernizing translations and support
different sorts of reduplication tactics.
In an article on English translations of 19th-century Italian literature, Venuti (1996a) men-
tions that readers interpreted archaisms as placing the work in the remote past because they were
reminiscent of the English-language Gothic genre. The strangeness of the text also underlined for
the reader that the text was a translation without interrupting the reading experience. This is an
interesting point, since in intralingual diachronic translations this very strangeness may have mul-
tiple, possibly contradictory, effects: While indicating the antiquity of the text and highlighting the
existence of a separate and less accessible original, this strangeness (possibly related to foreigniza-
tion or lower acceptability) also raises doubts about the very translational nature of the target text.
Reduced readability may turn into an advantage when such a translation is designed for, or used
by, learners of the older état de langue. The target text exposes them to many linguistic features of
the old language, possibly encouraging them to turn to the original and reread it; on the other hand
the translation is still easier to access than the original. Archaizing conventions may therefore be
beneficial, especially when they are accompanied by a didactic apparatus, such as endnotes, exer-
cises, glossaries or declension and conjugation tables, each providing an explanation for certain
linguistic particularities. This didactic practice has been used intralingually from as early as the
Classical and Hellenistic periods (Grammenidis & Floros, 2019). In the example of the reprinted
Bida translation of Aucassin and Nicolette, endnotes indicated that a modern French translation for
a medieval piece presented word order, inconsistent use of address pronouns, specific verbal tenses
and moods, as well as elision in possessive pronouns, all of which are more characteristic of Old
French rather than modern-day French (see Karas, 2008). It is a fascinating situation in which a
translation is used for teaching about the source language, while readers have to be cautious about
distinguishing between target- and source-language features. If one has to be careful when study-
ing foreign literature through translation (Venuti, 1996b), even more caution is needed when the
source language is concerned; such caution, apparently, is not always practised when source and
target language are considered as one.7
21
Hilla Karas
In spite of the aforementioned advantages for students, we have here a paradoxical state of
affairs where a modern translation does not replace outdated and unintelligible linguistic proper-
ties, thus attracting attention to the very fact that they are not acceptable any more. Naturally, the
answer lies in finely balancing the use of modern-day and archaic language in the text: Too many
items of an earlier form of the language and the text risks becoming unreadable. However, as noted
earlier, obsolete components are often the main reason for the intralingual diachronic translation
itself. Hence, this type of heterolingual target text contains the very items which one would expect
to be converted.
Conventionalized representation of the earlier language

The three practices discussed previously – the inclusion of completely obsolete linguistic mate-
rial, literal translations obeying outdated rules and modern “faux amis” used with the sense of
the words they have evolved from – create, in turn, new norms. Readers can grow accustomed
to these anomalies without even mastering the original lexical or grammatical repertoire, taking
these representations as the standard style for medieval romances or ancient epics. In such a con-
text, the hybrid language can be appreciated by both the cultural elite (including specialists in the
relevant fields) and the fans of a specific genre who have grown accustomed to the style. While
such preferences can also develop in interlingual contexts (see Venuti, 1996a), it would seem that
in intralingual cases, readers often have the impression that the strangeness encountered has been
copied straight from the source.
However, as a result of this convention, markers of antiquity become necessary in their own
right and may be added as an independent translational strategy rather than directly deriving from
source text details. As mentioned earlier, a special form of the language may be preferred because
it signals in-group identification even if it is less accessible for the general public, not only for
religious scriptures but also for other founding texts.
An archaic style may be chosen for a translation for many reasons beyond the representa-
tion of a text’s authorial time or narrated time: It can also enhance the claims to authenticity of
a pseudotranslation (Toury, 2005) or express a translator’s stance on opposing historical world
views, such as medieval vs. modern ideals (Yoon, 2021). When a convention requires antiquity
markers for founding texts, we have a historical genre which is expected to include particular
types of archaisms; they are then independently introduced into the translation in a very plausible
manner, creating an apparent representation of original linguistic features. As an example, Alex-
andre Bida’s 19th-century modern French translation of Aucassin and Nicolette (1878) included
archaic morphological features (verbal suffixes), elision and the resulting apostrophe, an adjective
replaced by its synonym spelt in an antiquated form (while the literal and direct translation would
not permit it) and the use of a hyphen to combine an adverb and an adjective – all of which were
the direct result of decisions made by the translator rather than the reproduction of an earlier lin-
guistic variety. Since norms do not prevail forever, a 20th-century re-edition of the same transla-
tion (Williams, 1933) eliminated some of these characteristics, without hesitating however to use
the remaining ones for didactic purposes (see Karas, 2008).
We can therefore say that the norm of an archaic translation style may create an illusion of
linguistic authenticity and transparency. Such an illusion is particularly powerful in intralingual
transfer, due to readers’ assumptions that the source text would be relatively comprehensible and
that its language could be very simply and directly adjusted to modern standards.
To summarize, the strategy of archaizing and its methods of application depend on the inter-
pretation of the source text, target system norms and the translator’s assessment of their intended
22
readerships’ expectations and knowledge regarding linguistic forms, literary traditions or cultural
references.
The various transfer methods listed previously can be classified using what Hill-Madsen (2019)
labelled “degree of translation” in intralingual translation; it covers the proportion of simple redu-
plication of linguistic material, compared to conversion resulting from linguistic differences. We
would expect to find a very low degree of translation in diplomatic transcriptions and a somewhat
higher degree in critical editions; renditions explicitly labelled as translations often display lower
extents of reduplication, depending on accepted norms. On the other hand, modernizing transla-
tions would exhibit a low degree of reduplication and a higher degree of translation.
Modernization vs. intralingual diachronic translation

If intralingual intertemporal translation basically results from the necessity to update a text, why
do we even need to discuss modernization? First, “modernization” can refer to non-linguistic com-
ponents, such as realia items or socio-cultural facts, as well as stylistic and genre features, which
may all be replaced in a sort of diachronic domestication (Jones & Turner, 2004). Where language
is concerned, normally this type of translation inevitably involves a certain level of modernization,
which is therefore also widely acceptable.
However, this linguistic modernization is frequently performed in a manner that would not
draw too much attention to itself, through the use of unmarked contemporary expressions which
readers take for granted. On the other hand, some linguistic forms indicate very clearly their period
even without designating real world phenomena. For example, slang expressions and structures,
forms of address, or loan words which have not yet completely integrated in a language comprise
very noticeable signposts of their own time frame. These kinds of modernizations were referred
to by Lefere (1994) and Jones and Turner (2004) as “violent modernization”, which readers can
easily link to a later period than the source. When the artefacts, situations and textual details are
datable to the same epoch as linguistic forms, this compatibility may encourage a better reception
even in contexts where an archaizing translation is the norm. Similarly, the reception of violent
modernizations is determined, among other aspects, by the attitude in the target culture towards
the old language variety: As its prestige and relevance increases, so the reception of modernized
translations deteriorates. When modernization removes the societal barrier between holders of cul-
tural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) (the “well read”) and the other speakers, reactions from educators
and other gatekeepers are likely to be unfavourable.
At the opposite end of the scale, modernization can be viewed as the only way to salvage the
content of a text, in a context where the source language is so remote from contemporary speakers
that any linguistic representation would undermine the whole project. This position was expressed
regarding key cultural texts, such as modern renderings of the Hebrew Bible8 or Turkish retransla-
tions of Kelile and Dimne (Berk Albachten, 2019). In both cases, it was claimed by translators and
supporters of their work that insisting on the obsolete language based on puritanism and outdated
literary tastes might push the text into oblivion. Such a position promotes the use of a plain and
accessible variety rather than a literary, highbrow register. Such retranslations of Biblical texts,
drawing from Martin Luther’s (1530/2014) approach to his seminal German translation, were
surveyed in Zethsen’s (2009) pivotal paper on intralingual translation.
Modernization can derive from wider considerations than just language change or translational
norms. When Greek intralingual diachronic translations took a modernizing turn, it was not a
direct consequence of a shift in norms or individual translatorial choices; it resulted from a gen-
eral shift in the norms of written language. Indeed, the famous Language Questions arose in the
23
Hilla Karas
19th and 20th centuries concerning the specific variety to be adopted for purposes of highbrow
culture and later as official language. The options included katharevousa, an artificially recon-
structed variety based on Classical Greek but “purged” of non-Hellenic vocabulary and grammati-
cal features, and the so-called Demotic (“popular”) written version (Dimotiki), now referred to as
Standard Modern Greek. Importantly, even katharevousa was not identical to Ancient Greek, as it
included grammatical modifications in features such as particles, numbers and connectives. Over
the decades, the Demotic variety gained ground due to its affinity with the spoken language and
was declared by law in 1976 as official in Greece and Cyprus (Mackridge, 2012; Vlachopoulos,
2007). The linguistic battle unavoidably affected intra- and interlingual translations in these coun-
tries: Since Classical Greek had become incomprehensible at that point, all translations had one of
the two varieties as their target language. A significant portion of intralingually translated materials
covered seminal texts such as Ancient Greek tragedies, comedies, poems and historical accounts
(Grammenidis & Floros, 2019). As a result, any choice between Demotic and katharevousa inher-
ently changed the proportion of reduplication and archaization in every intralingual diachronic
translation. As the norm of translating into Demotic gradually spread, texts earlier translated into
katharevousa had to be retranslated in a manner which modernized texts that would have been
conventionally archaized. The Greek Orthodox Church declared after the 1901 riots that Demotic
translations of the Bible were profane and might distort Biblical concepts due to linguistic diver-
gences (Vasileiadis, forthcoming). With time, such translations were published and even gained
recognition from the Orthodox Church.
Archaization, modernization and ideology

Clearly, socio-cultural elements may impact the desire to reproduce original linguistic material.
The first factor has already been mentioned: The prestige of the source text’s historical layer. For
example, Classical Greek and Biblical Hebrew were – and in some respects still are – considered
as pure, exemplary and “holy”, depending on the period or sub-group in the speakers’ community.
A second relevant factor is the extent to which the old état de langue is viewed as a separate variety
or evolutionary stage by the speakers’ community. If one cannot or should not separate contempo-
rary written language from its classical form, there is no need to translate it, or alternatively, it can
serve itself as a target language (Karas, 2016a). If we accept Sakai’s (2009) claim that languages
are not naturally distinct entities, neither on the ethno-political level nor on the diachronic level,
then such boundaries depend on cultural conceptions and other biases. Any group can insist that
their linguistic code should not be separated into distinct, identifiable layers, even when they fail
to comprehend their historical texts.
They can choose instead to revive the old varieties and put them back into use, at least in writ-
ing. Such an effort can take the form of rejecting any modernizing intralingual translation, either
by avoiding their publication or through negative reactions to such translations. This explains the
majority of the reactions to the Modern Hebrew Ram Bible (see Karas, 2016b). In fact, some of the
few positive reactions to the translation were based on Zuckermann’s claim that Modern Hebrew
and Biblical Hebrew are not even the same language (cf. Zuckermann & Holzman, 2011), thus
viewing translation as an obvious solution. Most writers on the subjects who emphasized sameness
and continuity between the layers opposed the translation.9
A community wishing to avoid any division between old and modern language can opt for a
second modus operandi, teaching the public the earlier historical forms through the use of kathar
evousa in 19th- and early 20th-century Greece (Grammenidis & Floros, 2019). It would seem
that in both cases, the ideological rationale behind the attempt to emphasize the sameness – or at
24
least direct continuity – between old and modern versions of the language are related to nation
building. In Israel, the emphasis on familiarity with Biblical Hebrew through laborious learning
rather than use of modernized translations seems to ensue from the central role still played by the
founding religious text in cultural, historical and political inner struggles. In the Greek case, both
katharevousa and Dimotiki were presented as promoting linguistic continuity: While the first one
was indeed largely based on the classical language, the very use of Dimotiki in translations of key
historical texts such as the Bible and The Oresteia aimed, among other things, to establish its status
as the natural modern substitute for both the original idiom and the formerly standard target vari-
ety. Apparently, this approach has been accepted by many, given that nowadays speakers complain
that what is threatened by the world dominance of English is not just Standard Modern Greek but
rather the “Greek language” as an undivided whole, after thousands of years of documented con-
tinuous use (Mackridge, 2012).
In the two examples cited earlier, intralingual translation became entangled in larger debates
about the history and continuity of languages, cultures, territories and nations. These debates dem-
onstrate again the claim that historical translations and translation history both determine their
own concepts in a circular manner (cf. Davis, 2014; Sakai, 2009). In this context, norms, expecta-
tions and innovations related to the way intralingual diachronic translations represent their source
language play a very important role.
Intralingual diachronic translation can also result directly from language planning, as it did in
the case of the Turkish language reform, which included not just a change of alphabet but also the
elimination of many foreign terms, mainly of Arabic and Persian origin, and their replacement
by Turkish equivalents. This reflected an effort to remove traditional and Islamic influences from
the culture as a whole, such that supporters of the Kemalist movement also promoted intralingual
translations and retranslations to fit and proliferate their line of thinking (Berk Albachten, 2014).
Clearly, this type of retranslation would mostly avoid representing the source language, precisely
as part of the endeavour to recreate the nation and its renewed culture.
From a slightly different perspective, Seamus Heaney finds traces of Irish terms in the Old
English text of Beowulf and feels free to use them if he judges it poetically or historically right,
in an effort to “come to terms with [the] complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and
resistance . . . a history which has to be clearly acknowledged by all concerned” (Heaney, 2000,
p. xxx). He therefore used reduplication as a tactic to voice and represent not just the historical
layer of “English” but also the contemporary Irish speakers who preserve some of the old vocabu-
lary along with its semantic and phonetic values.
Text layout and transparency

An obvious way to grant readers access to the original language is to present it accompanied
by the translation, in a bilingual edition. When both texts are displayed, a new parameter
should be taken into consideration. Whether it is called “double presentation”, following Pym
(1992/2010, p. 80) or “co-presence” following Kaufmann (2002), it may directly impact the
translation itself as well as the intended reading (Hewson, 1993). In interlingual translations, the
languages and their alphabets may present profound contrasts, to the level of complete unintel-
ligibility; however, in intralingual cross-temporal translations, particularly when both codes use
the same alphabet, readers are more likely to attempt reading the original and possibly compare
the versions.
Potentially, this comparison may encourage readers to judge the translation according to
their own norms of fullness and equivalence (Pym, 1992/2010). If they expect the target text
25
Hilla Karas
to reproduce features such as sentential segmentation, vocabulary and syntactic structures, they
may criticize any apparent violations. In order to prevent such reactions, a translator who is aware
that their work is planned to be published in a double format may either opt for a very close,
largely reduplicating translation or add various types of explanations and justifications for the
discrepancies, for example in footnotes, prefaces or epilogues. In other cases, an existing stan-
dalone translation reprinted in double presentation may be “dressed up” with these supplementary
elements by the editors. In fact, such notes inevitably point readers at the linguistic shifts behind
translatorial decisions not to adhere to source lexical stems, verbal tenses or structures (Karas,
2007). The number and the volume of such comments depends on translation norms, the status of
the translator or the type of publication. Nonetheless, if norms encourage younger people to learn
the source historical layer, for example through their inclusion in important board or certification
exams, then the double presentation may play the opposite role: Since readers are expected to use
the source itself to study, then the translation, serving as a study aid, should be as accessible as
possible, freed from expectations to represent or imitate linguistic and aesthetic properties. Such
a switch can be detected in bilingual editions of French medieval literature, between the 19th cen-
tury and the beginning of the 20th century on the one hand, and the pocket-sized bilingual editions
at the end of the 20th and the early 21st centuries on the other hand.
Furthermore, the classical facing-page format of the bilingual edition is far from being the
only layout providing double presentation. Different layouts may assume or inspire distinct
ways to read both texts. A printed book may be one complete text followed by its translation or
just relegate one of them to the end of the volume, as a separate chapter or an appendix, depend-
ing on the relative importance attributed to the respective versions. Such a setting discourages
parallel reading and comparison, now reserved for specialists or particularly interested individu-
als. Even when source and target are both on the same page, their segmentation is significant:
An interlinear setup, or two facing columns, facilitate parallel reading, while two long textual
blocks one followed by the other make for less comfortable reading. In some cases, one version
is also printed in a different or a much smaller font, emphasizing its lower prestige and status,
again discouraging the reader. The division into smaller units presented on the page, whether
in equivalent formats or not (size, typeset, column width), affects reading order as well, since a
text broken into many short phrases can also interfere with any attempt to read fluently any one
of the versions.
Some translations indicate many modifications of their source wording through the use
of bold or italic lettering, parentheses, brackets, asterisks and similar marks in the text itself
(Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot & Karas, 2021; Pym, 1992/2010, p. 88). This technique underlines their
adherence to the source language as well as their transparency as far as any such changes
are concerned. In a double presentation, these signs attract attention to any such procedures,
even if the reader was focusing solely on the translation, without any intent to correlate ver-
sions. The technique also creates an impression that all changes, as minor as they may be, are
openly indicated, and that the rest of the text does adhere to a clear and coherent convention
of equivalence. In intralingual diachronic translations, this equivalence often covers many lin-
guistic details, such as verbal forms, orthography and ellipsis. However, this impression of
transparency is not always authentic, for a variety of reasons, such as translator’s fatigue which
may decrease the attention for such details, or a desire to disguise some interventions that risk
provoking unwanted reactions.
Additionally, all of these strategies and layouts may be applied to parts of a text: Some chapters
or paragraphs may be presented as summarized translations, others in bilingual presentations,
others yet may be omitted altogether (see D’hulst, 1995). The source language representation can
26
therefore differ throughout the volume, depending on the importance of a textual fragment or its
linguistic code. Finally, all of these options are equally valid for texts in digital formats. Yet, these
may grant their readers tools to select different presentation modes, a fact that can directly affect
translatorial decisions. Translators will have to take into consideration that their text may be read
independently of its source or be compared to it at any point. It seems too early to describe the
impact of such modular publication mechanisms on source language representation, but hypoth-
eses can be formed based on the aforementioned descriptions.
This section has focused on the ways in which translations highlight shifts as compared to the
source text, and to overt indications of these shifts in the target text itself and its paratexts. The
very existence of such indications implies readers’ assumptions about the type and scope of what
consists of acceptable and noteworthy changes.
Script
The whole prior discussion takes for granted that the same alphabet is used in both source and
target texts, otherwise bilingual editions would not be as obviously prone to comparisons. Even
so, intralingual cross-temporal translations do sometimes take place between different scripts.
Clearly, the change in script has a direct impact on the issue of source-language representation.
Two possible transfer procedures other than translation aim to represent original linguistic mate-
rial. The first option is transliteration, which involves swapping letters in one script with particular
letters or combinations in a second script, following accurate and predictable rules, in an effort to
reflect the spelling of the source text. A second option is transcription, where the spoken language
is noted through an equally conventional set of rules. Within a language, this is relevant if users of
different alphabets also tend to have distinct pronunciations due to accent or dialectal differences,
or due to phonetic changes taking place on the diachronic axis. Most often, diachronic intralingual
transfer takes place beyond these fully conventional conversion methods.10
Nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish is one example of multiple scripts (Berk Albachten,
2019). While it normally used Arabic letters, it also existed in additional alphabets: Karaman
lidika, preferred by Christians, used Greek letters; Armeno-Turkish used Armenian script; Judeo-
Turkish used Rashi script; Cyrillic-Turkish used Cyrillic letters, and finally Syro-Turkish was
written in Old Syriac script. This diversity was meaningful for the ethnic and religious groups,
as it expressed their particularity and served as a means for self-differentiation within the wider
linguistic community. Translations between these scripts obviously eliminated one identifying fea-
ture in the language; in addition, some further features may also disappear in such a translation. A
translator may omit terms considered inappropriate or opt for plain language in order to increase
comprehensibility, inevitably effacing other relevant characteristics or introducing new ones to
emphasize a certain identity.11 Naturally, terms and structures marking communal identities, such
as words of specific foreign origins or religious connotations, may be erased intentionally on ideo-
logical grounds, as it happens in any type of translation.
The use of a specific alphabet as a means to express and draw mutual boundaries was lost
in Türkiye when the language reform of 1928 abolished all these alternatives in favour of the
Latin system alone. The intralingual translations and retranslations resulting from the reform often
exceeded linguistic updating to include a “purification” of Ottoman and other elements along with
content manipulations (Berk Albachten, 2014), both concealing and rewriting various identity
markers which the new regime disapproved of.
A phenomenon closely related to intralingual translation and scripts is kanbun kundoku (“Jap-
anese reading of Chinese texts”). Although it is basically a method which historically enabled
27
Hilla Karas
Japanese speakers to directly deal with Chinese texts in Kanji through added annotations, attitudes
towards it have not always likened it to translation proper. In fact, its long use in Japan over several
centuries had “blurred the boundaries between the two written languages” to a point where it was
regarded as an intralingual “register change” rather than an interlingual conversion (Wakabayashi,
2019, p. 59). Since the differentiation between inter- and intralingual depends on cultural sche-
mata, and here the use of the same script delivered a close, very transparent representation of the
source language, it was decided to mention kanbun kondoku despite the fact that it is not a typical
case of intralingual diachronic translation.
Conclusion
While archaization and modernization can occur in all diachronic translations, they touch upon the
basic paradox of intralingual translation, where a product of archaization partly converges with the
original, thereby not only masking the reason for translation but also signalling it. Modernization,
on the other hand, minimizes the representation of the original text and language. The two trends
normally coexist and complement each other. Transliteration, transcription, diplomatic transcrip-
tion and critical edition are contiguous procedures which closely represent the original language,
and may even count as translation under specific conditions.
Within more typical translations, several strategies are used for archaization: Older linguis-
tic items or those which by convention mark antiquity and can become the translational norm,
to the point that they would be generated in the process of translation rather than derived from
source material. This last archaizing technique creates an illusion of transparency and authentic-
ity through the very addition of new elements. Literal translations, preference for older forms or
earlier, technical and uncommon meanings of contemporary terms, as well as the preservation of
outdated linguistic and stylistic habits such as binomials or kennings are other archaizing options.
In general, these tactics can also serve as markers of knowledge or membership in privileged pro-
fessional or social groups. In addition, these methods all emphasize the diachronic gap but at the
same time make the translation less transformative. The latter fact renders archaizing translations a
remarkably useful tool for learning the older linguistic variety in an intralingual setting, especially
if a didactic apparatus accompanies the text. As a result, the translation reproduces some of the
lower readability of the original while still providing readers with more accessible versions – again
emphasizing the inherent paradox of intralingual intertemporal translation.
This category of translation is closely influenced by language ideologies and norms in the target
environment. If speakers underscore linguistic continuity, they often avoid such translations in
favour of other procedures, refuse to name them translations, or reject or even ban the ones that
do get published. They may also allocate more resources to teaching and preserving the older état
de langue and texts. Conversely, a change of script in a language is often the result of continuity-
breaking social and cultural changes, inducing a whole array of translational shifts.
The translation layout can have a considerable impact on its reading and the extent to which it
represents the source variety. Bilingual editions, particularly in juxtaposed or interlinear format,
encourage comparison and dialogue between the textual versions; overt markings of translational
shifts generate another illusion of transparency, or necessitate the addition of explicit discussions
and justifications.
The exceptionally varied parameters related to the representation of source language, as well as
their cultural and social grounds, reveal the core specificity of intralingual diachronic translations,
namely the indispensable and crucial reference to issues of linguistic continuity and difference
within sameness.
28
Notes
1 Obviously this is still possible, since the target text reader – necessarily belonging to a posterior period – is
somewhat familiar with both linguistic codes or at least aware of their existence.
2 See a discussion of similar cases in Hill-Madsen (2019, p. 556).
3 This ambivalent term, also known as “genre troubadour”, can also refer to the general interest in and imi-
tation of medieval painting, sculpture and music, starting mainly in France at the end of the 18th century
(see Pupil, 1985). This sense of the term will not be used here.
4 Traduction marotique, after 16th-century Clément Marot, poet and translator of François Villon.
5 We are referring here to cases of homonyms rather than the more common polysemy. For example, the use
of the term port in modern French not in the sense of “harbour” but rather as “parade” or “procession”,
following its medieval meaning. See Buridant (2005, p. 33).
6 A kenning is a compound phrase, often figurative, corresponding to a common noun, used in Old Ger-
manic, Old Norse and Old English poetry. Famous examples from Beowulf are hronráde, “whale-path”
for “sea”, or hilde-leoma, “battle-light” for “sword”.
7 Interestingly, the translation mentioned here actually comprised a modern French translation of an Old French
text destined for American college students, for whom French is indeed a foreign language (Williams, 1933).
One can easily imagine the confusion of less than fluent readers when facing this hybrid creation.
8 See author Meir Shalev’s position in his interview with Sapir-Wietz (2011).
9 However, see Bornstein (2008) in Karas (2019).
10 For a discussion on the relations between these procedures and translation, see Hill Madsen (2019) and
Gottlieb (2017).
11 See the example of Gavriilidis’s translation of Midhat’s text in Berk Albachten (2019).
Further reading
For more on intralingual French diachronic translation and levels of representation:
Galderisi, C., & Vincesini, J. J. (Eds.). (2015). De l’ancien français au français moderne. Brepols.
On diachronic translations, including intralingual ones, as reflecting linguistic change:
Lavidas, N. (2022). Intralingual translations: Two directions – to the past or to the present. In The diachrony
of written language contact (pp. 90–102). Brill.
On diachronic versions as intralingual (and interlingual) translations:
Screnock, J. (2017). The overlap of transmission and translation. In Traductor scriptor (pp. 50–92). Brill.
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004336568_004
On a diachronic translation as a means to detect stylistic features and effects:
Sherry, B. (2017). Lost and regained in translation: The sound of Paradise Lost. In A. Duran, I. Issa, &
J. R. Olson (Eds.), Milton in translation (pp. 33–50). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/
oso/9780198754824.003.0003
On the translators’ point of view:
Sirés, P. M. (2020). Like walking on cobblestones: An analysis of translator’s prefaces in Japanese intralin-
gual translations. SKOPOS. Revista Internacional de Traducción e Interpretación, 11, 81–102.‫‏‬
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On the necessary revolution in Bible education in Israel]. ‫גילוי דעת‬, 1, 13–31.
32
2
RETRIEVING BELGIUM’S
NATIONAL PAST
19th-century intralingual translation and transfer
practices in the legal, linguistic, and literary
domains
Lieven D’hulst
Introduction
Although the history of views on translation and translation practices has consistently privileged
literary and religious translation over a long period of time, for the last few decades the gap with
translation histories in other fields, such as public and private everyday settings, institutional trans-
lation, cross-lingual practices and more is gradually closing.
As an additional effect of the discovery or rediscovery of such views and practices of the past, a
historical perspective may prove its ability to bridge past activities that have coexisted if not inter-
mingled before their becoming embedded in separate disciplines like linguistics, literary studies
and history. This chapter will deal with a specific century and area in which these disciplines were
indeed knitted together more closely than they have been since. And it will argue that this process
was favoured by translation, all sorts of translation, not least intralingual translation.
Nineteenth-century Europe offers a vantage point for the study of the transversal role of transla-
tion across a range of disciplines and settings. As pointed out by Joep Leerssen, a major beacon
for disciplinary kinship was set a century earlier by Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1724), in
which the term filologia or philology was recoined as a mode of investigation of
all things by which humans make their world recognizable, knowable and predictable –
which is tantamount to saying that philology deals with culture. Aspects of culture are, for
Vico: mythology (a deferential way of saying that religion, too, is a cultural praxis providing
certainties), history, manners and customs, law, literature and language.
(Leerssen, 2008, p. 17)
As is well known, philology developed considerably during the late 18th and 19th centuries in
Europe, pervading legal history, comparative linguistics, literary history and more upcoming dis-
ciplines, designing and refining its techniques of finding, storing, describing, interpreting, edit-
ing and translating ancient, mostly medieval, texts (Espagne & Werner, 1994; Thiesse, 2022).
Governments as well as learned societies sustained philological endeavours, both nationally and
33 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-4
Lieven D’hulst
internationally. Archivists, librarians, bibliophilists and antiquarians all provided access to a mas-
sive amount of erudite information for larger groups of learned people, while at the same time
popular versions and schoolbooks aimed at children and the less educated flourished. As is equally
well known, a strong driving force behind the growth of interest in philology is nationalism and
the sentiment of belonging described by Miroslav Hroch as the first phase of a national movement,
which consists of the rediscovery of the past culture and language of a nation (Hroch, 1985).
Philological activities and nationalist feelings featured in smaller and larger cultures, as well
as in multilingual ones, although one of the premises of nationalism was the supposed intimate if
not exclusive connection between a language, its literature and its culture, a connection which the
coexistence or rivalry between more languages within a single nation-state seemed to challenge if
not contradict. Most new nations born after the Napoleonic wars and throughout the century had to
find ways to reconcile the ideology of national belonging and the effective reality of multilingual-
ism. Philology offered a useful tool here: Translation. And so, translation became the panacea to
access the practices and disciplines of the past. Translation was omnipresent: Between different
languages, between ancient and modern versions of the same language, between oral, manuscript
and print media, within and between multilingual cultures.
In this chapter, I will focus on translations carried out in administrative, legal and cultural prac-
tices, which are by themselves no more than samplings of political, socio-economic and cultural
life (ministries, city administrations, police, trade, religious life, hospitals, education, etc.). As
mentioned earlier, translation history has a long way to go here, in spite of the growing number
of contributions on translating at pivotal moments in multilingual areas such as Belgium and the
Netherlands during the French Revolution (cf. D’hulst & Schreiber, 2014), Germany in the Napo-
leonic period (cf. Paye, 2013), 19th-century Switzerland (Dullion, 2020), Italy (Schreiber, 2020)
and the Habsburg regime (cf. Wolf, 2012).
It may seem paradoxical that everyday translations are so ubiquitous and yet difficult to trace.
But it is no paradox for the historian. First, these translations were far from systematically reg-
istered, being rarely written down, only occasionally printed and even less stored in archives.
Second, they blended with other language practices, making up rather sophisticated networks of
language relations and exchanges that have not been listed in catalogues of books and printed
media or electronic databases, nor described in overviews or case studies by language or transla-
tion historians. Heuristic techniques that handle simple distinctions such as translation, adaptation
and imitation are inadequate. To put it bluntly: With regard to the 19th century, the term transla-
tion is mainly used to designate interlingual translation, while, conversely, the large array of other
cross-lingual or cross-media practices are never (or not yet) labelled by the terms and meanings
coined by Jakobson in 1959, and multiplied and expanded by others (among others, Gottlieb,
2018; Zethsen, 2021). Of course, the same holds for many more notions including general ones
that will recur hereafter, such as language and language family as well as their corresponding
terms (idiom, dialect, etc.), which are far from solidly established in the 19th century.1
And so, theoretical debates on the concept of “intralingual translation” will not be the focus
of this chapter. Instead, it will be used both as a basic tool to identify past practices that would
otherwise remain unnoticed and to locate them within co-occurrent sets of practices of textual
transmission2 (cf. D’hulst, 1995), including practices of interlingual and intralingual transfer. Like
other periods, the 19th century is deeply permeated by all sorts of processes of mediation and
re-mediation, which are relayed within and across geopolitical borders by publishers, translators,
officials and readers. Overall, there is no reason to assume that the study of textual features or
genetic processes should have precedence over other instances or parameters involved in intra-
lingual translation: Mediators, spaces, language rights and so on. In the following sections, I will
34
Retrieving Belgium’s national past
consider cases of co-occurrence of intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation with the
aim of uncovering the diversity of the language exchanges that took place in 19th-century Belgium
and of better understanding the functions attached to these exchanges. For the sake of clarity, the
exchanges taking place between the two major national languages of Belgium will be labelled
interlingual, while the exchanges taking place within each of these two languages (diachronic,
diaphasic, dialectal, diamesic or other, cf. Gottlieb, 2018, p. 51) will be labelled intralingual.
The chapter starts with a brief account of the historical context of 19th-century translation in
Belgium, and then moves on to examine samples of exchanges between France and Belgium in
the historical domain, translations between French, Dutch of the Netherlands and Belgian Flemish
in the legal domain, and translations between ancient and modern Flemish in the linguistic and
literary domains.
Translation and transfer directions in 19th-century Belgium:

a brief overview
The geographical space that will become the Kingdom of Belgium in 1830 bears a long history of
occupation and annexation, starting with the Romans and followed by the Spanish, the French, the
Austrian and the Dutch. Each period witnessed both varying tensions between different language
communities and interlingual mediation. Two major languages have coexisted since the early Mid-
dle Ages, Flemish and French, however asymmetrically related. In the 19th century, the language
situation had evolved as follows: In Flanders (located in the North), diglossia with bilingualism
French-Flemish dominated, while in the South, that is, in Brussels and in Wallonia, there was
diglossia without bilingualism (only French or Walloon was spoken).3 According to the sociolin-
guist Joshua Fishman, diglossia without bilingualism means that
two or more speech communities are united religiously, politically or economically

into a single functioning unit notwithstanding the socio-cultural cleavages that separate
them. . . . Since the majority of the elites and the majority of the masses never interacted
with one another they did not form a single speech community (i.e., their linguistic rep-
ertoires were discontinuous) and their intercommunications were via translators or inter-
preters (a certain sign of intragroup monolingualism). . . . Nevertheless, the body politic
in all of its economic and national manifestations tied these two groups together into a
“unity” that revealed an upper and a lower class, each with a language appropriate to its
own restricted concerns.
(Fishman, 1967, p. 33)
What happens when a multilingual society turns into a nation-state in which one language, for
example, French, is chosen as the official one, at the detriment of the other, even if the latter is
spoken by the majority of the state’s inhabitants? During the 19th (and part of the 20th) century,
Flemish activism strived for equal rights for their language in the official domain, which led in
1898 to the Equality law. Even so, more time elapsed before Flemish became an official language
in all public domains. And other issues like status, standard, training, literacy and citizenship were
all impacted by the government’s official monolingual language policy.
However, this policy also provided language rights for the Flemish majority, as inscribed in
the Constitution of 1831: “The use of languages spoken in Belgium is optional: It can only be
regulated by law, and only for acts of the public authorities and for judicial affairs.”4 This article
opened the way for translation and other transfer modalities in almost any domain or practice that
35
Lieven D’hulst
had to be adapted after independence: Political institutions, administration, journalism, justice and
so on. Interlingual translation between French and Flemish reached unprecedented levels during
these decades, and perhaps even disproportionate levels given the massive volume of translation
on the one hand and the more than widespread mastery of French in Flanders on the other. Clearly,
intra-Belgian translation is held up as a symbol of freedom of language and an allegiance to non-
official language users. Conversely, it deprived the same citizens and their language of the same
status as the official language.
Belgian society became a playing field in which interlingual and intralingual exchanges inter-
mingled and competed in complex ways. The rules of the game were set by private and public
institutions. The latter handled an essential distinction, namely between official and non-official
translation: The first type of translation was initiated and controlled by official instances such as
ministries on the national level, governors at the provincial level and mayors at the local level
of the cities and municipalities; it was executed by civil servants and printed and distributed by
official printers and publishers. The bulk of the translations concerned legal documents: Laws,
decrees and ordinances. Other translations featured a wide variety of public information emanat-
ing from national, regional and local authorities. During wartime, authorities also used placards
and other means to spread military propaganda. Yet, in spite of their dependency on official bod-
ies, the translations had no real status, since texts in French only were endowed with legal value.
As for non-official or private translations, they seemingly hinged upon the market conditions that
regulated the production, selling and distributing of books and journals in Belgium.5
Moreover, to ensure the outward legitimation of Belgium was another function of mediation, espe-
cially vis-à-vis its closest neighbours who had occupied it a few decades before, that is, France and
the Netherlands. Hence, Belgian national identity had to be defended in spite of its linguistic affinities
with both the North (Dutch and Flemish are close variants) and the South (French). This function
initiated a second translation movement, which remained so to speak within the same language and
could be called inter-Belgian interlingual and intralingual translation in and out of French and Flem-
ish. This movement had two basic missions: To export national texts with high cultural value through
interlingual translation and to import foreign texts deemed apt to cover internal weaknesses or “gaps”.
The result of this double, intranational and international, bind is a highly ramified network of
translation directions, completed by transfer directions, which were equally intra- or interlingual,
but used other carriers, such as direct import, reeditions, pirate versions, paraphrases, comments,
summaries, quotations and the like (cf. D’hulst, 2012). Hence, we may distinguish the following
directions, which we deliberately restrain to the realms of law, history and culture:6
a Belgian French originals translated into Flemish (e.g., laws, regulations and public informa-
tion distributed at national, regional and local levels by ministries, provincial governments and
municipalities).
b Belgian French originals translated into German7 (as previously but smaller volumes).
c French originals from France translated into Flemish (for example, the Napoleonic codes).
d Flemish originals translated into French in France and in France (pre-revolutionary customs
and legislation, historical documents, literature, see D’hulst, 2022).
e Belgian French originals translated into German in Belgium (see point a, but small volumes).
Also, one may count in German originals and others in more languages (Latin, Italian) trans-
lated, be it to a far lesser extent, into French or Flemish in Belgium.
As for transfer relations, the earlier directions apply also and are to be completed by the follow-
ing (the list is not exhaustive):
36
f French originals from France reproduced and adapted into Belgian French or Flemish texts
(codes, academic treatises, dictionaries, articles in legal journals).
g Belgian French originals adapted into Flemish (lexical borrowings, loan translations of syntac-
tic units and generic features).
h Flemish originals reproduced and adapted into Flemish editions and translations (lexical bor-
rowings and loan translations from customary law in modern Flemish).
i Dutch originals and translations adapted into modern Flemish (lexical and syntactical borrow-
ings in translations of the Civil Code).
Of course, more is needed to chart all types and modes of transfer relations, to clarify in which
practices and genres they occur and how frequent they are in comparison with translations proper.
In the following paragraphs, the focus will be on three cases of intralingual translation and transfer
relations which highlight attempts to ensure or improve the position of Flemish in the cultural, his-
torical and legal domains, that is, relations between French (France) and French (Belgium), with
regard to other Germanic languages and in relation to its own past.
Between French (France) and French (Belgium)

The annexation of Belgium by France between 1795 and 1815 followed by the renewed imposi-
tion of French as the only official language in 1830 provoked a deep “Frenchification” of Belgian
culture, manners and communication in general and the domain of legal thought, practice and
language in particular (see Martyn, 2011). Yet, Frenchification did not take a single path, nor was
it always accepted without further argument. In the following, I will compare two paths which
illustrate the differences if not oppositions, depending whether translation takes place in Belgium
or between Belgium and France.
Diachronic intralingual translations as a means to provide access to prestigious past writings
were a success story in 19th-century Europe, while also becoming the topic of lengthy debates:
How literal should the rendering be, should one not rather provide direct access to the older lan-
guage, should one limit translational interventions to spelling, morphology, lexicon or syntax,
should significant changes be signalled in notes or in the text, and so on? Clearly, intralingual
translation is an umbrella term to cover a wide range of philological operations, which were
almost always expected to cover additional functions, such as the expression of nationality,
authenticity or literary value. Yet, not all translation practices followed that path. In the legal
domain, both the import of French and Dutch writings in Belgium yielded changes inspired
not by their literary value but by their judicial suitability. Furthermore, the viewpoints on legal
translating in French switched depending on whether the target language was French French or
Belgian French.
A key reference point for 19th-century legal translating into French of Latin and Flemish origi-
nals is the early 18th century, that is, the Treaty of Utrecht (1713–1715), which brought the former
parts of the Netherlands, including the County of Flanders ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs, under
the French crown. As a logical outcome of that treaty, old Flemish customary law had to be inte-
grated into the French law. To that end a translation was made of the Flemish Coutumes et loix des
villes et des chastellenies du Comté de Flandre (Customs and laws of the towns and castellanies
of the County of Flanders, 1719, 3 volumes).
In his letter to the French king, translator Alexandre Le Grand, also solicitor at the Parliament
of Paris and Flanders, argues that the customs and laws of Flanders now belong to a “Famous
37
Lieven D’hulst
nation, which fills a large and beautiful Province, one of the first foundations of the Monarchy of
the Gauls”8 (vol. 1, p. 2). To replace one idiom by another offers nothing but benefits:
Your Majesty will see in it these customs and laws conceived hitherto in a Teutonic idiom,
very narrow-minded, where they have remained as buried, and thereby unknown to other
Nations, even to all of France, to present themselves in crowds at the feet of your Majesty,
feeling, so to speak, the advantage of being transformed, in this book, in a language, which
is that of your Majesty.9
(p. 2)
Although Le Grand’s translation was based on an original deprived of the “beautiful expressions”
(belles expressions) and the “purity” (pureté) of original French, it nevertheless aimed at conserv-
ing the “sentiments” (feelings) and the “genius” (génie) of the Flemish population. Also, it sought
to solve a pragmatic dilemma for administrators and lawyers: Instead of appointing French offic-
ers with some mastery of the source language, these costumes and laws could be accessed “in a
language that would be as easy and almost natural to those who were established members of this
sovereign [French] Tribunal”10 (n.p.).
The translator’s self-praise aims at countering the criticism of Flemish lawyers convinced that
it was impossible to conceive and to render the meaning of the text, even for those whose mother
tongue is that of the text (p. 3). Le Grand also insists on the translation norms he has respected
throughout:
in order not only to render the true meaning and spirit of the texts, but also to render them in
good French terms, in a clear construction, which do not extend or restrict their ideas, either
by the confusion of ambiguous terms in expressions, or by remaining attached too much to
the letter, or by not being attached enough to it.11
(Caveat, n.p.)
In addition, the translations were submitted to Flemish lawyers, who corrected misunderstand-
ings and syntactic errors, replaced or added terms, modified punctuation and adapted the French
version in view of a better fit with the Flemish original, while, conversely, the translator pruned
non-standard French. Still, in a number of cases, the translator felt compelled to borrow or calque
Flemish terms in view of enabling their understanding by those for whom these texts must serve
as a rule (Caveat, n.p.).
This attempt to incorporate Flemish and other provincial sources in French written law did not
result in a homogenous text, on the contrary. The stylistic handling of provincial peculiarities led
the translator to avoid the rendering of words that were deemed too “barbarian” (barbares) for
the French (n.p.), or other terms, which would not give a correct representation of the concepts
signified by these terms (n.p.). Be that as it may, this translation benefited from a Royal Privilege
(Privilège du Roy, 1716), an exclusive authorization to publish this bilingual edition, with notes in
Latin. It was successful enough to be integrated into the Nouveau Coutumier général ou Corps des
coutumes générales et particulières de France (New General Customary or Body of General and
Special Customs of France) (Bourdot de Richebourg, 1724).
But what about the afterlife of this translation, and more importantly, how was it received in
Belgium a century later? In 1846, the Belgian government charged a Royal Commission for the
Old Laws and Ordinances of Belgium (Commission royale des anciennes lois et ordonnances de
Belgique) composed of Belgian lawyers to produce a new French translation of the Coutumes.
38
According to Gheldolf, the editor of the first volume, the French translation by Le Grand could not
be adopted, because it was imperfect (“à cause de son imperfection”, Coutumes des pays et comté
de Flandre, Customs of the county of Flanders, 1868, p. X). And so Belgian French seemed more
apt to translate old Flemish, while the editors’ philological standards required a revision of earlier
Flemish versions that had not faithfully reproduced the spelling of the first original (p. X). The new
edition took the form of a bilingual version Flemish-French, while in a number of cases, medieval
French versions that were already in use were reproduced side by side with the Flemish originals,
but transcribed into modern French. Gheldolf admits that the texts “offer a host of technical and
local terms that are unknown in modern Flemish and which he is unsure of having understood or
translated with exactitude” (p. XI).
And so, it seems, intimate knowledge of the Belgian legal past and philological skills became
the standards set for new translations. Only Belgian lawyers could meet these standards, which
expressed both a resistance against direct French import and an unusual deference toward both
ancient and especially modern Flemish, an “idiom” deprived of any official status as a legal lan-
guage at that time. Philology and patrimonial history are national binding elements. Cultural
belonging overrides adequacy to French language norms in this case.
However, French of France remains the undisputed norm at the time, a dominant one that is
hardly questioned when it comes to views and pragmatic legal practices of the present. In 1831,
the Belgian government adopted the French Code civil (1804), better known by its second version,
the Code Napoléon (1807), without any changes (“even the references to France and the French
Empire remain in the Civil Code”, Possemiers, 2021, p. 207). And it had little interest in soliciting
and divulgating Flemish translations of the Civil Code or of legislative, judicial and doctrinal texts
of French origin. Yet, Flemish lawyers (Lorio, Lecat and others) had already provided private ver-
sions during the French period (1795–1815), while the return to French in 1831 was not accepted
without question in Flanders. Karel Ledeganck was one of the most prominent romantic activists
of the early Flemish movement, which strived to improve the status of Flemish in public life. At
the beginning of the 1840s, he produced a new Flemish translation of the Civil Code meeting a
demand from the wider Flemish language community. But Ledeganck’s work (1841) did not pass
the practical test: Lawyers continued to use the French code, in spite of several reeditions that
amended, commented and enriched the translation.
The French Code Napoléon remained in place, solid as a rock, as the only official text endowed
with legal value (van Gerwen, 2018, 2019). Seemingly, French legal content and verbal expression
were considered as two in one, forged together to the extent that they continued to be the norm of
legal thinking and writing in Belgium12 as elsewhere in Europe and far beyond (Soleil, 2017). And
so, intralingual translation was either confined to small changes in spelling and punctuation13 or to
the status of respectful comment or paraphrase of the official code. Here, legal pragmatism prevailed
over cultural ideology. Nonetheless, in the long run, both enhanced the awareness of translation as
a token of the legal or linguistic inability to produce a text with equal value in the shared language.
Comparative language analysis

In the 19th century, philology spread and popularized models and methods to discover, describe,
edit, translate and print exemplary texts of the past – epic poetry, songs, chronicles, memoirs and
other prestigious texts that belonged to the cradle of nations. It became an important lever in the
construction of national identity with a strong support base in practices like history, linguistics and
literary history. In multilingual nation-states, an additional function appeared: That of legitimizing
a minor language and its culture.
39
Lieven D’hulst
In the Netherlands and Belgium these functions led to an increased interest in the history of
Dutch, comparative linguistics and lexicography (Willemyns, 2013), while intralingual transla-
tion turned into an efficient philological instrument: As an indispensable device in the writing of
dictionaries such as the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal (Dictionary of the Dutch language,
1864 ff.), the Middelnederlandsch Woordenboek (Dictionary of Middle Dutch, 1885 ff.) and
numerous technical and legal dictionaries, as well as an occasional metalinguistic tool employed
in footnotes and glossaries of historical studies, editions or language studies.
Comparative linguistics of the early 19th century may be described as “a mixture of (proto)
typological work, of studies belonging within historical-comparative grammar, glottogenetic
speculations, and wide-ranging genealogical classifications” (Swiggers, 2011, p. 806). The his-
torical-comparative bias was well represented by the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz
Bopp, the brothers Grimm and others, and was picked up later on by linguists in the Netherlands
and Belgium, one of whom was Pierre Lebrocquy, a professor of Germanic languages at Ghent
University and an activist in favour of Flemish as a central type of the Indo-Germanic language
family. Lebrocquy was perfectly aware of the gap between the past and the present, that is,
between the former centrality and the present marginality of the same language. But how did
he attempt to bridge the gap? By arguing that the study of Flemish antiquity was an asset for
the recognition of its overall value and, more specifically, might dispel prejudices and foster the
study of other Germanic languages. In his Analogies linguistiques (1845), which earned him his
chair at the university of Ghent, Lebrocquy addresses, in an unusually explicit way, three groups
of readers:
We first and foremost address those Flemish Belgians, who, still slaves to old prejudices,
persist in ignoring the language of their fathers, and who, for sure, would never open a book
written in the disdained idiom.
We then address the Walloon Belgians who falsely imagine that the knowledge of the
language of their compatriots could only serve them to converse with the proletarians and
peasants of three or four provinces of the Kingdom.
Finally, we address here the French themselves and the inhabitants of southern Europe
in general. If it happens that some of them read our work, they will have the opportunity to
convince themselves that as soon as we have taken the trouble to learn a single language of
Teutonic origin, we can in a very short time acquire the intelligence of all the others. A very
simple truth, but of which we are not sufficiently penetrated in France, where the idioms of
the North, although less neglected than in the past, are still only the subject of a superficial
study.14
(Lebrocquy, 1845, p. VI)
The comparative approach allows Lebrocquy to foreground common aspects of the Teutonic lan-
guages, a term also used in the singular to designate Flemish.15 He deliberately avoids the use of
the concept “translation” because it would imply a kind of loss as with the translation from Flem-
ish into French (p. 59). Translation between languages considered similar or belonging to the same
family serves little purpose because it suggests difference when there is identity:
What is the point of placing other words next to German words that differ only in small
spelling changes? We will simply translate in parentheses some terms that are not part of the
usual vocabulary of Flemish.16
(Lebrocquy, 1845, p. 154)
40
Lebrocquy exhibits a similar reluctance with regard to notes explaining divergent spelling
or meaning of dialects of the same language; samples of ancient German dialects are quoted
without comments, and it will suffice to explain from time to time a word disguised under
an outdated spelling to make reading easier (Lebrocquy, 1845, p. 59). Ancient Flemish being
superior in many respects to modern Flemish, the past should be rendered as it was, without
any mediation:
This eighth-century Flemish language is remarkably beautiful. We have to envy especially

its harmonious sweetness, then the richness of its inflections and its grammatical forms. In
this double respect, Flemish arouses astonishment and admiration. Its grammar seems to
approach the perfection of classical languages. Then, what abundance and what a happy use
of vowels! the most pleasant, the purest resonate at the end of almost all words. . . . Really,
if Flemish, in its later culture, had retained these precious qualities; if, to the rich develop-
ments of derivation received since, it had united the treasure of ancient harmony and the
benefits of its first grammatical resources, we would today be in possession of the most
beautiful and perfect language of Europe and perhaps of the world. Unfortunately, this was
not the case.17
(p. 54)
The editor makes his argument more vivid by presenting samples of records or charters of the
13th and 14th centuries, written in the Teutonic dialects or idioms of Holland, Flanders, Brabant,
Guelders, Aachen, Cologne, Kleve, Wesel, Heinsberg, Westphalia, Magdeburg, Brandenburg and
Mecklenburg.
Clearly, Lebrocquy adheres to a philological tradition which loosely combines language his-
tory, text commentary and cultural history, while soliciting the seriousness of upcoming historical
linguistics. But all means serve the same goal: The promotion of Flemish and the resistance against
translation and in particular against the dominance exerted by official translation against which
Flemish activism had started to react (Nouws, 2019). Unfortunately, in spite of his seemingly
conciliant use of French to analyse the history of Flemish, Lebrocquy’s reputation as an activist
cut short his university career, his appointment not being confirmed by Prime Minister Charles
Rogier in 1847.
The leverage of past Flemish patrimony

From 1830 onwards, the newly formed state of Belgium was compelled to redefine its relations
with neighbours whose political hegemony it had rejected, yet all the while still undergoing their
intellectual and cultural influence: Firstly, France, and secondly, the Netherlands. At the same
time, institutions, officials, mediators in all domains as well as language users had to find a balance
between the two national languages, within and beyond the public and official sphere. The cultural
past offered an almost inexhaustible source of knowledge, texts and other artefacts which could
act as leverage for a better recognition of Flemish in Belgium.
A great number of Middle Dutch literary monuments (Beatrijs, Karel ende Elegast, Reinaert de
vos, many courtly romances, folk songs, etc.) were rediscovered, edited and translated in the 19th
century, not least by official cultural mediators aiming at the promotion of Belgium as a viable
and prestigious nation in spite of its inner division, but also by Flemish activists who nurtured the
ambition to restore the position of Flemish and place it on a par with French. Most mediators bear
trace of this dilemma, by choosing one of two ways: The first consists of translating the Flemish
41
Lieven D’hulst
original into modern French, the second of editing that original (in some cases supplementing the
edition by an intralingual version in modern Flemish).
But both remain deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, translating Flemish fits the realm of phi-
lology and turns the language into a historical object of study rather than a practice to be defended,
learned and used in the present. This is the position taken by Flemish translator Jules de Saint-
Genois in the introduction of his translation of Charles et Elegast, ancien roman en vers (1836):
The Flemish language has not always been, as it is today, disdained, almost relegated to the
countryside and the lower classes. . . . May this pale translation make known how many
works our old Flemish literature has that deserve to be studied.18
(p. 27)
Translating is also a token of nationality, but outwardly oriented, as a way to make Belgium
participate in emergent international philology, following the Germans, the English and espe-
cially the Dutch who have long studied the Flemish language and its literary achievements
(pp. II–III).
On the other hand, the promotion of nationality was also shaped by text editions with occa-
sional intralingual and interlingual translations and bilingual passages as a matter of compromise.
For instance, the Belgian government founded in 1834 a Royal Historical Commission (Commis-
sion royale d’histoire) with the aim of researching and updating previously unpublished Belgian
chronicles.19 Flemish activist Jan Frans Willems was one of the first contributors and provided an
annotated Flemish edition of a medieval chronicle by Jan van Heelu’s Slag van Woeringen20 (Wil-
lems, 1835). Curiously, though, the edition received two covers (in French and Flemish), while
Willems’s introduction was in French only, expressing the kind of compromise that must have
emerged after long discussions.
Flemish activists concurrently launched private editorial initiatives, one of the first being once
again Willems who, in 1837, started up a Belgisch museum voor de Nederduitsche tael- en let
terkunde en de geschiedenis des Vaderlands uitgegeven op last der Maetschappy tot bevordering
der Nederduitsche Tael- en Letterkunde21 (1837). This museum aimed at drawing the attention of
Belgian citizens to both the inner excellence of their mother tongue and the memorials of their his-
tory and literature (1837, p. 6). French was neither the sole nor the privileged carrier of medieval
Flemish texts, while editing also contributed to the methodical and scientific study of language.
In the museum, essays and editions alternate, while intralingual translations of medieval texts in
verse and prose are confined to fragments in footnotes. By contrast, full translations of the parable
of the prodigal son in the Brussels, Ghent and Antwerp dialects act as leverage for the scientific or
“linguistic” approach toward the history of Flemish.22
This vast endeavour bears witness to an almost frantic search for textual proof of national
grandeur, a search which features the early phase of creating patrimonial repositories of the past.
It resulted in real patchworks of genres (biographies, anecdotes, rhymed sayings and proverbs,
but also modern poetry with a national or historical bias) and mixed use of techniques of editing,
translating and commenting.
In addition to the preceding examples, intermedial translation or transfer modalities deserve
mention, especially when manuscripts are transformed into print, as with the Kronyk van Vlaen
deren (Chronicle of Flanders), a 15th-century document edited by Serrure and Blommaert in 1839
with the aim of counterbalancing the common French image of Burgundian Flanders depicted
by Froissart, Monstrelet and Commynes in their chronicles and memoirs: An image in which
the just fight of freedom by the Flemings was presented as an act of rebellion and mutiny. Sound
42
historiography should base on autochthonous sources adequately rendered in print (p. xviii). The
editorial undertaking is supported by the “Maetschappy der Vlaemsche Bibliophilen” (Society of
Flemish Bibliophiles) who issued a range of medieval texts on a private basis, as a supplement to
the limited number of official initiatives and taking into account the vast amount of manuscripts
material waiting in the archives. The editors provide literal transcriptions but no explanatory foot-
notes, which reduces readability for those with little philological expertise. However, a table of
contents at the end of the volume transcribes the chapter titles in modern Flemish, while a lengthy
glossary of obsolete words offers intralingual translation in modern Flemish.
Yet, this should not make us forget that other and larger parts of the population, including those
without reading skills, are taken into account by private agents, with different aims and using
different techniques. Popular narrative and folk songs with roots in the medieval past find their
way into reeditions frequently with a wide distribution. In fact, this tradition of cheap books and
booklets simply pursued a longer tradition of collecting, anthologizing and adapting oral tales and
written narratives, some of which fitted Herderian national projects, such as the ones by Grimm or
Andersen, or those whose disputed origin became the occasion to defend fiercely cultural rights (as
happened for example with the Roman de Renard claimed by the French and Flemish, see D’hulst,
2014, p. 151 ff; Leerssen, 2006, pp. 75–95).
Increased accessibility was not only achieved through the transfer from manuscript to print, and
from learned to popular versions of folk songs (D’hulst, 2018), but also by conserving traces of
orality as with Lootens’s Oude Kindervertelsels in den Brugschen tongval (Old tales for children
in the dialect of Bruges, 1868). In his preface, anthologist Lootens discusses two options offered
to the editor of folktales for children:
Our publication could have been carried out in a double way; one could, following the
example of Grimm, have conveyed a single story in the original dialect and all the others in
the ordinary written language, without changing anything about their childlike simplicity;
but we were also free to spend all in the spoken accent, and it is the last way we have chosen,
for good reasons.23
(n.p.)
Once again, the acknowledged prestige of the language justified the literal rendering of the oral
tales registered, while the threat of corruption of its purity if not its oblivion is an equally strong
argument.24
Conclusion
Language exchanges within Belgium and between Belgium and its neighbouring countries evoke
the image of a railway network ensuring two-way and even multi-directional traffic between
smaller and larger geographical poles, with varying frequencies in time and number of travelling
persons and objects. But as always, metaphors do not capture the whole of reality: While it is use-
ful to see the different types of exchanges (or translation and transfer modalities) and their multiple
directions as a network that covers an entire nation and even extends beyond, trains have other
functions than translations and transfer modalities, and translations and transfer modalities are
first and foremost interconnected but non-identical discursive operations inviting a more germane
approach.
Intralingual translation as presented in this chapter was a method deployed by an emerging
philology, with the support of public and private institutions and pervading the legal, language and
43
Lieven D’hulst
literary domains. It had two aims. On the one hand, highbrow intralingual translation sustained
the knowledge and hence awareness of Flemish as a legal language with potential and ambition,
as well as the knowledge and awareness of the longstanding history of Flemish and its prestigious
cultural patrimony. On the other hand, popular intralingual translation rendered a wider repertoire
of national texts in Flemish accessible to a larger number of people and by that token sustained the
idea of double group cohesion, of Belgium and Flanders. These two practices evolved differently,
sometimes partially merging over a rather long period of time.
The historical study of intralingual translation should not only nurture the ambition to lay bare
the wide array of translation and transfer practices that coexist and interact over a longer period of
time, but also aim at answering whether the functions carried by intralingual translation are cognate
to those of other translation and transfer practices. This way one may hope to come closer to the
main ambition of translation history, that is, to contribute to understanding how culture evolves, a
process that cannot be metonymically pinned down to items such as literary genres, movements,
language forms, ideas and ideologies, in which immediate and conspicuous changes are deemed
more important because they are more visible. Slower changes and continuities stretching over
longer periods are less visible and often more influential.
At this point, one may venture to say that while the history of Flemish emancipation has long
been considered as a linguistic, cultural, social and political struggle, it has also been a struggle
against translation and adjacent transfer modalities that interposed between the direct and unre-
stricted use of Flemish as an autonomous language. To unravel the underlying forces of this evolu-
tion, the meanderings of its unfolding (including downturns and unpredictable turns), the “messy”,
unsystematic if not inconsistent nature of the views, definitions and practices that went with it are
at the very heart of translational evolution. It is time to acknowledge the need to move beyond
oversimple statements about the nature and function of past translations: This is perhaps the main
lesson of historical research.
To end on a more general note: The debates on the nature of equivalence, the binarity of
source-target relations or the construction of the original through the many means offered by
cross-lingual transpositions have helped to “dethrone” both translation and its source in favour
of an enriched understanding of both as being interrelated and mutually determined carriers of
cultural exchanges.
Notes
1 Historical metalanguage needs proper consideration, as convincingly argued by A. Pym (2021).
2 See also the concept of textual “transformissions” (among others, Coldiron, 2019) applied to the early
modern period.
3 For a historical overview, see among others, Witte and Van Velthoven (1998).
4 Original: L’emploi des langues usitées en Belgique est facultatif: il ne peut être réglé que par la loi, et
seulement pour les actes de l’autorité publique et pour les affaires judiciaires. (All translations are mine
unless stated otherwise.)
5 It should be noted accessorily that since the early years of independence, the Belgian market remained
feebly structured, notably in comparison with the French (Durand and Winkin, 1999).
6 For a more detailed presentation, see D’hulst and van Gerwen (2018).
7 The German-speaking area represented less than 1% of the population.
8 Original: Nation célèbre, qui remplit une grande et belle Province, l’un des premiers fondements de la
Monarchie des Gaules.
9 Original: Votre Majesté y verra ces coutumes et ces loix conçues jusqu’à présent dans une [sic] idiome
teutonique, fort borné, où elles sont demeurées comme ensevelies, et par là, inconnues aux autres Nations,
44
même à toute la France, se présenter en foule aux pieds de votre Majesté, se ressentant, pour ainsi dire, de
l’avantage d’être transformées, dans ce livre, en une langue, qui est celle de votre Majesté.
10 Original: dans une langue qui fût facile et devenue presque naturelle à ceux qui ont été établis membres
de ce souverain [French] Tribunal.
11 Original: afin de rendre non seulement le vray sens et l’esprit des textes, mais encore de les rendre en bon
termes français, dans une construction nette, qui n’en étendissent ou n’en restreignent pas les idées, soit
par la confusion des termes ambigus dans les expressions, soit en s’attachant trop à la lettre, ou en ne s’y
attachant pas assez.
12 “Belgium has remained very faithful to the French Code civil, in fact, even more faithful than France,
many changes only being made after France had already led the way” (Heirbaut, 2004, p. 228). This helps
to explain why the Civil Code has been fully “Belgified” only recently, i.e., in 2020.
13 As ironically noted by Heirbaut: “the 1807 text of the Code civil has been changed by commercial editors
to bring its language and punctuation more into line with current practice. Hence réglemens has become
règlements, paiement was replaced by payement and so on. For punctuation the most remarkable change
is that the comma before an enumeration has been replaced by a colon” (2004, p. 221).
14 Original: Nous nous adressons d’abord et surtout à ceux des Belges flamands, qui, encore esclaves d’anciens
préjugés, s’obstinent à méconnaître la langue de leurs pères, et qui, à coup sûr, n’ouvriraient jamais un livre
écrit dans l’idiome dédaigné. Nous nous adressons ensuite aux Belges wallons qui s’imaginent faussement
que la connaissance de la langue de leurs compatriotes ne pourrait leur servir qu’à converser avec les pro-
létaires et les paysans de trois ou quatre provinces du royaume. Nous nous adressons enfin aux Français
eux-mêmes et aux habitants de l’Europe méridionale en général. S’il arrive que quelques-uns d’entre eux
lisent notre travail, ils auront l’occasion de se convaincre que dès qu’on s’est donné la peine d’apprendre
une seule langue d’origine teutonique, on peut en fort peu de temps acquérir l’intelligence de toutes les
autres; vérité bien simple, mais dont on n’est pas assez pénétré en France, où les idiomes du Nord, quoique
moins négligés qu’autrefois, ne sont cependant encore que l’objet d’une étude superficielle.
15 See previous section.
16 Original: à quoi bon continuer à placer en regard de mots allemands d’autres mots qui n’en diffèrent
que par de minimes changements d’orthographe? Nous nous contenterons de traduire entre parenthèses
quelques termes qui ne font point partie du vocabulaire usuel du flamand.
17 Original: Cette langue flamande du huitième siècle est remarquablement belle. Nous avons à lui envier
surtout son harmonieuse douceur, puis la richesse de ses inflexions et de ses formes grammaticales. Sous
ce double rapport, elle excite l’étonnement et l’admiration. Sa grammaire paraît approcher de la perfection
des langues classiques. Ensuite, quelle abondance et quel heureux emploi de voyelles! les plus agréables,
les plus pures résonnent à la fin de presque tous les mots. . . . Vraiment, si le flamand, dans sa culture ul-
térieure, avait conservé ces précieuses qualités; si, aux riches développements de dérivation qu’il a reçus
depuis, il avait uni le trésor de son ancienne harmonie et les avantages de ses premières ressources gram-
maticales, nous serions aujourd’hui en possession de la langue la plus belle et la plus parfaite de l’Europe
et peut-être du monde. Malheureusement il n’en fut pas ainsi.
18 Original: La langue flamande n’a pas toujours été, comme aujourd’hui, dédaignée, presque reléguée dans
les campagnes et les classes inférieures. . . . Puisse cette pâle traduction faire connaître combien notre
vieille littérature flamande possède d’œuvres qui méritent d’être étudiées.
19 For more details, see D’hulst (2022).
20 Battle of Woeringen.
21 Translation: Belgian Museum of Low German Language and Literature and the History of the Homeland
published by order of the Society for the promotion of Low German Language and Literature.
22 Another private initiative was the successor of the Belgisch Museum (Belgian Museum) relabelled as the
Vaderlandsch Museum voor Nederduitsche Letterkunde, Oudheid en Geschiedenis (Patriotic Museum of
Low German Literature, Antiquity and History, 1855), edited by the same Serrure.
23 Original: Onze uitgave kon op eene dubbele wijze geschieden; men kon, volgens het voorbeeld van
Grimm, een enkel verhaal in den oorspronkelijken tongval en al de andere in de gewone schrijftaal over-
brengen, zonder eventwel iets aan hunne kinderlijke eenvoudigheid te veranderen; doch ons stond ook
vrij allen in den gesprokenen tongval uit te geven, en het is de laatste wijze, die wij, om goede redenen,
verkozen hebben.
24 For the non-local reader, Lootens adds footnotes and comments on phonetic and morphological features
of the dialect of Bruges.
45
Lieven D’hulst
Further reading
Bell, D. A. (2001). The cult of the nation: Inventing nationalism, 1680–1800. Harvard University Press.
Cohen, P. (2021). The translation state. Linguistic governmentality as language politics in early modern
France. In C. Rundle (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of translation history (pp. 155–172). Routledge.
McCain, S. (2018). The language question under Napoleon. Palgrave Macmillan.
References
Bourdot de Richebourg, C. A. (1724). Nouveau Coutumier général ou Corps des coutumes générales et par
ticulières de France. Michel Brunet, t. I.
Charles et Elegast. (1836). Ancien roman en vers, traduit du flamand par Jules de Saint-Genois. L. Hebbelynck.
Coldiron, A. E. B. (2019). Translation and transformission; or, early modernity in motion. Canadian Review
of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 46(2), 205–216. https://doi.
org/10.1353/crc.2019.0018
Coutumes des pays et comté de Flandre par A. E. Gheldolf. (1868). Vol. 1. Gobbaerts.
Coutumes et loix des villes et des chastellenies du Comté de Flandre. (1719). Traduites en françois . . . par
Mr. Le Grand, avocat aux Parlements de Paris et de Flandre. 3 vols. Nicolas-Joseph Douilliez.
D’hulst, L. (1995). Anthologies of French medieval literature (1756–1816): Between translating and editing.
In H. Kittel (Ed.), International anthologies of literature in translation (pp. 1–14). Erich Schmidt.
D’hulst, L. (2012). (Re)locating translation history: From assumed translation to assumed transfer. Transla
tion Studies, 5(2), 139–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2012.663597
D’hulst, L. (2014). Essais d’histoire de la traduction. Avatars de Janus. Classiques Garnier.
D’hulst, L. (2018). Mediating Flemish folk songs across cultural borders during the 19th century: From patrimo-
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glers? Literary translation and cultural mediators in peripheral cultures (pp. 235–262). Palgrave Macmillan.
D’hulst, L. (2022, June 14). Œuvrer à la gloire nationale: Traductions interlinguales et intralinguales des
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47
3
PINKELTJE REMAINS
PINKELTJE
Intralingual translations of a
Dutch children’s icon
Elke Brems
Introduction
“I hope that my version will boost the popularity of Pinkeltje. . . . I consider it cultural heritage. . .
there is no child in the Netherlands that has not ever read a book about Pinkeltje” (Kuipers &
Smeets, 1996, p. 41).1 This is how Suzanne Braam legitimizes her rewriting of one of the most
well-known children’s book series in the Netherlands. It is cultural heritage and therefore deserves
to be “boosted”. But further on in the same interview, she also says that she would never do that for
adult literature: “I wouldn’t dare, who am I to do such a thing?” (Kuipers & Smeets, 1996, p. 42).2
Rewriting, or intralingual translation, is presented as more acceptable and even necessary for chil-
dren’s literature, whereas it is unacceptable for adult literature. In this chapter I will investigate the
practice of intralingual translation in children’s literature, using the Pinkeltje books as an example.
Studying intralingual translation

In an article in which she tries to put intralingual translation (back) on the map of translation
studies, Karen Korning Zethsen lists “the main factors that seem to be influential in intralingual
translation (and at the same time, the very reasons for the existence of intralingual translation)”
(Zethsen, 2009, p. 5). These factors are knowledge, time, culture, and space. Regarding the first
factor, knowledge, she points out that the knowledge of a certain target audience may be insuf-
ficient to understand a source text in its own language and that the text must therefore be rewritten.
In Dutch-speaking Belgium (Flanders), for example, there is the newspaper called Wablieft for
people with reading difficulties or people who are learning Dutch, in which “normal” newspaper
articles are reformulated at language level A2 to B1 of the Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages (CEFR). In fact, “knowledge” is also related to the following two factors
mentioned by Zethsen. The factor “time” is designed to encompass the fact that a source text was
written in an older variety of an original language that is difficult to understand nowadays. For
example, when students of Dutch have to read the 13th-century Reynard the Fox, a story written
in Middle Dutch, they are often given an intralingually translated, modernized version alongside
it. So, this also concerns a lack of “knowledge”. The same applies to the factor “culture”: The
readers of the target text do not understand certain cultural references in the source text, so these
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-5 48
Pinkeltje remains Pinkeltje
have to be translated intralingually. For example, an album of the Belgian Dutch-language comic
Suske & Wiske may undergo changes for a Dutch-speaking readership in the Netherlands. Thus,
the place name Grote Markt in Brussels becomes Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. After all,
the children who read these albums in the Netherlands are not familiar with the Grote Markt in
Brussels. “Space”, the fourth factor mentioned by Zethsen, has to do with the length of the target
text in relation to the source text: This involves shortening or (less frequently) expanding a source
text. This often happens in journalism, for example, where press releases can be either lengthened
or shortened.
In an article on intralingual translation between Dutch-speaking Belgium and the Netherlands –
two areas where Dutch is spoken, Brems (2017) identified a fifth factor, which she termed cul-
tural politics. The article discusses cases of translation between Flanders and the Netherlands that
involve power relations between the two regions. The article concluded that linguistic and transla-
tion norms are inextricably linked with cultural hierarchy and power relations and that studying
intralingual translation flows within one language can reveal how power relations become mani-
fest and how identity and alterity are fostered (see also, e.g., Berk Albachten, 2013, for Turkish and
Longinovic, 2011, for Serbo-Croatian). Translation can thus serve to draw boundaries and alienate
the other within the same language area. These five “reasons for the existence of intralingual
translation” (Zethsen, 2009, p. 5) can no doubt be further expanded when more cases are studied.
Case studies enrich, nuance, and refine categorizations as much as categorizations help us to find
patterns and similarities among case studies.
When one conducts a case study on intralingual translation, several aspects of that specific case
can be studied. Here, I propose a list of eight aspects of intralingual translations to be taken into
account (partly based on Brems, 2017). Studying these aspects might help to clarify which of the
five factors previously mentioned were influential in the creation of this translation, and therefore
why the translation was considered useful or necessary. It might even add more factors. The list
of eight aspects to be studied has two important limitations: It is an incomplete list that allows for
more aspects to be included. It must also be noted that not all aspects are relevant in any given
case.
1 Direction of the translation. Which language variety finds it necessary to translate the other and
does it also happen in the other direction? This may indicate hierarchies between the varieties
of a language.
2 Field. In which field does intralingual translation take place, and do all societal domains use it? For
example, intralingual translation is sometimes used on television but not in the political domain.
3 Medium/Genre. Intralingual translation may happen more often in spoken language than in
written language, or in cartoons more often than in books.
4 Stakeholders. Either individuals or institutions may be involved in the initiating, carrying out,
and officializing an intralingual translation process.
5 Paratexts. Texts surrounding the actual translation can help to contextualize an intralingual
translation. For books, for example, it may be useful to study prefaces, footnotes, and blurbs in
the book or interviews and book trailers outside the book.
6 Illustrations. Are the illustrations “replaced” or are they retained? What does that tell us about
pictorial norms and traditions? Next to illustrations, other elements of “material text” can be
studied. Pillière states, “to consider merely the textual transformations, the linguistic features,
would be to neglect the contribution made by the other participants in the enterprise” (Pillière,
2021, p. 6). She stresses the importance of studying the “repackaging” of the text and shows
how elements such as covers and illustrations are also part of intralingual translation.
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Elke Brems
7 Reception. How do people react to it? On Mugglenet.com, for example, American readers
reacted furiously to the fact that the American version of the Harry Potter books had been
adapted for the American readership: “As a US reader, I hated that a separate version had to be
put out for us. It makes me cringe every time I see ‘Sorcerer’s Stone’ instead of ‘Philosopher’s
Stone.’ In my opinion, the books should have been left alone and the US readers made to figure
out the differences. . . . Why would I want to read a bastardized version of the story?” (Mug-
glenet.com).
8 Translation shifts. This comprises a comparison between source and target text: What changes
in translation and what remains the same?
In the case study set out here I will mainly focus on six of the eight aspects: Stakeholders, paratexts,
illustrations, reception, translation shifts, and genre. Direction and field are less relevant here.
Retelling children’s literature

The present case study is drawn from the genre of children’s literature, a genre known for its
frequent adaptations of source texts (Desmet, 2007, p. 78). Stephens and McCallum (1998, p. 3)
compare the genre to “general literature” and notice a much larger portion of stories that are being
retold in literature produced for children. These retellings take all kinds of forms (rewritings, trans-
lations, retranslations, transpositions, adaptations, reinterpretations) and occur in different media
settings, from cinema to video applications (Douglas & Cabaret, 2014, pp. 327–328). Within the
genre of children’s literature, fairy tales and children’s classics seem most likely to be retold. The
reason for this common practice of tailoring source texts is “the perceived experience and require-
ments of the child reader in the target culture” (Lathey, 2012, p. 196). The source text must be
adapted to the image that the adult translator has of the “contemporary child”: What do the chil-
dren know, what do they need to know, which knowledge is not fit for children? This child image
is not individual or particular but is embedded in the values and expectations related to childhood
in the target culture. Adult translators mediate between the child image of the source and target
cultures if they differ.
Attuning a translation to the child image of a particular target culture is important because for
children, reading is often considered to be a socialization process (both as readers and as citizens).
Writing for children aims to introduce readers into the society and culture in which they grow up
and are expected to function (Geerts & Van den Bossche, 2014, p. 7). So, the mediation of liter-
ary texts (in the form of retelling) is considered more legitimate and even desirable for children
than for adults because children’s literature has to prepare children for their future role in society.
Each time a text intended for children enters a new context, its social and moral values need to
be tailored to suit the “supposedly malleable younger generation” (Douglas & Cabaret, 2014,
p. 17); otherwise, the process of socialization cannot take place. Intralingual translation is one of
those mediation processes that help literary texts for children to serve the purpose of socializa-
tion if norms and values change within the same language and/or culture. So, regarding children’s
literature, a sixth factor that is influential in the creation of an intralingual translation comes into
play: Shifting norms and values. This plays an important role in the Pinkeltje case study, as will
be shown.
A further complication is brought to the fore by Geerts and Van den Bossche when they rightly
stress that retellings are not just about changing things, but also about preserving, conserving, and
giving a new life to texts: “Retellings can simultaneously express a preoccupation with the pres-
ervation of a traditional text and the need for revising the very tradition it adheres to” (2014, p. 8).
50
Paradoxically, this means that intralingual translation can serve the purpose of resisting change
instead of implementing it. Preservation may hence be a seventh factor, or “reason for the exist-
ence of intralingual translation”. Commercial interests sometimes accompany the need for preser-
vation, as the following case study will show.
Pinkeltje
A year before the outbreak of the Second World War, filmmaker and children’s book author Dick
Laan (1895–1973) published his first book for pre-school children, De avonturen van Pinkeltje
(The Adventures of Little Pinkel/Pinkeltje, 1939).3 A reprint was only made after the war (1948);
its appearance was however not appealing because only thin grey paper was available for produc-
ing books at the time. But after a second book, Pinkeltje en zijn vrienden (Pinkeltje and his friends,
1949), the rise of Pinkeltje was unstoppable. New adventures of the Pinkel family followed year
after year, and old volumes were reprinted numerous times (Duijx & Linders, 1991, pp. 80–85).
All Pinkeltje stories have a similar narrative structure, with a plot in which coincidence plays
a major role. The little old man Pinkeltje invariably gets into trouble somewhere in the story. He
falls out of a tree, lands in a snowball, sinks up to his arms in an “oliebol”, almost drowns in the
treacle pot, but is saved just in time by his friends. The Pinkeltje stories are set partly in the world
of grown-ups and partly in a gnome kingdom of their own. The latter world is a combination of
fairy-tale elements (king, castle, court) and elements from modern life (telephones, cars, cafés).
Pinkeltje usually acts as an aide to the authority (king Pinkelpracht). By the end of the book, Pin-
keltje has often solved a riddle or put right a wrong. In the ninth book, Pinkeltje en de flonkersteen
(Pinkeltje and the sparkle stone, 1957), Pinkeltje finds himself a wife, Pinkelotje, the epitome of
a docile and caring partner.
Pinkeltje’s immense popularity did not go unnoticed in the press. In 1970, the newspaper
Nieuws-blad van het Noorden wrote: “Tens of thousands of children cannot sleep at night if Mummy
or Daddy has not read to them from Pinkeltje.”4 Frank de Glas (1996) notes in a very critical arti-
cle that it was a blessing for publisher Holkema & Warendorff to have such a steady seller in its
publication list. “Despite the completely outdated nature of Laan’s work, despite the fact that he is
ignored by the leading children’s book critics, the income from his continuing books contributes
greatly to the publisher’s financial strength” (1996, p. 40).5 Twenty-nine volumes have appeared
in a print run of almost three million copies (four were published posthumously). The books were
translated into English, German, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, and Icelandic.
Pinkeltje became the object of the first great wave of merchandising in the Netherlands, including
placemats, bibs, glasses, puzzles, postcards, gifts, colouring competitions, chocolate bars, and the
like (Duijx & Linders, 1991, p. 84).
Although Pinkeltje remained very popular with its readers, its success in critical reception
soon waned. Duijx and Linders describe the evolving reception of the Pinkeltje books. Initially,
the Pinkeltje stories were praised for their appeal to children’s imagination and the inexhaustible
fantasy of Dick Laan. The stories were considered entertaining, educational, and instructive. But
this reception slowly turned more critical. In 1961 De Groene Amsterdammer wrote: “We have
had enough and there should be no more Pinkeltjes, if only because the good impressions from the
beginning are in danger of being wiped out.” In 1963, Miep Diekmann warned against the danger
of rigidity in the thirteenth volume Pinkeltje en de parels (Pinkeltje and the pearls): “The author
evidently concentrates more on finding ever new situations than on outlining the characteristics of
his Pinkeltje character more clearly.” Other reviewers objected to the omnipresence of Mr. Dick
Laan in the stories and to his simple style (Duijx & Linders, 1991, p. 83).6 In 1971, in the feminist
51
Elke Brems
magazine Sextant, Woosje Wasser rejected Dick Laan’s derogatory treatment of women. She criti-
cized the fact that the women in the series remained nameless, that they were always busy baking
biscuits, making pudding, or embroidering (Duijx & Linders, 1991, p. 83).
In their history of children’s literature in Flanders and the Netherlands, Harry Bekkering, Netty
Heimeriks, and Willem van Toorn strongly criticize the series. According to them, Pinkeltje shows
resemblances to fairy tales but without the solid structure of that genre. Moreover, they claim
Pinkeltje is too straightforward and does not make the connection between the child reader and
the story world. The books lack suspense and are written in a very simple way. “It is all about the
nice world that takes place at knee level, with woolly animals and oh, so scary adventures that
fortunately always end well, but otherwise there is nothing interesting to note” (Bekkering et al.,
1989, p. 427).7
Retelling Pinkeltje
Yet all this sharp criticism did not prevent Pinkeltje from being popular. In 1982, the publisher
Holkema & Warendorff decided to have children’s book author Corrie Hafkamp and illustrator
Dagmar Stam adapt the Pinkeltje series. The duo produced 29 picture books. Their stories are
much shorter, they use the same characters, but otherwise differ too much from the “originals”
to be called intralingual translations. The covers read “Based on an idea by Dick Laan”8 and the
names of Hafkamp and Stam are very clearly stated: “Written by Corrie Hafkamp” and “drawn
by Dagmar Stam”. The series ran until 1989. By then, the publisher had conceived of the idea of
producing an intralingual translation of Dick Laan’s 29 original books. The intralingual transla-
tor assigned to do the job was Suzanne Braam. Between 1995 and 1999, she translated all Dick
Laan’s Pinkeltje books. It is these versions, and not those of Dick Laan, that have been reprinted
since and have thus replaced the original works in bookshops and libraries. Unlike the books by
Hafkamp and Stam, the cover of these books mentions Dick Laan as the author. Inside the books,
written in small letters, however, is the following: “Adapted by Suzanne Braam with drawings by
Julius Ros”. As mentioned earlier, retellings are intended not only to revise older stories, but also
to preserve them. That is indeed the case with these intralingual translations. The publisher did
not want to let go of Pinkeltje; he was still too popular and lucrative. But an update was needed.
Besides the text, the layout was also in need of renewal. There was discussion at the publish-
ers as to whether the yellow covers and the drawn appearance of Pinkeltje with which the readers
were familiar should be retained (Kuipers & Smeets, 1996, p. 41). After all, as a publisher, they
were capitalizing on the familiarity of the series among parents, who ultimately buy the books. But
it was decided to renew the appearance of the books by using colourful, richly illustrated covers,
and a new illustrator, Julius Ros, gave an entirely different, more modern look to Pinkeltje and the
other characters.
This was not Suzanne Braam’s first attempt at translation. She had already made new transla-
tions of the stories of Karl May and Selma Lagerlöf’s Nils Holgersson, among others. She had
also translated other books originally written in Dutch, such as Dik Trom by C. Joh. Kieviet. She
had thus acquired extensive expertise as an (intralingual) translator, and she also expressed that
expertise publicly by legitimizing and explaining her translation practice. In an interview in Vooys,
Braam notes that it is usually the parents who buy Pinkeltje books, often out of nostalgia, but that
they soon realize that the books are now terribly old-fashioned. She claims that the old text of
Pinkeltje had become indigestible for contemporary children, especially when you read them out
loud “you can hardly believe your ears” (Kuipers & Smeets, 1996, p. 39).9 Nevertheless, Braam
follows Dick Laan’s books sentence by sentence: “I try to keep Dick Laan’s style intact as much
52
as possible. He wrote it, he invented it. To do justice to that writer, I follow the text line by line,
very conscientiously” (Kuipers & Smeets, 1996, p. 39).10 Indeed, she usually does so, although
sometimes she leaves out passages. For example, she notes herself that she thinks Pinkeltje cries
too much for a grown man with a little beard, so she deleted some of those passages (Kuipers &
Smeets, 1996, p. 39).11
It is indeed striking, when you compare the source and target texts, to note that Braam usually
follows Laan sentence by sentence. But it is equally striking to note that changes have occurred in
every single sentence: None of the sentences are identical to the source text.
Translation shifts
The eighth aspect I mentioned that is worth pursuing when studying a case of intralingual trans-
lation is a comparison of source and target text. This involves reading both texts in detail and
mapping the differences. Many models are available for studying translation shifts in detail;
among those most commonly used are Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) and Chesterman (1997).
The most basic model used to compare source and target text (both words and images) draws
on the rhetorical concepts repetitio, adiectio, detractio, transmutatio, substitutio, and deletio
(see also Delabastita, 1989; Kaindl, 1999). These models all allow students and scholars to map
shifts, but they are only the first – at times tedious – step in any analysis. In fact, this mapping
of shifts from source to target forms the groundwork leading to the more challenging, and most
interesting, part of the analysis: Trying to group together and explain these shifts and work
towards an interpretation of the similarities and differences between source and target texts.
What do the shifts imply for the meaning, form, and function of the target text, as opposed to
the source text?
In what follows I do not present tables of translation shifts, but rather an interpretation of the
shifts I found, which were grouped into four types. I am aware that another scholar might select and
group the translation shifts differently; there is always a subjective element in any interpretation.
I took a sample of five books (out of 29) to study the intralingual translation shifts they contain
by contrasting them with the original versions. My corpus consists of Pinkeltje en het grote huis
(Pinkeltje and the big house, 1953 and 1996), Pinkeltje en de parels (Pinkeltje and the pearls, 1961
and 1997), Pinkeltje en de gouden pen (Pinkeltje and the golden pen, 1963 and 1997), Pinkeltje en
de boze tovenaar (Pinkeltje and the evil wizard, 1968 and 1998) and Pinkeltje en de Bibelebonse
pap (Pinkeltje and the Bibelebonse porridge, 1976 and 1999), all five of course in both versions
(referred to as “Laan” and “Braam” in the examples). These books were selected because they
cover the whole period in which the series appeared, a period of 23 years. Moreover, my choice
was determined by the availability of the books in two versions on the second-hand market.12
Changes in expressiveness
Dick Laan wrote his books as read-aloud stories. Braam changed some of these typical character-
istics drastically, although she certainly still conceived of them as read-aloud books. The originals,
for example, are packed with onomatopoeia, sounds that the person who reads the books aloud to
a child is supposed to make while reading. Braam leaves almost all of them out or reduces them
drastically. Here is an example from Pinkeltje en de gouden pen:
But what was that??? What was the sound they heard??? Proo-proo-proo-proo-proo!!!
(Laan, 1963, p. 34)
53
Elke Brems
Suddenly, somewhere in the distance, there was the humming sound of a car.
(Braam, 1997, p. 34)13
In this example, the onomatopoeia is omitted entirely, and the sound is described rather than
imitated. In the following example from Pinkeltje en de boze tovenaar, the onomatopoeia is not
completely omitted but reduced.
Rrrrrrr-boonk, rrrrrrr-boonk, rrrrrrr-boonk, rrrrrrrr-boonk, rrrrrrr-boonk. That strange sound

came from the cupboard.
(Laan, 1968, p. 111)
Rrrr-boonk, rrr-boonk! Pinkeltje ran upstairs. The sound came from the linen closet.
(Braam, 1998, p. 92)14
In the first example, Laan uses many more question marks and exclamation marks than Braam. Like
the onomatopoeia, this gives very explicit reading instructions to the person reading out loud; there’s
not much room for one’s own input or creativity. Another typical feature of the read-aloud character
of Laan’s books is the question-answer format. Here are two examples from Pinkeltje en de parels:
And what do you think he saw there??? He saw Pinkeltje!!!

(Laan, 1961, p. 8)
He saw Pinkeltje.
(Braam, 1997, p. 7)15
And what do you think he was doing there? Yes, you guessed it right!
(Laan, 1961, p. 14)
(omission)
(Braam, 1997, p. 13)16
One could label the three shifts (onomatopoeia, punctuation, question-answer) as changes in
expressiveness. They also cause changes in the relation between text, reader, and listener. With
Laan, the listener is more directly involved in the story (is supposed to answer a question, for
example), and so is the reader, who has to make sounds, ask questions, shout things out, and so
on. Of course, the reader can do that too in Braam’s version, but then more of his/her own input is
expected; it is less overtly spelled out. Laan’s version is more explicit. It is more oriented toward
oral storytelling, with its clear markers of orality.
Change in tone
The second set of shifts has to do with the tone of Laan’s books. It is more childish than in Braam’s
translations. For example, Dick Laan uses a lot of diminutives, which can be formed in Dutch by
adding the suffix -je or -tje to a noun. Here is an example from Pinkeltje en de parels:
54
Wiebelstaartje (Wiggly-tail), the hondje (little dog), got a bit angry when he heard it.
(Laan, 1961, p. 5)
The hond (dog) Wiebelstaart (Wiggly-tail) did not like that sound
(Braam, 1997, p. 7)17
This difference is most striking in the naming of the characters: In Laan’s versions, every char-
acter’s name has a diminutive suffix: Krekelewietje, Mierepietje, Lappelientje, Zilverdraadje,
Knaagtandje, Brommertje and so forth. Braam adopts all these names but always without the
diminutive suffix. This makes the tone less childish. Braam also uses other means to give the story
a more “adult” tone. When Laan writes: “He talked for a very, very long time” (Pinkeltje en de
parels, 1961, p. 9), Braam translates: “He kept talking for hours” (1997, p. 9)18 and when Laan
writes “the learned Mr. Owl” (1961, p. 57), Braam writes “Professor Owl” (1997, p. 48).19
The avoidance of repetition is also clearly a choice Braam makes. Because of their read-aloud
character and to make it as easy as possible for the children, Laan’s stories contain a lot of rep-
etition, which Braam often omits. A striking form of repetition in Laan’s work is that of proper
names, instead of using alternatives or personal pronouns. Here is an example from Pinkeltje en
de gouden pen:
This is where Zwartsnoetje is sitting. And then they saw Zwartsnoetje sitting at the bottom
of one of the empty milk bottles.
(Laan, 1963, p. 108)
That’s where Zwartsnoetje is. And indeed, the mouse was at the bottom of an empty milk bottle.
(Braam, 1997, p. 96)20
Laan repeats the name “Zwartsnoetje”, while Braam uses “the mouse” the second time instead
of the proper noun. And here is an example with a personal pronoun from Pinkeltje en de boze
tovenaar:
The next day, Pinkeltje and Pinkelotje left their house early to go to the village.
(Laan, 1968, p. 17)
The next morning, they were on their way to the village early.
(Braam, 1998, p. 15)21
Braam also uses what she herself calls “bolder language” to change the childish tone of Laan’s
books (Kuipers & Smeets, 1996, p. 40). The tone has certainly become more brash in the transla-
tion. When the cat and the dog (two important characters) quarrel in Pinkeltje en de parels, for
example, in Laan’s book the cat says to the dog: You “with that little tail waving back and forth”
(1961, p. 5), while in Braam’s translation it sounds like this: “With that stupid tail of yours always
waving back and forth” (1997, p. 7),22 and in the same quarrel we read: “I’d like to give you a little
slap on the nose” (1961, p. 5) in Laan’s book and “You’re about to get a good whack, you know
that?”23 in Braam’s translation (1997, p. 7). On one point, Braam’s translation is less brutal: Scenes
in which children are punished, or people or animals are beaten, are often omitted. In Pinkeltje en
de Bibelebonse pap, a child is spanked by Laan, but not by Braam. Changing parenting norms are
probably the reason for this shift.
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Elke Brems
In Dick Laan’s books, a number of terms or objects are explained to the children, such as the
difference between a wizard (tovenaar) and a magician (goochelaar), a dry cleaner (stomerij), a
flagpole (vlaggenstok), and mother of pearl (parelmoer). Braam often shortens these explanations
and sometimes omits them altogether. This reduces the didactic tone in her versions of the stories.
It also has pragmatic consequences: The person who reads aloud (and the narrator) now sound less
pedantic and omniscient.
Braam also usually omits the lessons that Dick Laan wants to teach the children (e.g., you
should always wash yourself properly, or you shouldn’t eat sweets). Here is an example from
Pinkeltje en de parels:
Of course Pinkel covered his mouth to laugh, because it is not nice at all to just laugh at
someone.
(Laan, 1961, p. 85)
(omission)
(Braam, 1997, p. 72)24
Updates to make the stories more contemporary

A third set of shifts involves updates to the stories. These updates can be linguistic, factual, or pic-
torial. For example, Braam replaces many old-fashioned words with more modern terms, Father
and Mother (Vader en Moeder) becoming Mum and Dad (mama en papa), or a flying machine
(vliegmachine) becoming an airplane (vliegtuig). But there is also an update in terms of content.
In Pinkeltje en het grote huis a baker calls at the front door in Laan’s version; in Braam’s transla-
tion that becomes a milkman (1953, p. 117, and 1996, p. 101) because bakers no longer called at
people’s houses when Braam translated the book. Another example is the radio repairman who
arrives on his tradesman’s bike in Laan’s version and now comes by car in the later translation
(1953, p. 70, and 1996, p. 62). The mother who is depicted as cleaning the house in an apron with a
headscarf in Laan’s book is not mentioned in Braam’s (1953, p. 110, and 1996, p. 96). These kinds
of updates can be seen in the illustrations as well. In Pinkeltje en de gouden pen, for example,
there is a drawing of a classroom. In Laan’s version, all the children sit neatly at their desks, which
are in rows facing the teacher. In Braam’s translation, the children’s desks are placed together and
face each other. Two children are seen painting and doing puzzles and one is writing something on
the blackboard. The atmosphere in the classroom is more relaxed and disorderly. The children’s
clothes and the teacher’s appearance also differ greatly in the two versions. Whereas in Laan’s
book, the teacher is a distinguished old lady with a bun, glasses, and a long, pleated skirt, in
Braam’s version the teacher is a young woman with ponytail and trousers.
In Laan’s versions of the Pinkeltje books, Mister (meneer) and Madam (mevrouw) are often
placed in front of a person’s name. Dick Laan himself, for example (who also appears in the books,
see later), is called Mister Dick Laan. Braam almost always omits this. This reduces the distance
between the child (the book’s audience) and the adult, a shift dictated by changing standards in the
relationship (hierarchy) between children and adults.25
The books also get an update regarding some changed norms and values (see also the exam-
ple of the punishments that are left out). Here and there, Braam takes the feminist criticism that
was aimed at Pinkeltje to heart. Pinkeltje’s wife is called Pinkelotje (a name that could also be
interpreted as a derivative of Pinkeltje), but Braam often shortens her name to Lot, to give her
a somewhat stronger and more contemporary image. Here and there, she is given more room to
56
speak and act. These changes are sometimes very subtle. Here is an example from Pinkeltje en
de parels:
Well, you can understand that Pinkelotje was happy when she saw Pinkeltje again. She
embraced Pinkeltje and gave him ten kisses.
(Laan, 1961, p. 39)
Pinkelotje and Pinkeltje were overjoyed when they saw each other again. They hugged each
other and gave each other twenty kisses.
(Braam, 1997, p. 124)26
Whereas in the first version Pinkelotje is happy to see Pinkeltje again and embraces and kisses
him, in the second version the feeling is mutual: They are happy to see each other and embrace and
kiss each other (twice as much).
Sometimes the changes in relation to gender are very explicit. In Pinkeltje en het grote huis,
for example, she omits the following remark about the dry cleaner: “You could have everything
cleaned there, if the Mothers didn’t have time for it” (1953, p. 132).27
Or in Pinkeltje en de parels:
Behind them came the musicians with their flutes.

(Laan, 1961, p. 22)
Behind them came the musicians – men and women – with their flutes.
(Braam, 1997, p. 18)28
Besides interventions in terms of gender, there are also interventions in terms of political correct-
ness. Pinkeltje’s country (Pinkeltjesland) is, for example, situated in Africa (called a “country” by
Laan, which Braam obviously does not adopt). Laan used the n-word to refer to the people there.
This is deleted by Braam. When the characters see people referred to with the n-word from their
rocket in Laan’s book, they see “giraffes” in Braam’s (Pinkeltje en de gouden pen, 1963, p. 46,
and 1997, p. 45). Another example of updating to contemporary standards is the fact that Pinkeltje
smokes less in Braam’s translations.
Change of voice
The Pinkeltje books are conceived in such a way that the writer, Dick Laan, plays a role in them.
Most books begin with a chapter in which Dick Laan (Mr. Dick Laan in the original versions) is
visited by Pinkeltje who then tells him of an adventure that is retold in the third person in the rest
of the book by Dick Laan. In other words: Dick Laan is the author, the narrator, and a character.29
In Pinkeltje en het grote huis the first chapter contains a whole scene in which Pinkeltje is angry
because he finds himself so badly drawn by the new illustrator Rein van Looy in the two previ-
ous books (Pinkeltje op reis and Pinkeltje in Artis). It is a very curious scene in which the writer
Dick Laan uses the characters Pinkeltje and Dick Laan to settle a dispute with his publisher and
new illustrator. Dick Laan (the character) thinks that Pinkeltje should be a “long, thin man with
an ordinary head and a neat, white beard”, while Van Looy draws them as “gnomes with short, fat
bodies and big, silly heads and weird beards”. And the character Dick Laan sneers at his publisher
when he says that he understands that it makes Pinkel angry: “I don’t like it either, but the man
57
Elke Brems
who has the books printed has not even shown me the drawings” (1953, p. 8).30 Braam deletes that
scene and turns it into a scene where Pinkeltje is angry because Laan was on holiday and therefore
could not be reached.
The whole idea that Dick Laan plays this triple role makes Braam’s role more complicated. The
fact that Laan was both the author and narrator and a character as well gave the books an illusion
of authenticity and directness that is disrupted when Braam also moves into the diegetic space.
The one-to-one relationship between the three Dick Laans can no longer be upheld. Braam’s voice
can also clearly be heard.
In Style and Ideology in Translation Jeremy Munday calls the translated text “a mix of source
and target, an amalgam of author and translator . . . whereas, for many reviewers and readers . . . the
translator [is] merely a layer of transparent varnish” (Munday, 2008, p. 13). According to Alvstad,
“there is a dominant sociocultural convention according to which translated texts are read as if they
were produced solely by the author” (Alvstad, 2014, p. 271). She calls this convention the transla-
tion pact. As readers of a translated text, we trust the translator to give us a faithful rendering of
what the author has written. That is why Braam’s name is only mentioned in small letters inside the
books and Dick Laan is still the sole author. The illusion of authenticity created by the identification
of the three Dick Laans and the consistency of the one voice should be broken as little as possible.
The translation pact also applies to intralingual translation, but it is complicated further. In
the case of a book in a foreign language, it is clearer that a translation has been made and that a
translator has been at work, even if one expects him or her to have faithfully followed the source
text. Intralingual translation is different. It is often a form of intervention that needs legitimizing.
Readers who are aware that they are reading an intralingual translation know that the target text
differs from the source text, otherwise no translation would have been necessary. So, the transla-
tion pact in an intralingual translation is different from that in an interlingual translation, although
as a reader you will still expect to be able to trust the translator. Braam also emphasizes that
one should “not affect the essence of the story” and “not change the character”. Pinkeltje should
remain Pinkeltje (Kuipers & Smeets, 1996, p. 38).
Yet the question of power and authority arises in both interlingual and intralingual translation.
Pillière calls this the issue of accountability (Pillière, 2021, p. 208). Alvstad reminds us, “the origi-
nal text is filtered through an enunciating instance with power to alter and change everything in
the original utterance” (2013, p. 207). And Braam certainly uses this power; as was demonstrated
earlier, she makes quite a few changes. Moreover, she has a clear paratextual presence: She is
also an agent presenting the text. The interview Braam gave in Vooys is a good example of this:
She reveals herself there as a translator and explains her working methods and views. So, Braam
manifests her voice both textually and contextually. And the illustrator Julius Ros also “voices” his
interpretation of Laan’s text, as I have shown. So does the publisher, who gave the translation brief
to Braam and ordered the illustrations by Ros. But of course, the illustrator and the publisher were
also voices in Laan’s original versions, although Laan kept up the myth that it was a one man show,
even by criticizing the illustrator and the publisher openly in the books, thus claiming his authority
at all levels. This myth was effectively debunked by Pillière in her book: “(T)he text can . . . be
seen as the result of a collaborative effort and not as the result of a single creative genius” (Pillière,
2021, p. 32). The intralingual translation by Braam lays that bare, but it was there all along.
Conclusion
I have approached my case from some of the eight aspects listed previously: Stakeholders, para-
texts, illustrations, genre, reception, and translation shifts. These aspects are interdependent and
58
need to be discussed in relation to each other, for example, in the section on the translation shifts
I involved several of the other aspects in the analysis. In this section I highlighted four types of
change: (1) A change in expressiveness, which also causes a change in the relationship between the
text, the person who reads it aloud, and the child: Providing less explicit reading instructions, leav-
ing more room for personal reading styles; (2) a change in tone: The translations are less childish,
less didactic and more brash, suggesting a child image that doesn’t expect too much pampering by
the narrator and can handle a slightly more difficult text. This also means changing the relation-
ship between adult and child, whereby the adult is no longer the “teacher” and the moral compass;
(3) an update of the stories, bringing them closer to the society the contemporary child lives in and
the language he/she speaks. The modernization also reflect changes in norms and values (gender,
racism, etc.); (4) a change in voice, since the translator interferes in what seemed to be the closed
circuit of author, narrator, and character. This also impacts on authority and authenticity in the
stories.
These changes are probably not just relevant to this case; further research may reveal whether
they occur more frequently, with the same translator, in the same genre, in the same period, or in
the same culture, for example.
Returning to the five factors that are influential for intralingual translation mentioned earlier
(Zethsen’s list, with the added cultural politics factor), we can now take a broader look at the case.
It appears from my analysis of several aspects of the Pinkeltje series that “space” and “cultural
politics” do not play a significant role in this case. “Knowledge”, “time”, and “culture” do play
a role and are often intertwined. Changes are made by the translator because the children no
longer know certain elements or words from the source text (such as outdated words or a baker
who comes to the house), which, on the one hand, has to do with shifting knowledge, and, on the
other hand, also with the time gap and with cultural differences between the Dutch society of the
1950s–1960s and that of the 1990s (think of the way the classroom is depicted in the illustrations).
This is not always the result of a lack of knowledge; sometimes there is also an increase in the
audience’s (the children’s) knowledge, which is why the translator did not find it necessary to
make everything as explicit as in the source text. However, there are other factors at play besides
the five mentioned earlier. I already mentioned the factor of changing norms and values that is at
work here: Think of the different hierarchy between adult and child and the changes in views on
gender and racism. One specific set of norms are aesthetic norms: The translator cuts back on the
repetitions, on the onomatopoeia; in short, she makes stylistic changes because she has a different
conception of children’s literature. The new layout and illustrations also belong to this category of
stylistic-aesthetic changes, although for some interventions other factors (culture, knowledge) can
be invoked. I also mentioned the factor of preservation: The publisher wanted to keep the Pinkeltje
legacy alive and available. In order to preserve it, however, paradoxically changes needed to be
made, because criticism of the original books had become too harsh. Based on this case study, I
would thus add two more factors to the list: Firstly, one involving norms and values, which cause
the intralingual translator to produce a version that is more in tune with how people in the target
culture think about certain ethical and aesthetic issues, and secondly, one concerning preservation,
where intralingual translation is undertaken not in order to change the original but in order to keep
it. Preservation can also be for commercial reasons.
Each case of intralingual translation can enrich the field of research and the research questions.
I used two types of categorizations: Factors and aspects. Both a categorization of driving forces
behind intralingual translations (“factors”, now extended from five to seven) and a list of aspects to
be studied in a given case (I listed eight such aspects one can look at) are at all times dynamic and
subject to change and improvement. This does not mean that such “lists” are not useful: They are
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Elke Brems
a starting point in discussing cases of intralingual translation and can sharpen both the similarities
and the differences between cases.
Many of the factors and aspects mentioned are obviously also suitable when analysing interlin-
gual translation. A few important differences can be named, albeit with proviso, since both intra-
lingual and interlingual translations come in many shapes and sizes. Firstly, intralingual translation
seems to require extra justification: If the text already exists in a certain language, why translate it
into the same language? Discovering the motivation therefore often takes up a larger part of intra-
lingual translation research. Secondly, in a case of interlingual translation, every word has changed:
The source text is almost always completely replaced, whereas this “replacement” is sometimes less
radical in intralingual translation, which calls for questions regarding what has and has not been
translated and why. Thirdly, for readers of an intralingual translation, the source and target texts
are often both comprehensible, which influences their reception and interpretation. The most strik-
ing particularity of a study on intralingual translation is that it can shed light on relations between
varieties of a language, on the diachronic or synchronic inner dynamics of a certain language and
culture. The case of translations between Flemish Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch (Brems, 2017)
demonstrated that linguistic and translation norms are inextricably linked with cultural hierarchy
and power relations and with the construction of identity and alterity. The Pinkeltje case is different.
In this case, genre (children’s literature) is very important: The authority of the author seems less
fixed in this case for example. There is more room for other agents, the author can be voiced over to
a certain extent, whereas in adult literature that practice is much more controversial: As Braam said:
“I wouldn’t dare, who am I to do such a thing?” (Kuipers & Smeets, 1996, p. 42).
Children’s literature serves, among other things, to socialize a child audience. The child image
shifts across and within societies and so do the norms and values that must or can be passed on
through children’s literature. Therefore, the genre is open to all kinds of retelling, including intra-
lingual translation. By examining a case of intralingual translation in children’s literature, one can
trace societal changes within the same culture with regard to the image of the child, but also with
regard to language and style and to morals and customs. The case then becomes a magnifying glass
that can be used to bring societal changes into focus.
Coda
Pinkeltje has been reintroduced as a “franchise” since 2014: The books are now no longer written
by an individual, but by a collective “Studio Dick Laan”. The name Dick Laan is thus retained, but
no longer belongs to that one real person, but to “the authorship of Pinkeltje”. Like the Hafkamp
adaptations, they are mostly new stories that are always linked to a tourist attraction in the Nether-
lands (e.g., Pinkeltje in the Rijksmuseum, Pinkeltje in the Efteling, Pinkeltje on Texel): Pinkeltje is
deployed in branding the Netherlands, as a kind of national icon. Possibly, the books are “ordered”
by the attractions. It is striking that this new series has been reissued with the old yellow covers
and with illustrations that are new but refer to the old illustrations in retro style. On the biggest
web shop in the Netherlands, bol.com, they are recommended as funny and exciting adventures
“of an iconic character from Dutch children’s literature: Who has not grown up with Pinkeltje?”
Notes
1 All translations are mine. This is the original Dutch text: Het is te hopen dat mijn versie Pinkeltje weer
zodanig opkrikt dat de serie de komende tien jaar of langer nog steeds verkocht blijft worden. Ik vind het
namelijk wel cultuurgoed. De boeken zijn zo ontzaglijk bekend, er is geen kind in Nederland dat niet ooit
een boek van Pinkeltje heeft gelezen.
60
2 Daar waag ik me niet aan, wie ben ik?

3 The Pinkeltje series has had several illustrators. The oldest Pinkeltje is drawn by Dokie van Amstel who
in the second edition of 1948 was replaced by a creation of E. M. ten Harmsen van der Beek. Froukje van
der Meer drew the gnome figure in Pinkeltje en zijn vrienden (Pinkeltje and his friends) and later editions
have a Pinkeltje by Rein van Looy.
4 Tienduizenden kinderen kunnen’s avonds niet slapen als papa of mama niet heeft voorgelezen uit Pinkeltje.
5 Ondanks het volstrekt verouderde karakter van Laans werk, ondanks het feit dat hij in de toonaangevende
kinderboekenkritiek genegeerd wordt, dragen de inkomsten uit zijn steeds dóórlopende boeken flink bij
aan de armslag van de uitgeverij.
6 De Pinkeltje-verhalen worden aanvankelijk geprezen vanwege de aansluiting bij de kinderlijke verbeel-
dingswereld en de onuitputtelijke fantasie van Dick Laan. Men vindt de verhalen gezellig, opvoedkundig
en leerzaam, maar in 1961 uit De Groene Amsterdammer enig ongenoegen: “onder ons gezegd vinden
we het nou welletjes en moesten er maar geen Pinkeltjes meer bijkomen, al was het maar omdat de goede
indrukken van het begin erdoor uitgewist dreigen te worden.” In 1963 waarschuwt Miep Diekmann bij het
dertiende deeltje Pinkeltje en de Parels voor het gevaar van verstarring: “De schrijver concentreert zich
kennelijk meer op het vinden van steeds nieuwe situaties dan op het duidelijker omlijnen van de karak-
teristiek van zijn Pinkeltje-figuur.” Andere recensenten maken bezwaar tegen de alom aanwezigheid van
mijnheer Dick Laan in de verhalen en tegen zijn simpele stijl.
7 Pinkeltje hoort bij het soort verhalen dat in de verte aan sprookjes doet denken, maar niet de sterke struc-
tuur ervan heeft en niet de relatie legt tussen het kind dat het verhaal leest of hoort en de geheimzinnige
wereld waarin zich het verhaal afspeelt. Pinkeltje is daarvoor te ondubbelzinnig, heeft te weinig span-
ning en is ook veel te simpel geschreven. Het gaat dan allemaal wel over de aardige wereld die zich op
kruiphoogte afspeelt, met wollige dieren en o, zo enge avonturen die gelukkig altijd goed aflopen, maar
verder is er niets interessants over op te merken.
8 Naar een idee van Dick Laan.
9 Die oude tekst van Pinkeltje is echter onverteerbaar voor kinderen van nu. Als je het voorleest dan weet je
niet wat je hoort.
10 Ik probeer de stijl van Dick Laan zoveel mogelijk intact te laten. Hij heeft het geschreven, hij heeft het
bedacht. Om die schrijver recht te doen, volg ik de tekst regel voor regel, heel consciëntieus.
11 Bij Dick Laan huilt hij veel vaker dan ik hem laat huilen. Ik vind dat zo’n kletskoek, een volwassen man-
netje met een baardje dat voortdurend met tranen in zijn ogen zit.
12 In 1978, a film called Pinkeltje was released, directed by Harrie Geelen. This film is an intersemiotic
translation of the Pinkeltje series and as such falls outside the scope of my research. Moreover, it is not
an adaptation of one of the books, but a new story, written by Geelen as a scenario and then adapted into
a book by Imme Dros. The film is available (in Dutch) on YouTube.
13 Laan: Maar wat was dat??? Wat hoorden ze daar voor een geluid??? Proe-proe-proe-proe-proe-proe-proe-proe!!!
Braam: Opeens klonk ergens in de verte het brommende geluid van een auto.
14 Laan: Rrrrrrrrrrr-boenk, rrrrrrrrr-boenk, rrrrrrr-boenk, rrrrrrrrrr-boenk, rrrrrrrrr-boenk. Dat rare geluid
kwam uit de kast.
Braam: Rrrr-boenk, rrr-boenk! Pinkeltje rende naar boven. Het geluid kwam uit de linnenkast.
15 Laan: En wat denk je dat hij daar zag??? Hij zag Pinkeltje!!!
Braam: Hij zag Pinkeltje.
16 en wat denk je dat hij daar ging doen? Ja hoor, je hebt het goed geraden!
17 Laan: Wiebelstaartje, het hondje, werd een beetje boos toen hij het hoorde.
Braam: De hond Wiebelstaart hield niet van dat geluid.
18 Laan: hij vertelde een heel, heel lange tijd.
Braam: hij bleef uren achter elkaar praten.
19 Laan: de geleerde meneer uil.
Braam: professor Uil.
In an interview with the newspaper Het Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, Dick Laan himself said: You have to
write your sentences in such a way that a six-year-old child, who is reading himself, can understand them.
And if I have to use a difficult word, I explain it. My best review was once given to me by a man who said:
“I won’t let my child read Pinkeltje because it won’t learn anything and that’s exactly what I want” (Laan,
1970). (Je moet je zinnen zo maken dat een kind van zes jaar, dat zelf leest, het kan begrijpen. En als ik
eens een moeilijk woord moet gebruiken dan leg ik het uit. Mijn beste recensie heb ik eens gekregen van
een man die zei: “Ik laat mijn kind geen Pinkeltje lezen, want het leert er niets van en dat wil ik nu net.”)
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Elke Brems
20 Laan: Hier zit Zwartsnoetje. En toen zagen ze Zwartsnoetje onder in één van de lege melkflessen zitten.
Braam: Daar zit Zwartsnoet. En inderdaad, de muis zat op de bodem van een lege melkfles.
21 Laan: De volgende dag kwamen Pinkeltje en Pinkelotje al vroeg hun huisje uit om naar het dorp te gaan.
Braam: De volgende morgen waren ze al vroeg op weg naar het dorp.
22 Laan: met dat heen en weer zwaaiende staartje.
Braam: met die stomme staart van je die steeds heen en weer zwaait.
23 Laan: Ik zou je best een tik op je neus willen geven.
Braam: Je kunt zo een mep van me krijgen, weet je dat?
24 Laan: Natuurlijk lachte Pinkeltje achter zijn hand, want het is helemaal niet aardig om iemand zomaar uit
te lachen.
25 In the credits of the film Pinkeltje, it is also striking that the names are preceded by mister or madam,
which is very unusual: for example, “music: mister Joop Stokkermans” or “styling: madam Marjolein
Stokkink.”
26 Laan: Nu, je begrijpt wel, dat Pinkelotje blij was, toen ze Pinkeltje weer zag. Ze omhelsde Pinkeltje en gaf
hem wel tien zoenen.
Braam: Pinkelotje en Pinkeltje waren dolblij toen ze elkaar weer zagen. Ze vlogen elkaar om de hals en
gaven elkaar wel twintig kussen.
27 Van alles kon je daar schoon laten maken, als de Moeders er geen tijd voor hadden.
28 Laan: daarachter kwamen de muzikanten met de fluiten.
Braam: daarachter kwamen de muzikanten – mannen en vrouwen – met de fluiten.
29 In the 1978 film adaptation, the Dick Laan character even plays a leading role, although he is of course
played by an actor, Aart Staartjes, complicating the “I-narrator” with whom the movie begins: “My name
is Dick Laan. I have written many books about Pinkeltje. Some people think that I have invented the sto-
ries. But that is not true . . . Pinkeltje . . . (has) told me everything himself.” (“Mijn naam is Dick Laan. Ik
heb al heel wat boeken over Pinkeltje geschreven. Er zijn mensen die denken dat ik de verhalen bedacht
heb. Maar dat is niet zo . . . Pinkeltje . . . (heeft) zelf alles aan me verteld.”)
30 lang, dun mannetje met een gewoon hoofdje en een net, wit baardje, kabouters met korte dikke lijven
en grote, malle hoofden en rare baarden, Ik vind het ook niet leuk, maar de mijnheer, die de boekjes laat
drukken, heeft me de tekeningen niet eens laten zien.
Further reading
Articles that further investigate the concept of intralingual translation are:

Mossop, B. (2016). “Intralingual translation”: A desirable concept? Across Languages and Cultures, 17(1),
1–24. https://doi.org/10.1556/084.2016.17.1.1
Two interesting volumes with contributions about cases of translated children’s literature (mostly interlingual
or intermedial):
Kérchy, A., & Sundmark, B. (2020). Translating and transmediating children’s literature. Palgrave MacMillan.
van Coillie, J., & McMartin, J. (2020). Children’s literature in translation. Leuven University Press, available
in Open Access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/42580.
See also for an extensive discussion on the case study research method:
Susam-Sarajeva, Ş. (2009). The case study research method in translation studies. The Interpreter and Trans
lator Training, 3(1), 37–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750399X.2009.10798780
References
Alvstad, C. (2013). Voices in translation. In Y. Gambier & L. van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of translation
studies (Vol. 4, pp. 207–210). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/hts.4.voi2
Alvstad, C. (2014). The translation pact. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 23(3),
270–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947014536505
Bekkering, H., Heimeriks, N., & Toorn, W. van (Eds.). (1989). De Hele Bibelebontse berg: De geschiedenis
van het kinderboek in Nederland & Vlaanderen van de middeleeuwen tot heden. Querido.
62
Perspectives, 21(2), 257–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2012.702395
Brems, E. (2017). Separated by the same language: Intralingual translation between Dutch and Dutch. Per
spectives, 26(4), 509–525. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2017.1417455
Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of translation. The spread of ideas in translation theory. John Benjamins.
Delabastita, D. (1989). Translation and mass-communication: Film and T.V. translation as evidence of cul-
tural dynamics. Meta, 35(4), 193–218.
Desmet, M. K. T. (2007). Babysitting the reader: Translating English narrative fiction for girls into Dutch
(1946–1995). Peter Lang.
Douglas, V., & Cabaret, F. (Eds.). (2014). La Retraduction en littérature de jeunesse/Retranslating children’s
literature. Peter Lang.
Duijx, T., & Linders, J. (1991). De goede kameraad: Honderd jaar kinderboeken. Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Geerts, S., & Bossche, S. van den. (Eds.). (2014). Never-ending stories: Adaptation, canonisation, and ideol
ogy in children’s literature. Academia Press.
Glas, F. de. (1996). De bestseller Pinkeltje. Vooys, 14(3), 39–42. www.dbnl.org/tekst/_voo013199601_01/_
voo013199601_01_0038.php?q=pinkeltje#hl1
Kaindl, K. (1999). Thump, Whizz, Poom: A framework for the study of comics under translation. Target,
11(2), 263–288.
Kuipers, M., & Smeets, K. (1996). “Die Pinkeltje is zo’n betweter af en toe . . .” Suzanne Braam over het her-
talen van kinderboeken. Vooys, 14(2), 38–45. www.dbnl.org/tekst/_voo013199601_01/_voo013199601_
01_0027.php
Laan, D. (1953). Pinkeltje en het grote huis. Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Laan, D. (1961). Pinkeltje en de parels. Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Laan, D. (1963). Pinkeltje en de gouden pen. Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Laan, D. (1968). Pinkeltje en de boze tovenaar. Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Laan, D. (1970, July 31). Pappa, Pinkeltje lezen. Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 17. https://resolver.kb.nl/reso
lve?urn=ddd:011015785:mpeg21:p017
Laan, D. (1976). Pinkeltje en de Bibelebonse pap. Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Laan, D. (1996). Pinkeltje en het grote huis (adapted by Suzanne Braam). Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Laan, D. (1997). Pinkeltje en de gouden pen (adapted by Suzanne Braam). Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Laan, D. (1997). Pinkeltje en de parels (adapted by Suzanne Braam). Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Laan, D. (1998). Pinkeltje en de boze tovenaar (adapted by Suzanne Braam). Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Laan, D. (1999). Pinkeltje en de Bibelebonse pap (adapted by Suzanne Braam). Van Holkema & Warendorf.
Lathey, G. (2012). The role of translators in children’s literature: Invisible storytellers. Routledge.
Longinovic, T. Z. (2011). Serbo-Croatian: Translating the non-identical twins. In D. Asimakoulas & M. Rog-
ers (Eds.), Translation and opposition (pp. 283–294). Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/
9781847694324-016
Munday, J. (2008). Style and ideology in translation: Latin American writing in English. Routledge.
Pillière, L. (2021). Intralingual translation of British novels: A multimodal stylistic perspective. Bloomsbury
Academic.
Stephens, J., & McCallum, R. (1998). Retelling stories, framing culture: Traditional story and metanarratives
in children’s literature. Routledge.
Vinay, J. P., & Darbelnet, J. (1958). Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Didier.
org/10.7202/038904ar
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4
FORMS AND PRACTICES OF
IN PREMODERN CHINA
Barbara Bisetto
Introduction
This chapter looks at specific uses of intralingual translation in popularising canonical texts in the
educational context of premodern China, from the 12th century onward. It focuses on the presen-
tation of three textual genres, namely jujie (句解), zhijie (直解), and yanyi (演義), that gradually
emerged in the commentarial literature of the Song (960–1279), Yuan (1279–1368), and Ming
(1368–1644) dynasties.
These genres appeared in a historical period characterised by significant sociocultural changes.
First, there was the full-scale implementation of the civil service examinations as the way to access
official careers in the imperial administration. The educational curriculum that informed the exami-
nations centred on an in-depth knowledge of a corpus of Confucian canonical works dating back to
the first millennium BCE, and it required a long process of close reading, hermeneutical training,
and text memorisation. Then there was the development of governmental and non-governmental
printing since the Song dynasty, which increased the availability of books and extended the vari-
ety of texts and the range of potential readers. These two factors were closely interrelated and are
particularly relevant for the present discussion. The long educational training required to succeed
at the different levels of the examination system and the increasingly high competition between
prospective candidates supported the development of a rich network of agents and institutions
devoted to teaching and learning activities. This situation stimulated the demand and supply of
books and manuals to help students and examination candidates to train their ability to understand
and interpret classical and canonical literature and to refine their writing techniques. At the same
time, a growing class of educated scholars devoted themselves to teaching activities. It is in this
context that new easy-to-read commentarial genres flourished.
Studies on Chinese translation history have primarily focused on the analysis of the critical
moments in which China was engaged in the translation of foreign works, such as the transla-
tion of Buddhist texts starting from the early centuries CE (Hung, 2011) and the translation of
Western scientific and literary works at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (Wong, 2011).
Today, studies on intralingual translation focus on the contemporary modernization of ancient
and premodern texts or examine intralingual translation as an intermediate phase in preparing
for the interlingual translation of classical works (Huang, 2012; Luo, 2019). These studies leave
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-6 64
Forms and practices of translation in premodern China
out from the general picture instances of the historical development of this practice in the com-
mentarial literature, generally considered a domain of philology. Similarly, the idea of premodern
East Asia as “worlds without translation” (Denecke, 2014), which has been proposed on account
of the widespread use of character scripts and literary Chinese as a written lingua franca, seems to
rest implicitly on a conceptualisation of translation in terms of interlingual translation. However,
these approaches toward translation in the Chinese context only become possible by erasing from
theoretical discourse the semiotic significance of the multiple meaning mediating practices that,
over the centuries, were elaborated within the Chinese textual culture to neutralise understanding
barriers and overcome potential comprehension gaps in the transmission of texts. The large cor-
pora of metatexts produced over the centuries, from commentaries to rewritings and adaptations,
contain interesting material for research on the forms and practices of intralingual translation in
premodern China.
The structure of this chapter will be as follows: The next section will present the theoretical
underpinning of this study based on current research on intralingual translation, particularly from
a diachronic perspective. Then, I will outline the main categories adopted to define processes of
language modernization of ancient texts during the 20th century in China. The final section before
the Conclusion will be devoted to the analysis of the categories of jujie, zhijie, and yanyi in the
premodern context.
Theoretical foundations
As the life of texts is crucially related to their possibility to operate as signs in different temporal
and spatial settings (Gorlée, 1997), commentary and translation represent two primary mediating
forms of the interpretative program at the heart of semiosis. In the intertextual continuity they cre-
ate between a text (prototext) and its further models or metatexts (Popovič, 1976), commentary
and translation may interact in a variety of ways and degrees, sharing a communal space of media-
tion in metaliterature, which is what is here of interest in the perspective of intralingual translation.
Intralingual translation is an umbrella term for various phenomena moving along diachronic
and synchronic axes. Translation studies scholars have proposed different sub-categorisations
according to the element informing the communicative transfer, either time (diachronic), linguis-
tic variety (dialectal), register or genres (diaphasic), or linguistic mode (diamesic) (Gottlieb, 2018;
Hill-Madsen, 2019). In addition, single instances may combine various sub-categories: The audi-
ble modernized version of a classical masterwork, such as Dante’s Comedy for children, combines
the diachronic (modernization of language), the diaphasic (simplified version for children), and the
diamesic (writing-to-speech) categories of intralingual translation.
In her seminal empirical study on intralingual translation, Zethsen (2009) pointed out four
factors that seem influential in intralingual translation: Knowledge, culture, time, and space. Of
these, the first three play a relevant role in diachronic translation (Karas, 2016). In particular, the
time parameter has stimulated further research on translation status between different chrono-
logical layers of the same language, for example in relation to the ideological implications of the
language modernization of literary texts (Berk Albachten, 2014) and the role of translation in the
formation of linguistic identity (Davis, 2014). From the perspective of language history, Davis
argues that translation should not be considered simply as a mediation between different phases
of a language but also as “what generates the historical lineage and the boundaries used to define
a unified language in the first place” (Davis, 2014, p. 587). Furthermore, Karas (2016) has argued
for singling out the intralingual intertemporal translation as a separate category within transla-
tion studies based on characteristics and behaviours shared by instances of translation between
65
Barbara Bisetto
two chronological layers of the same language. Following Sakai (2009), who raised the question
of bordering and countability concerning language and translation, all these studies on diachronic
intralingual translation agree on the difficulty of distinguishing precise borders within a given
language and highlight the perceived value that the ideas of the unity of language and cultural
continuity may play in specific contexts or moments.
As ideas about language identification are subject to change and do not depend only on linguis-
tic features but may entail social, cultural, and economic factors, assumptions on translation in
transfer practices between different layers of a language may vary accordingly. This aspect is cru-
cial for a theoretical discussion on translation and the definition of diachronic intralingual transla-
tion. In her study on intralingual intertemporal translation, Karas (2016) moves away from Toury’s
postulates about translation (source text postulate, transfer postulate, relationship postulate). She
considers the presence of a transfer process between two languages and cultures and the idea of
assumed translation to be particularly relevant for a definition of translation. Assumed transla-
tion (Toury, 1995) in particular refers to all the utterances presented or regarded as translation.
However, Karas also recognises that assumed translation can be the result of a long and gradual
process. This graduality correlates with the conceptualisation of translation as a cluster category
in which translational phenomena present different degrees of prototypicality depending on differ-
ent conditions. This factor helps to explain why instances of intralingual intertemporal translation
are defined by terms other than translation and thus occupy a marginal position in categorising
translation. By integrating Toury’s postulates and the prototypical conception of translation with
the concepts of regulative ideas, translation regimes, and non-countable languages derived from
Sakai, Karas proposes two hypotheses on diachronic translation. First, if the historical layers of
the language have not become different languages, transfers between different layers are hardly
considered translation. Second, where the continuity between language layers is questioned or
loses importance, then instances of transfers between these layers are more likely to be referred to
as translation. She, thus, identifies several possible attitudes towards the idea of diachronic intra-
lingual translation, ranging from the unproblematic use of the term translation to cases where res-
ervations are still present. This position, however, does not include in the discussion the possibility
of unawareness, or in other words, cases of translation not recognised as such in a context, which
undermines the idea of assumed translation. As pointed out by Zethsen (2009, p. 799, emphasis
in the original), two requirements in Toury’s definition of translation, namely that “to constitute
a translation a transfer process must have taken place between two languages/cultures and most
importantly the resulting product must be assumed to be a translation by people in general” are not
“necessary conditions for a document/product to constitute a translation”. Focusing on intralingual
translation, albeit not specifically on diachronic translation, Zethsen and Hill-Madsen (2016) take
this line of reasoning one step further by proposing a modification of Toury’s postulates which
redefines the transfer postulate in terms of derivation, according to the fact that “translation is
not a matter of ‘moving’ content, but a matter of producing a new text on the basis of the anterior
one” (p. 704, emphasis in the original), and interprets the relationship postulate in the dimension
of relevant similarity as defined by Chesterman (1996) and based on skopos. This theoretical
perspective offers the possibility of investigating a broader range of phenomena in the context of
translational practices.
Diachronic intralingual translation in the Chinese context

Contemporary studies on diachronic intralingual translation in China focus primarily on instances of
language modernization of historical, philosophical, and literary texts from ancient and premodern
66
times. This translational practice is usually referred to by resorting to one of two expressions. The
first is jinyi 今譯 (modern translation, modern language version), which foregrounds the separation
between past and present, gu 古and jin 今, and is preferably used in scholarly editions, usually in
combination with jinzhu (modern annotations). The second is baihua 白話 or baihua ben 白話本
(plain language version, modern language version), which emphasises the linguistic variety, that
is, the common modern language as it has been shaped during the 20th century, and aims at a
broader, general readership. Both expressions point to the difference that separates the historical
layers of the language involved in the transfer process, and they both came into use in the first
decades of the 20th century.
The term baihua has been used since the early 20th century, initially to refer to vernacular lan-
guage annotations (baihua zhushi 白話注釋; baihua zhujie 白話註解) of canonical and classical
literary texts. According to a preliminary research conducted on different bibliographic catalogues,
mainly from the National Libraries in Beijing and Taipei, earliest examples include an edition of
uncertain date (around 1910) of the Three Hundred Tang Poems with annotations in the vernacu
lar language (Baihua zhushi Tang shi sanbaishou 白話注釋唐詩三百首), edited by Xu Shunping
許舜屏; an edition of the Classic of Poetry with annotations in the vernacular language (Shijing
baihua zhujie 詩經白話註解) published in Shanghai in 1918; an edition of the Four Books for
Women, illustrated and annotated in the vernacular language (Huitu Nüsishu baihua zhujie 繪
圖女四書白話註解) also published in 1918 in Shanghai by the Huiwentang publishing house;
an edition of the Four Books annotated in the vernacular language (Sishu baihua zhujie 四書白
話注解) edited by Tong Guanzhuo 童官卓 and Xu Fumin 許伏民 and published in 1924 by the
Shanghai Qunxue xueshe publishing house; another edition of the Four Books with translation
in vernacular language and punctuation in the new style (Xinshi biaodian Sishu baihua jieshuo
新式標點四書白話解說) edited by Jiang Xizhang and published in the same year by Shanghai
Jinzhang tushuju, and followed shortly after, between 1926 and 1930, by another edition of the
Classic of poetry, with the original text facing the vernacular version, vernacular annotations and
punctuation in the new style (Yan wen duizhao baihua zhujie xinshi biaodian Shijing 言文對照
白話註解新式標點詩經). All examples fall into the category of reader’s guides (duben 讀本),
“which emerged as a new bibliographical category at the turn of the twentieth century” (Sibau,
2021, p. 191). The rise and the development of this wave of publications aimed at popularising
the classics by reproducing the original text with vernacular annotations were powered by the
ascent of the vernacular language movement (baihuawen yundong 白話文運動) that enflamed the
cultural and intellectual world at the end of the empire and in the early decades of the Republican
period. In the vision of its fervent promoters, the use of the classical language in education was one
of the greatest maladies in China at the time and one of the reasons for the country’s backwardness
toward western nations. The modernization of China was inextricably linked to a reform of the
education system that would allow more comprehensive access to literacy. The language reform,
based on adopting a linguistic standard closer to the spoken language, represented a crucial part
of this reformist process. Alongside the annotations, complete translations began appearing in
the same years. For instance, the vernacular translation and adaptation in narrative form of Gao
Ming’s play Pipa ji 琵琶記 (The Lute), Baihua Pipa ji 白話琵琶記, dates back to 1922, and it
explicitly adopts the term yi 譯 (translated by) to introduce the author of the vernacular version.
Compared to baihua, the term jinyi 今譯 came into use relatively later, during the 1930s, and
then with increasing frequency from the 1950s and 1960s, when authoritative translations of
works from ancient China’s historical, philosophical, and literary heritage began to be published
in modern languages. For instance, the term figures in the title of the work Gushu jinyi (Ancient
texts in modern translation 古書今譯) compiled by Ma Mingge 馬銘閣 in 1935, and later in a
67
Barbara Bisetto
series of modern translation of poems from the ancient collection Chuci 楚辭 (Songs of Chu) by
the poet Guo Moruo 郭沫若, such as Rhapsodies by Qu Yuan in modern translation (Qu Yuan fu
jinyi 屈原賦今譯), published by Renmin wenxue chubanshe in 1953, and Encountering sorrow
in modern translation (Lisao jinyi 離騷今譯) published in 1958 by the same publishing house.
The explicit adoption of the term jinyi, which contains the word yi used since antiquity to refer to
translation between different languages in its prototypical dimension, thus represents the culmi-
nation of a long process of metalinguistic categorisation of processes of transfer within different
historical phases and varieties of the Chinese language and their modern definition in terms of
translation.
Translation in premodern annotations

The few instances mentioned in the previous section on the language modernization practices of
classics during the 20th century reveal the prominent role annotation played in Chinese textual
culture as a textual space designated to record processes of language transfer. This aspect is in con-
tinuity with the millennial-long tradition of commentaries, particularly in the context of so-called
elementary learning, which in the variety and multiplicity of its textual genres accommodated
various transfer practices, from lexical and exegetical glosses to paraphrases.
Ever since antiquity, the types of commentaries have varied diachronically, influenced by fac-
tors such as agents, readership, and modes of production. In the premodern period, from the Song
dynasty onwards, alongside scholarly commentaries, new commentarial works emerged oriented
primarily towards reformulating prototext segments in a more straightforward linguistic style.
In the Song-Yuan period (10th–14th c.), a rich body of commentaries aimed at popularising the
Confucian canonical works began to flourish in the context of private village schools that prepared
young students for the imperial examinations (Gu, 2014). Such works are usually marked by the
presence of the term jujie, or “explication by sentence”, in the title. Based on extant editions and
references included in bibliographic catalogues from premodern times, we know that all the fun-
damental canonical works, such as the Book of Poetry (Shijing 詩經), Book of Changes (Yijing
易經), Book of Documents (Shujing 書經), the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu 春秋), Con-
fucius’s Analects (Lunyu 論語), and the Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), had commentaries in the form
of “explication by sentence”. The explanatory annotation included information on the meaning of
words or aspects of ancient culture that could reduce the distance between the original text and the
reader. Annotation included also a paraphrase or a more literal reformulation of the specific textual
fragment. The annotation was reproduced after a minimal textual portion of different length (ju)
and was graphically distinct from the prototext because it was written in smaller characters and a
double column. The textual explanation was a component of a tripartite annotation system which
included also phonetic and lexical glosses referred to respectively in the title by the terms zhiyin
(pronunciation 直音) and pangxun (lateral glosses 傍訓).
The work Zhiyin pangxun Mao Shi jujie 直音傍訓毛詩句解 (Explication by sentence of Mao’s
version of the Book of Poetry with pronunciation and lateral glosses) by Li Gongkai (13th c.) is a
representative example of this textual genre. Of uncertain date, the work features interlinear anno-
tations to poems in the Book of Poetry.
The following two excerpts contain the short prose preface that introduces the poem “A simple
peasant” (poem 59) in Mao’s edition of the Book of Poetry and the poem’s first stanza, together
with the annotations in Li Gongkai’s work, written in smaller characters. As mentioned before,
in the extant printed editions of the work, the annotations are written in a double column format,
while here they are reproduced in a single line following the modern punctuated edition edited by
68
Li (2012). The translation of small preface and the annotations in excerpts 1 and 2 are my own. The
English translation of the poem’s first stanza in excerpt 2 is from Waley (1996, p. 49).
《氓》，詩篇名，氓音萌。刺時也。所以刺當時也。宣公之時，衛宣公時。禮義消亡，禮義之
化消亡不存。淫風大行，淫亂之風盛行而莫遏。男女無別。男女混合，無有分別。遂相奔誘。
於是更相奔誘。華落色衰，及顏色衰如華之落。復相棄背，又相棄絕而違背。或乃困而自
悔，或乃窮困而自悔悟其過。喪其妃耦。則已喪失其妃耦矣。妃，配。故序其事以風焉，所以
序述其事以爲風刺焉。美反正，其既失而能反於正道者，則嘉美之。刺淫泆也。其淫逸而不知自
反者，則譏刺之也。泆，逸。
Excerpt 1 – small preface

A simple peasant, the poem’s title, the pronunciation of “simple peasant” (meng) is as “meng” (sprout) is a
criticism of the times is meant to criticise those times. At the time of Duke Xuan, the times of Duke
Xuan of Wei ritual norms and ethical righteousness had withered away, the influence of ritual norms
and ethical righteousness had withered away and disappeared and immoral customs were widespread
licentious customs were in vogue with no restrain. There were no distinctions between men and
women men and women mixed with no distinction and therefore they united and seduced each other
and for this reason they united and seduced reciprocally. As youth declined and appearance ruined that
is the look was ruined following the passing of youth they abandoned and left the other again they cast
aside and left behind the other again. And then one reduced to distress repented and then being reduced
to destitution one realised the errors and repented having lost the partner but had already lost one’s consort.
“Consort” (fei) is “spouse” (pei). Therefore this poem recounts this fact for edification for this rea-
son, it narrates this fact in order to serve as edification and criticism to praise the return to the property to
express admiration to those who, being lost, are able to return to the way of property to criticise indulging
into licentiousness and to criticise those who indulge in debauchery and do not know how to turn back to
oneself. “Licentious” (yi) is “dissolute” (yi).
Excerpt 2 – first stanza

氓之蚩蚩婦人始見此氓，蚩蚩然無所知。蚩，尺之反。抱布貿絲抱布而來，與我易絲。貿，茂。
匪來貿絲徐察其意，則非來與我易絲也。來即我謀乃來就我謀為室家之事。送子涉淇於是渡涉
淇水。至於頓丘直到頓丘之地。匪我愆期氓欲與偕行，而女未肯往，謂之曰: 非我愆過汝所約之
期。子無良媒汝自無好媒往來導達，故我行計未決耳。將子無怒謂吾子無發恚怒。將音鏘。秋
以為期但以秋時為約而成昏也。
We thought you were a simple peasant [When] the woman met this peasant for the first time, [he] looked
simple, ignorant. “Chi” (simple) reads as “Ch(i) and (Zh)i. Bringing cloth to exchange for threads. He
came bringing cloth to trade threads with me. “Mao” (trade) is [pronounced] as “mao” (luxuriant). But you
had not come to buy my thread Observing his intentions calmly, he had not come to trade threads with me.
You had come to arrange about me. You had come to arrange about me as wife. You were escorted
across the Qi Then we crossed the river Qi As far as Beacon Hill arrived directly to Dun qiu “It is not
I who want to put it off The peasant wanted them to proceed together but the girl was not yet willing to
go. [She] said to him: It is not me who is delaying the engagement you arranged. But you have no proper
match-maker. You do not have a good matchmaker to present your salutation, so I have not yet resolved to go.
Please do not be angry [She] said: Do not be furious. 將 is pronounced ‘qiang’. Let us fix on autumn
as the time.” Still, let us consider the autumn season for the engagement and get married.
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Barbara Bisetto
These textual fragments show that the commentator’s focus is pedagogical: Annotations provide
contextual details to help readers correctly read and understand each segment of the prototext.
Since this is a poetic text, prosification plays a crucial role in the transfer process. There is no
manifest interest in working specifically on the prosodic structure of every sentence, so that every
line of the poetic text is rewritten in more readable prose. From this perspective, simplification is
achieved by loosening the conciseness of the language of the source text.
At the level of glosses, we find primarily phonetic glosses, which are registered according to
different annotation systems, to single out specific terms (for example the phonetic glosses on chi
and mao) or to disambiguate the pronunciation of a character in a specific line if the character has
different readings (as for the gloss on meng after the poem’s title, and that on qiang in the stanza’s
last couplet). Lexical glosses are almost absent, except for the glosses on “consort” and “licen-
tious” in the prefatory text. At the lexical level, transformations are directly absorbed into the
translation and involve the shift from monosyllabic to disyllabic terms, for example, in the case
of qi 棄 and bei 背 which become qijue 棄絕 and weibei 違背, mei 美 becomes jiamei 嘉美, and
qian 愆 adds the resultative guo 過 in qianguo 愆過, or the addition of a synonymic expression, as
in the explanation of chi 蚩蚩 (ignorant, simple) in the stanza’s opening line, which is replicated
in the annotation followed by ran 然 to mark the adjectival predicate and then by a paraphrase,
“with no knowledge” (無所知).
A significant feature of the metatext concerns the treatment of the referential dimension of the
prototext and the cohesive ties. From this perspective, the text moves with “telescopic oscilla-
tion” (Cataldi, 1999, p. 246) between the dimension of commentary and that of translation. For
example, in the note added to the poem’s opening line, the commentator introduces “the woman”
as the subjective entity in the poem. However, this reference immediately takes the form of the
poetic persona as suggested by the recurrent uses of the first person pronoun wo 我 (I), which is
repeated five times in the following notes, in contrast to the two occurrences in the poem’s first
stanza. The commentator’s presence surfaces again in the note to the seventh line, when he inserts
a contextual reference to explain the woman’s words which are referred to afterwards introduced
by the verb wei 謂. Similarly, in the note to the ninth line the woman’s words are also introduced
by wei. In both cases, the “I” persona of the poems slides into the “she” of the commentator’s
interpretative text.
Next to jujie texts, another textual category for the popularisation of the classics that emerged
after the Song dynasty is marked using the term zhijie (lit. “direct explications”) in the title (Kin,
2021). Other similar categories were zhishuo 直說, in which shuo 說 (lit. “to say”, “to explain”)
(Xu, 2012) stands for “explanation”, and zhitan 直談 (lit. “direct discussion”) (Xing, 2020). As
Kin (2021) pointed out, these texts translated the entire canonical texts into the colloquial language
to help readers reach an accurate understanding of their meaning. They were evidence that “the
gap between Literary Sinitic and the colloquial language had expanded to the degree that the old
piecemeal explanations of the classics with annotations written in Literary Sinitic were no longer
sufficient for an accurate understanding of the meaning of the texts” (Kin, 2021, p. 161). The old-
est attested editions of zhijie texts are the works Daxue zhijie 大學直解 (Direct Explication of the
Great Learning) and Zhongyong zhijie (Direct Explication of the Doctrine of the Mean) 中庸直
解 written by Xu Heng (1209–1281), “distinguished Confucian master, educator and adviser to
Qubilai Qu’an” (Chan, 1993, p. 416) in the early Yuan period. In pursuing his work as a passion-
ate and dedicated Confucian educator, Xu was also an important translator. According to Klein
(2018, p. 92), “he translated the ossified, esoteric written language of the educated Chinese elite
into the living language of the common people”, transforming the moral teaching and culture of
the ancients into a living practice for the benefit of his contemporaries.
70
The following excerpts are from Zhongyong zhijie in the Siku quanshu edition of Xu Heng’s
collected works (Lu zhai yi shu 魯齋遺書, Collected Writings from the Lu Studio).
As in the case of jujie works, the text is divided into segments of variable length, and the
explanatory note appears immediately after each segment. In the Siku quanshu edition, the text
and the note are separated only by a white space, and there is no difference in the size of the
characters. Each new textual segment begins in a new column, and the note then continues with
an indent in the upper margin of subsequent columns. To distinguish prototext and metatext, this
chapter follows the edition punctuated and edited by Takekoshi (2007), with the Zhongyong seg-
ment in bold and the annotation text in standard font. The English translation of the Zhongyong is
based on Plaks (Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung, 2003, p. 26); the translation of the annotation is mine.
仲尼曰。君子中庸。小人反中庸。「仲尼」是孔子的表字。「君子」是能體道的人。
「中庸」是不偏不倚。無過不及。平常的道理。「小人」是不能體道的人。「反」是
相背的意思。子思引他祖孔子之言説：君子之人於中庸之道身體而力行之。日用常行
無不是這道理。故曰「君子中庸」。小人之人於中庸之道不能身體而力行之。日用常
行都背着這道理。故曰「小人反中庸」。
Our Master Chung-ni [Zhongni] has stated: “The man of noble character embodies the
ideal of the mean in common practice, whereas the man of base character behaves in a
manner contrary to this ideal”. “Zhongni” is the style name of Confucius. “man of noble
character” is the man who is able to embody the Way. “The mean” is the principle of being
impartial and unbiased, without excess and without deficiency, the principle of being com-
mon. “The man of base character” is the man who is not able to embody the Way. “Contrary”
( fan) means “opposite” (xiangbei). Zisi quotes the words of his grandfather Confucius say-
ing: The one who is a man of noble character places himself on the Way of the mean and
practices it with earnestness. In his daily, ordinary activities, there is nothing which is not in
accord with this principle. Therefore, he has stated “The man of noble character embodies
the ideal of the mean in common practice”. The person who is a man of base character
cannot place himself on the Way of the mean and practice it earnestly. In his daily, ordinary
activities he always violates this principle. Therefore, he has stated “The man of base char
acter behaves in a manner contrary to this ideal”.
As this example shows, the annotation generally consisted of a first part with lexical glosses on
the meaning of particularly relevant or complex terms or to provide contextual information helpful
in understanding the message, and then a second part that provided a translation of the text in a
more straightforward linguistic style that combines elements of classical and vernacular language
in order to improve the comprehensibility of the text. Various elements of the annotation are dis-
tinctive of the written vernacular language, such as the use of shi 是 as a copula and the use of the
particle de 的 for nominal determination, and on the lexical level the use of shuo 說 to introduce
speeches in place of yue 曰 used in the classical language.
Xu Heng’s activity as educator and translator greatly influenced the development of the zhijie
writings, which in the following dynasties expanded from canonical texts to include other works
considered fundamental for moral or cultural education. A classic example from the Ming period
is represented by a corpus of works written by Zhang Juzheng (1525–1586), an eminent late Ming
politician who rose to serve as Chief Grand Secretary during the reigns of Longqing (1567–1572)
and Wanli (1572–1620) emperors and worked also as the tutor of the young Emperor Wanli in the
early years of his reign. Zhang Juzheng compiled various zhijie commentaries and, in particular,
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Barbara Bisetto
an important zhijie edition of the Four Books with the commentaries by the Song dynasty Neo-
Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200), the Sishu jizhu zhijie 四書集注直解 (Direct explica-
tion of Collected annotations on phrases and sections of the Four Books), which in the 17th century
served as basis for the Jesuits’ translations of the Four Books in Latin language (Meynard, 2015).
The following excerpt is Zhang’s annotation of the same passage from Zhongyong discussed
earlier.
仲尼，是孔⼦的字。反，是違背。⼦思引孔⼦之⾔說道：「中庸是不偏不倚，無過
不及，平常的道理，雖為⼈所同有，然惟君⼦為能體之，其⽇⽤常⾏，無不是這中
庸的道理。若彼⼩⼈便不能了，其⽇⽤常⾏，都與這中庸的道理相違背矣。」
“Zhongni” is the style name of Confucius. “Contrary” (fan) is “violate” (weibei). Zisi quotes
the words of Confucius saying: “The Mean is the principle of being impartial and unbiased,
without excess and without deficiency, the principle of being common. Although it is what
men possess in common, only the person of noble character is able to embody it, so that in
his daily, ordinary activities there is nothing that does not conform to this principle of the
mean. On the other hand, however, the person of base character is not able to do so, and in
his daily and ordinary activities, acts against this principle of the mean”.
(Chongke Zhang Gelao jingyan Sishu zhijie 重刻張閣老經筵四書直解 (1679, Vol. 1),
Zhijie Zhongyong 直解中庸 juan 2, p. 4a)
The annotation structure mirrors that of Xu Heng’s text, with lexical glosses at the beginning,
followed by the translation. However, in the translated text, the source text is no longer referred
to with citations to the specific portion of the text, and the translation thus proceeds continuously.
Linguistically, the translated text uses a vernacular style mixed with classical elements.
A second important zhijie work by Zhang Juzheng is Nüjie zhijie 女誡直解 (Direct explications
of the Lessons for Women), an annotated vernacular edition of Nüjie by Ban Zhao (ca. 45–116),
one of the canonical texts on female education in the imperial period. The work was commissioned
to Zhang by Empress Dowager Li on the emperor’s wedding in 1578 as an instruction book for
the women entering the imperial palace. The text was intended for women’s instruction within the
court and did not gain wider circulation until the first half of the 17th century when it was included
in the printed edition of Zhang Juzheng’s complete works (Xia, 2010).
The following excerpt is drawn from the first chapter, Beiruo diyi 卑弱第一 (The Lowly and the
Weak). The English translation of Ban Zhao’s text is from Pang-White (2018). The translation of
Zhang’s annotation is mine. In the edition contained in the Collected Writings of Master Zhang Taiyue,
newly engraved (Xinke Zhang Taiyue xiansheng wenji 新刻張太岳先生文集), the textual spaces of
prototext and annotation is marked visually, as the segment from Nüjie is indented by two spaces at
the beginning of the column, while Zhang’s annotation follows and extends along the entire column.
古者生女三日，卧之牀下，弄之瓦磚，而齋告焉。
瓦磚，即今之紡磚。弄是以手拈弄。大家說：古人生女三日之後，臥之牀下，寢之
于地，將一塊紡磚與他拈弄，齋戒而吿之祖先說：我某日生一女。
On the third day after the birth of a girl, the ancients let her sleep [on the ground] below the
bed, let her play with a tile [from a weaving machine], and after fasting they announced her
birth to the ancestors at the ancestral temple.
(Pang-White, 2018, p. 43)
72
“Tile” is today’s spindle. “Play” is “to play [with something] in the hand”. The Lady said:
Three days after giving birth to a girl, they laid her under the bed and made her sleep on the
floor, gave her a spindle in her hands to play with, and after fasting announced to the ances-
tors: On such a day I gave birth to a girl.
卧之牀下，明其卑弱，主下人也。弄之瓦磚，明其習勞，主執勤也。齋告先君，
明當主繼祭祀也。三者蓋女人之常道，禮法之典教矣。
典即是常。這一節是解說上四句之意。大家説：古人生女所以臥之牀下者，明其不
高傲，不強梁，專尚卑弱之義。盖女人以事人為職。故專主于下人而不可高傲也。
所以弄以紡磚者。明其熟悉勞苦之義。盖女人以紡織為職，故主于執持勤勞而不可
懈怠也。齋吿先君者，盖女子長大嫁人將以內助其夫承家祭祀敬於誕生之初即齋戒
而吿之。這三件乃女人常行之道，禮法中常以為教而不容已也。
To let her sleep [on the ground] below the bed is to make it clear that she is the lowly and
the weak, and that she should place herself beneath others. To let her play with a tile [from a
weaving machine] is to indicate unmistakably that she should be accustomed to labor and be
diligent in her work. Fasting and announcing her birth to the ancestors is to convey unam-
biguously that she is responsible for [preparing ritual offerings and] continuing ancestral
religious rites. These three responsibilities depict the constant way of being a woman and
the canonical teachings of the ritual law.
(Pang-White, 2018, p. 43)
“Canonical” [teachings] are constant. The above section is an explanation of the meaning of
the last four sentences. The Lady said: That the ancients, after giving birth to a girl, placed
her below the bed, was to make clear that she should not be arrogant, tyrannical, and should
esteem the lowly and weak. It is a woman’s job to serve others. Therefore, she should place
herself beneath other and not be arrogant. That they let her play with a spindle, was to make
clear that she should familiarise herself with hard work. It is a woman’s job to weave. There-
fore, she should set herself on being diligent and hard-working, and should not be lazy. As
for fasting and announcing her birth to the ancestors, it is to make clear since the moment of
birth that as a girl, once she is grown and married, she will assist her husband in performing
the family rites. These three things are the constant way of being a woman, as they are taught
in the ritual law, and cannot be discontinued.
(Xinke Zhang Taiyue xiansheng wenji 新刻張太岳先生文集, juan 11, pp. 5b–6a)
Similar to the examples presented so far, the text is divided into segments of varying length, fol-
lowed by the annotation, written in a simple style mixing classical and vernacular elements. The
annotation might include lexical glosses, a brief explanation of the meaning of the text, and the
translation. The explanatory section is introduced with the words “Zhe yi jie shi jieshuo [. . .] . . .
zhi yi” 這一節是解說 [. . .] 之意/義 (This part is the explanation of the meaning of [. . .]), while
the translation segment is preceded by the expression “Dagu shuo” 大家說 (The Lady said), Dagu
being the title name of Ban Zhao. The translation contains various insertions that reveal the inter-
pretative and pedagogical objectives of the author, given the specific readership. For example,
the insertion of “should not be arrogant, tyrannical” in the opening lines of the translation offers
a practical and concrete reading of the meaning of “lowly” for a woman who enters the imperial
court. The terms introduced in the lexical glosses to explain vocabulary from the prototext are
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Barbara Bisetto
usually repeated in the translation, an element suggesting the synchronicity between the glossary
intervention and the making of the translation.
A second late Ming zhijie version of Ban Zhao’s Lessons for Women is the work Cao Dagu
Nüjie zhijie 曹大家女誡直解 (Direct explication of Lessons for Women by Lady Cao) compiled by
Zhao Nanxing (1550–1627) and printed as a standalone text in 1587 (Xia, 2010). This work repro-
duces Ban Zhao’s text accompanied by an easy-to-read translation, mixing elements of classical
and vernacular languages and offering another example of the premodern interest in popularisation
practices.
The last category considered in this chapter is that of yanyi (lit. elaboration of the meaning).
Compared to jujie and zhijie, which as metaliterary categories belong firmly to the domain of
commentarial literature, the case of yanyi is more complex, as it stretches between the domains
of commentary and narrative fiction. Since the Tang dynasty and then more frequently from the
Song-Yuan period onwards, the term yanyi appeared in the title of commentaries on religious,
canonical, and poetic texts (Bisetto, 2017, 2018). During the 16th century, however, the term
began to appear in the title of narrative works based on the rewriting of stories on historical and
pseudo-historical subjects, in the wake of the success of the novel Sanguo zhi tongsu yanyi 三國
志通俗演義 (Lit. An elaboration of the meaning of the Sanguo zhi to reach the masses). If and to
what extent there is a link between these different instances of yanyi in premodern textual culture
is a matter that falls beyond the scope of this chapter. However, scholars have observed how yanyi
narratives often incorporated more or less extensive translations of classical language sources
that were rewritten and absorbed within the new narrative. In this perspective, and albeit careful
analysis of individual instances, yanyi narratives may help shed light on the complex processes of
recodification and reimagination associated with the diachronic transposition of texts.
One interesting case is represented by the 17th-century work Gujin Lienü zhuan yanyi 古今
列女傳演義 (An elaboration of the meaning of Biographies of Women from past and present), a
vernacularised version of another canonical work of women’s education in ancient China, the Han
dynasty text Lienü zhuan 列女傳by Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE). The work consists of six chap-
ters for a total of 110 biographies, of which 91 are based on biographies from the first six chapters
of Lienü zhuan and its sequel Xu Lienü zhuan, and the remaining 19 on stories included in other
premodern anthologies. Unlike the other works presented in this chapter, in this case the metatext
does not accompany the original text as a tool for helping its comprehension but replaces it, creat-
ing a new text elaborated starting from the linguistic transformation of the source text. Based on
a preliminary comparison of a corpus of biographies from Liu Xiang’s text and the vernacular
version, Bisetto (2014) observed the variety of microtextual strategies applied in the translation
process, which included verbatim quotation, word-to-word translation, paraphrases, and amplifi-
cation, adopting a linguistic style that combines the classical and the vernacular language.
In explaining the general project informing the yanyi edition in the preface, the author, styled
with the pseudonym You Longzi 猶龍子, claims explicitly that the work originates from the aware-
ness of the linguistic hiatus that separates the Han text from its contemporary readers. He thus
assumes the responsibility of transferring the text’s most profound meanings from the ancients’
style to the common language familiar to everyone. In so doing, he carefully indulges in those
details that enrich the verbal composition of a text, thus continuously shifting the task from ver-
nacularisation to fictional rewriting and plot development. In this way, the author helps the reader
interpret some of the most disturbing issues raised by the heroine’s virtuous behaviours by offering
detailed contextual information to clarify the woman’s inner mind: “Through this transformation,
the Expanded Biographies creates a comprehensive accommodation between the Han dynasty
classic and late imperial mores” (Moyer, 2020, p. 26).
74
Conclusion
The textual categories presented in this chapter show the importance that the practices of intra-
lingual translation played in the premodern period as strategies to promote the intelligibility and
popularisation of canonical texts in favour of common and non-scholarly readers. They belonged
to or emerged in the context of commentarial literature, and they primarily addressed a pedagogi-
cal function.
The three categories show the close interrelationship between commentary and translation in
the premodern period. On the one hand, the categories jujie and zhijie allow us to examine the
translative operations characterising these forms of commentary. The translation was seen as a
valuable tool to help readers to understand the meaning of the prototext. As such, it did not enjoy
an autonomous status, an aspect reflected in the hierarchical distribution of the different elements
on the page: Prototext, annotation, and translation. On the other hand, the case of yanyi allows us
to observe the traces of a shift in the opposite direction, with the embedding of the interpretive
function of the commentary in a new, fully autonomous text, which presents itself – with varying
degrees of accuracy – as a possible model of a previous text or even tradition of texts, in which
comprehension and knowledge are linked not only to aspects of language transfer but also to
aspects of meaning actualisation, as in the domain of invention.
Further reading
Elman, B. A. (Ed.). (2014). Rethinking East Asian languages, vernaculars, and literacies, 1000–1919. Brill.
Lanselle, R. (2022). Diglossia, intralingual translation, rewriting: Towards a new approach to the analysis
of the relationship between Ming-Qing vernacular stories and their classical sources (1). Journal of the
European Association for Chinese Studies, 3, 207–262.
Li, G., Sieber, P., & Kornicki, P. (Eds.). (2022). Ecologies of translation in East and South East Asia. Am-
sterdam University Press.
Li, X. A. (2019). Making classical Chinese literature contemporary. Translation “between centre and ab-
sence”. In J. Kiaer, J. Guest, & X. A. Li (Eds.), Translation and literature in East Asia between visibility
and invisibility (pp. 13–48). Routledge.
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Takekoshi, T. (2007). Zhongyong zhijie jiaoben (shang) 『中庸直解』校本(上) [Critical edition of
Zhongyong zhijie]. Kotonoha, 60, 4–15. www.for.aichi-pu.ac.jp/museum/pdf2/takekoshi60.pdf
Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive translation studies and beyond. John Benjamins.
Waley, A. (1996). The book of songs (J. R. Allen, Ed.). Grove Press.
Wong, L. (2011). Translation and politics in modern China, 1860–1980s. In H. Kittel, A. P. Frank, N. Greiner,
T. Hermans, W. Koller, J. Lambert, & F. Paul (Eds.), Übersetzung translation traduction. 3 Teilband/Vol
ume 3/Tome 3 (pp. 2188–2195). Walter De Gruyter.
Xia, X. (2010). Jingdian chanshi zhong de wenti, xingbie yu shidai – Yi wan Ming yu wan Qing de Nüjie
baihua zhujie 經典闡釋中的文體、性别與時代 – 晚明與晚清的《女誡》白話注解 [Language, gen-
der, and times in classical exegesis: Vernacular annotations of Nü jie in the Late Ming and Late Qing].
Zhongguo wenxue xuebao 中國文學學報, 1, 201–224.
Xing, N. (2020). Yuan Ming shiqi baihua de zhuanzhe yu jianjin. Yi Daxue zhijie Sishu zhangju jizhu Sishu
jizhu zhijie (Daxue) ciyu bijiao wei li 元明時期白話的轉折與漸進 – 以《大學直解》《四書章句集
注》《四書集注直解》(大學)詞語比較為例 [The transition and advancement of the vernacular in the
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Yuan and Ming periods. An analysis based on the lexicon in Daxue zhijie, Sishu zhangju jizhu and Sishu
jizhu zhijie (Daxue)]. Qinghai shifan daxue xuebao 青海師範大學學報, 42(6), 140–145.
Xinke Zhang Taiyue xiansheng wenji 新刻張太岳先生文集 [Newly printed collected works of Zhang Juz-
heng]. Siku quanshu 四庫全書. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/02100463.cn/page/n42/
mode/2up
Xu, D. (2012) Yuan dai de zhishuo zuopin yu shumian baihua zhushu de zijue 元代的直說作品與書面白話
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wenshi luncong 中華文史論叢, 4, 307–334.
org/10.7202/038904ar
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5
VERGILIAN CENTOS FROM
THE PERSPECTIVE OF
Stealing his club and much more from Hercules
Ekin Öyken
Introduction
This chapter has two interconnected purposes, one general and the other more specific. My general
focus is to discuss the relevance of studying Vergilian centos from the viewpoint of intralingual
translation, while a more specific purpose is to explore the tension between an original work and a
translated text, and the cento as original poetry and as a literary game.
I focus on two representative examples (both written in the fourth century CE) out of the 16
extant Latin centos from antiquity. These two, namely the Cento Vergilianus by Proba and the
Cento nuptialis by Ausonius, are diametrically opposed in terms of theme and style, but they
served as models for many centos that were written up to and beyond the early modern period.
What is a cento?
Centos are poems composed of half-lines, complete lines or sometimes slightly longer sections
taken non-consecutively and preferably with minimal modifications from the works of canoni-
cal poets, and they reached their apogee in late antiquity.1 Greek and Latin poetry was written in
quantitative metre, which was based mainly on syllable length, and ancient cento poems followed
that rule. Just like their source texts, usually epics, centos were cast in hexameters, and this formal
element appears to have played a unifying role in the organization of these elaborate collages
(Pavlovskis, 1989, p. 72).2 The Latin noun cento is derived from the Greek word ként(r)ōn, which
signifies a multicoloured garment sewn together from old fabrics – in a word, a patchwork. This
would suggest to anyone familiar with Homeric texts and their performative aspect a similarity
with the Greek term rhapsōidós. This term implies a type of professional reciter of epic poetry
as well as the formulaic composition technique of the earlier minstrels (West, 2001, p. 5, n. 5),
and the verbal component (rháptein) of this compound word is semantically related to “sewing”
(González, 2013). Although the two traditions (i.e., rhapsodic performance and cento poetry) are
apparently different in terms of history and poetics (see Bright, 1984, p. 79, n. 1; cf. Pavlovskis,
1989, p. 71), repurposing already existing material is essential to both of them. The cento is more
a literary technique than a generic genre; it is an “écriture such as parody, travesty, contrafacture,3
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-7 78
Vergilian centos from the perspective of translation
and pastiche” (Verweyen & Witting, 1991, p. 172). Its unconfined presence in various genres that
span from epic, didactic, and occasional poetry to drama and political essay can be considered
as one of the aspects that enabled the cento to outlive antiquity, the medieval ages, and beyond.4
Centos have a wide variety of themes that range from wedding nights to bread making, from
Christian teaching to dice games. Detailed studies that explore the cultural and literary value of
centos appeared relatively recently, mostly because of the ossified prejudice of the conservative
vein that compares ancient centos unfavourably to canonized poems of classical literature (see
Bažil, 2002; Hinds, 2014, pp. 172–173; Pavlovskis, 1989, p. 70). Latin versions of these patch-
work poems, of which barely more than a dozen are extant, are recycled verses mostly from
Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (thence the name Vergiliocentones),5 while their Greek
antecedents drew mostly on Homeric verses.6 If we disregard the two relatively long examples,
namely the 694-verse-long religious cento by the Christian poetess Proba and the 131-verse-long
erotic one by the poet Ausonius, most of the Latin centos are anonymous. They are sometimes
readily categorized according to their themes as Christian, mythological, or secular (McGill, 2005,
pp. xv–xvi), but their close reading reveals that they differ in terms of literary/translational strate-
gies and cultural paradigms.
The place of ancient centos in literary history

Unlike nineteenth-century historiography, which in general tended to see late antiquity as a decline
from the lofty standards of classical culture,7 many researchers today appreciate the wealth of
ideas, inspiration, and production of the late Roman culture, especially following the works of
Peter Brown (1971) and Alan Cameron (2011), among others. Some have even argued that the
Roman culture of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, and patristic literature in particular, is compa-
rable in these terms to the Athens of fifth century BCE (Conte, 1994, p. 678; cf. Pavlovskis, 1989,
p. 71). Late Latin poetry has shared the same fate, in that it has only recently been paid proper
attention, and the cento, which is one of its most radically experimental forms, was once called a
“literary freak” even by one of its own scholars (see Bright, 1984, p. 80).8
One of the main characteristics of the late antique poets is their way of engaging with the liter-
ary tradition from which they largely derive (see McGill & Pucci, 2016, p. 15). A difference can be
observed in this regard between the late antique Greek poets and the Latin poets.9 Some scholars
have argued that late antique Greek poetry was associated mainly with educational purposes, and
those Greek poems, unlike their Latin counterparts, were written mainly to be read rather than to
be recited, and aimed more at imitating rather than emulating classical models (see Hose, 2004;
Pollmann, 2017, p. 6). The Roman concepts of imitatio and aemulatio are important for under-
standing the artistic strategies of the centonists.
We should first consider that Latin literature developed largely through translations, adaptations,
and imitations of Greek literature from its beginnings in the third century BCE. This aspect of Latin
literature is sometimes compared to the process by which Western literature largely grew out of
Latin literature (Jensson, 2003, p. 86). Early Latin authors, some of whom were brought to Rome as
slaves and learned Latin as a second language,10 not only imitated the Greek models but sometimes
also competed with them, and the latter has usually been labelled as aemulatio in ancient literary
criticism.11 Nevertheless, the distinction between translation, adaptation, imitation, and emulation
was usually a fluid one in Roman culture. For instance, interpretatio, a Latin term that primarily
means “explanation, interpretation”, was also used for translation in a wide array of intra- and inter-
lingual forms. The rhetorical concept of imitatio, on the other hand, reflects the avowed depend-
ence of writers upon their predecessors (Conte & Most, 2012), but it does not consist of mere
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Ekin Öyken
imitation as its modern counterpart may initially suggest. Imitatio can be creative, and the differ-
ence between imitatio and aemulatio lies more with authorial self-positioning rather than with the
degree of originality. Hence, the two concepts are not exclusive but complementary (Russell, 1979,
p. 10), and they are naturally linked to the ancient Roman practice of translation (McElduff, 2013,
pp. 159–160). Considering the extensive literature on these ancient concepts and their later recep-
tion, I will content myself here by quoting Hermans (2002, p. 10) as adapted by McElduff (2013,
p. 15): “In looking at Rome, we must abandon our ‘metaphors of translation as likeness, replica,
duplicate, copy, portrait, reflection, reproduction, imitation, mimesis, mirror image or transparent
pane of glass’”. However, this should not lead us to think that the theory and practice of translation
in ancient Rome was homogeneous. As with many other cultures where translation played a key
role, there were competing perspectives and norms about translation in Roman times.
The late antique authors, many of whom experimented with unusual poetic forms and tech-
niques including the cento, have been until recently either undervalued and left in the shadow of
classical authors or seen as the undeveloped forerunners of European literature. Such accounts
have in general failed to realize the creative mediating function of these authors in the relationship
between ancient and medieval literature, which involves continuity as well as rupture.
Centos and intertextuality

There are several studies which explore centos within the framework of intertextuality (see espe-
cially Bažil, 2002; Verweyen & Witting, 1991). As probably the most extreme and structurally
complex mode of intertextuality, cento came to the fore during the Middle Roman Empire (117–
305 CE), and it was added to many other intertextual modes and strategies that can be found in ear-
lier Latin poets, including Vergil himself. Since influence and intertextuality in ancient literature is
a vast topic on its own, I will here confine myself to a representative anecdote about the reception
of Vergil’s use of Homeric material, recorded in the Suetonian vita of the poet:
Asconius Pedianus, in a book which he wrote “Against the Detractors of Vergil,” sets forth
a very few of the charges against him, and those for the most part dealing with history and
with the accusation that he borrowed a great deal from Homer; but he says that Vergil used
to meet this latter accusation with these words: “Why don’t my critics also attempt the same
thefts? If they do, they will realize that it is easier to filch his club from Hercules than a line
from Homer.”
(Trans. Rolfe, 1914, p. 465)
Roughly a generation later, another great poet, Ovid, reappropriated lines from eminent poets such
as Vergil, not as an act of plagiarism, according to his friend, the orator Gallio, but as an overt bor-
rowing that should be noticed. This information, which was recorded by Seneca the Elder,12 further
indicates that even renowned poets such as Vergil and Ovid did not refrain from literary allusions
and borrowings, and they considered them, on the contrary, part of their poetics.
Indeed, the metaphor of “creative stealing” for the reuse of poetic material has been a recurring
topos in Western culture.13 What is more striking, though, is its presence in Ottoman literature,
for instance at the end (couplets 2078–2080) of Hüsn-ü Aşk [Beauty and Love] by the eighteenth-
century poet and mystic Şeyh Galip’s (see Gölpınarlı, 1940, p. 15):
I found a new style in that buried vault

I opened that cache and I spent it all
80
I took its secrets from the Masnavi

I stole, but I stole common property
Endeavor to understand this yourself
Find that precious pearl and steal it yourself.
(Şeyh Galip, 2005, p. 202)
I think that the authorial voice in these two examples, namely Vergil’s and Şeyh Galip’s responses
to their detractors/critics, is strikingly similar, which further supports that to repurpose lines from
illustrious poets of the past has not been an uncommon practice. However, the fact that centos
consist almost entirely of borrowed material makes them unique.
When we consider the cento as a mode of writing that uses larger units, that is half-lines instead
of single words (Bright, 1984, p. 80), we are confronted with the problem of delineating the border
between literary and ordinary language, a border whose existence has often been called into ques-
tion by contemporary critical theorists (see Morgan, 1985; Rajan, 1991, p. 63; Semino & Steen,
2008). A poetic work is more than a sum of verbal expressions around a theme; it is an artwork
with a unique perspective on even the most common human experience and condition. Therefore,
to call the cento a game of reshuffling borrowed lines does not do justice to the contextual and
intertextual dimensions of this literary art form. On the other hand, in late antiquity it probably was
not seen merely as a form of intellectual vanity either. Contrary to their synthetic aspect, I consider
late antique centos as the natural expression of the artistic quest to build a culture with multiple
ethnic, political, and religious identities. I believe that a contemporary translation perspective is
crucial in observing all these, even though centos, like the rest of ancient literature and its sur-
rounding culture, are observable only through indirect and often fragmentary documents.
While Ausonius, an overtly self-reflexive cento author, seems to consider his verbal art, with
some poetic modesty no doubt, as far from being comparable to traditional forms of poetry in
terms of value and use, he did not refrain from spotlighting the skilful playfulness he achieved.
Unlike most ancient cento authors, many of his works in other poetic forms are extant. Therefore,
one can hope to discover where this author placed centos in relation to other poetic forms. Even if
his readers, and himself alike, did not regard the cento as literature per se, they may have cherished
its artistic novelty. Indeed, regardless of which model is used for explaining change in art history,
it seems difficult to claim that the pressure of novelty in art is of recent origin as once claimed (see
Berlyne, 1971; cf. Martindale, 1986). We should yet remember that aesthetic conservatism is not
a modern phenomenon either.
How do centos qualify as intralingual translation?

The implications of defining centos as a mode of intralingual translation are twofold. Firstly, lin-
guistic products that were not created from scratch, but borrowed and compositionally modified
from canonical texts of the past in the same language, seem to have provided an unexpectedly
convenient medium for cultural transfer, which can be studied fruitfully from the viewpoints of
translation history, cultural translation, or other branches of translation studies. Secondly, from the
viewpoint of literary history, considering centos as a form of intralingual translation can offer an
interesting perspective where the seeming discontinuity between classical Latin poetry and its late
antique counterpart can be alternatively explained as the inevitable alteration inherent in every act
of translation.
An intriguing aspect of considering centos from the perspective of intralingual translation is
that the limitation of available signifiers (i.e., verse fragments from existing poems), which this
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form of writing requires, is itself a means for transferring meaning. It should be noted here that
words not taken from canonical source texts; for Latin centos the three works of Vergil in general,
seldom appear in centos. Their poet-translators appropriated this limited repertory of verse frag-
ments instead of words or other lexical units for conveying meaning in thematically, structurally,
and narratively different target texts. This is also a crucial aspect that separates the cento from
other literary rewritings and qualifies it as a unique mode of intralingual translation. For the sole
sake of understanding their basic mechanism, the combinations of these fragments (not necessar-
ily syntagms) can be compared to the infinite combinations of the finite number of words that are
used in communication. The original semantic and syntactic values of the words that constitute the
fragments are preserved to varying degrees depending mainly on the combinations preferred by
the poet-translators. The reason I call the centonists “poet-translators” is not that they both wrote
poems and translated poems from or into other languages, but that the very nature of the cento
required them to act as both a poet and as a translator. It seems that they, at least the ones we know
by name, served as agents of change in late antiquity, during one of the great transformations of
the West in terms of religion and politics, and that centos enabled them to bring Vergil, or versions
of his works, to readers of later ages. To sum up, rather than coining new words or assigning new
meanings to existing words, or creating new expressions by combining them freely, cento authors,
as will be exemplified later, transform that limitation through a systematic type of intertextuality
into a means to transfer, alter, or juxtapose meanings.
An immediate example can be found in the well-known Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi
[Vergilian Cento in Praise of Christ] by the fourth-century Christian poetess Faltonia Betitia
Proba,14 in the section (307–312) where she retells the Deluge from Genesis (6:5 sqq.; 7:17, 21):15
Table 5.1 Lines 307–312 of Proba’s Cento Vergilianus
Tum pater omnipotens ¦ graviter Aen. 7.770 etc. ¦ Then the almighty Father, deeply troubled
commotus ab alto 1.126 (et) launched himself,
aethere semittit: ¦ tellurem effundit Aen. 9.645 ¦ 12.204 from the high heaven. He suffused the earth with
in undas (effundat) water,
diluvio miscens caelumque in Aen. 12.205 (solvat) mingling it with a flood and made the sky collapse
Tartara solvit. into Tartarus.
sternit agros, sternit sata laeta Aen. 2.305 He covered the fields, covered the fertile orchards
boumque labores and washed away
diluit; inplentur fossae et cava Aen. 1.326 the work of oxen. Trenches filled up and the deep
flumina crescunt; rivers swelled
et genus omne neci pecudum dedit, Aen. 3.480 and all livestock species were handed over to
omne ferarum. death, and the wild animals.
(Ed. Lucarini & Fassina, 2015) (Trans. Cullhed, 2015, p. 210)
Proba opens the section with the divine epithet of pater omnipotens (“the almighty father”,
a well-known designation of the Christian God) taken from Vergil’s Georgics (2.325) or Aeneid
(7.770 or 10.100),16 which originally describes the chief Roman god, Jupiter; continues with a
half-line that reads in translation “greatly troubled, [looking out] from the deep”, originally refer-
ring to the powerful sea-god, Neptune (1.126), and ends the sentence with another half-line from
Book 9 (645) of the epic to have: “Then the almighty father, greatly troubled launched himself from
the high ether”. The adjective altus in late as in classical Latin has the opposite semes of “deep”
and “high”. Proba seems to have used this polysemy to simultaneously evoke in the minds of her
82
learned readers the pagan god, Neptune, who had the deep sea as his abode, and the Christian God,
who resides in heaven. With the same mastery, she nullifies the meaning of “deep”, and hence the
allusion to the pagan divinity, by setting a half line that begins with the word aether (ether), which
is modified by the adjective altus of the previous line, and semantically modifies it in return from
“deep” to “high” to confirm the adjective clause “high ether”. Since Proba was well versed in
pagan Latin literature, this and similar instances are unlikely to be the accidental result of a merely
linguistic and metrical bricolage.17 As an increasing number of studies show, this kind of semantic
alteration was fundamental to the art of centonists (see, among others, Bažil, 2018; Fassina, 2006).
These introductory remarks may illustrate why centos qualify as intralingual translation.18 How-
ever, if one draws on the highly elaborate taxonomy of Gottlieb (2018), it is impossible to find any
category that covers centos even remotely, and the nearest option that one might consider seems to be
the category of intralingual translation that is intrasemiotic and diachronic (I/b/ii), isosemiotic (II/a),
adaptational (III/b), and verbal (IV/a), where “contemporary adaptation of ‘classic’ film” is given as
an example. If the adaptation in the example were made by re-editing the images from certain classic
movies, then centos could be considered in the same light, but obviously this is not the case.
The ancient readers were definitely aware of the connection between centos and the canonical
texts that provided their linguistic material. Therefore, centos cannot be thought of independently
from the stylistic aspects and cultural contexts of their source texts, and the cultural context
especially may be seen as the very dimension where translation is most obvious. Since the source
and target culture in question represent different systems, namely classical Latin literature and its
pagan world versus late Latin literature and its Christianizing world, and many of the linguistic
entities acquire different meanings in their target culture, we are dealing with a very complicated
case of translation where the form largely remains, and the content changes (see Figure 5.1).
The peculiar case of centos may be instrumental in expanding the current definitions of intralin-
gual translation towards more comprehensive frames that incorporate cultural theories to a larger
extent. Furthermore, the evident self-reflexivity of some centos may offer some important insights
about the diachronic types of intralingual translation in general.19
From the artistic perspective, the idea of “cumulative aesthetics” (Elsner, 2006) of late antiquity
involves centos as well as the architectural reuse of spolia,20 in this case, pagan art works such as
sculptures, reliefs, panels, and capitals, in new buildings of the henceforth Christian cities (Elsner,
2000, p. 176, 2006, p. 292). It should also be noted that the notion of originality at that time was
different from both that of the earlier periods of antiquity and that of the Romantic era and beyond
(Okáčová, 2009). This, I believe, further suggests that cultural theories of translation are well
suited to study centos.
A close reading of centos

The centos by Proba and Ausonius, and by the late Latin authors in general, reveal that in the
field of literature intralingual translations do not always aim to clarify the source text and make
its supposed meaning more accessible. As has been previously pointed out in some studies on
late antique centos, representatives of this technique purposefully obscured the source texts by
forcing their readers to perform an exegetical reading (see Pollmann, 2017, p. 117; Tissi, 2020,
pp. 284–295). While this process of obscuration might appear at odds with the common strategy of
explicitation in intralingual translation, it can also be seen as a key for indirectly introducing new
readers to an otherwise unfavourable culture and literary tradition.
Thus, I argue that the reorganization and recontextualization of the literary source text (usually
more than one in Vergilian centos), for culturally distant readers of roughly the same language,
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Figure 5.1 Basic schema of translation types and threefold levels of source/target differentiation in Proba’s
cento
can qualify as translation (see Pavlovskis, 1989, p. 75), and specifically as intralingual translation.
Nevertheless, cento authors seem to have been more concerned with manipulating source texts for
a wide variety of purposes rather than simply with transferring them literally into the target sys-
tem. From another perspective, however, owing to this technique of literary collage, which enabled
them to convert Vergil into a poet of late antiquity, the centonists could deliberately bridge the
gap between the Augustan poet and fourth-century Latin readers (Conte, 1994, p. 662; Pavlovskis,
84
Table 5.2 A selection of parallel motifs in Vergil and Proba
Vergilian context of the verse fragments Target context in proba Motif
Giant sea serpents kill the priest who warned Temptation of the serpent Serpent as the symbol of
the Trojans against the wooden horse evil
(Aen. II); the fury Alecto sends a serpent to
enrage Amata (Aen. VII)
Queen Dido’s story and her deception by the Eve’s deception Deception of a potent
hero Aeneas (Aen. IV) woman
Failure of a hive (G. IV) Great Flood Global destruction of life
Prophetess Sibyl describes the punishment of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount Punishment of impiety
impious figures in the netherworld (Aen. VI) about righteous living
Mercury with winged feet, the messenger of Jesus’s ascension into Heaven Divine messenger
gods (Aen. IV)
1989, pp. 72–73). As the target text is a collage or remix of the source texts,21 and it is not required to
retain the semantic content of the originals, what then has been transferred exactly? My first answer
to this would be a myriad of cultural symbols (see Table 5.2), such as the divine power of founding
cities and civilizations endowed to humans, which in Proba’s religious cento was transferred from
Aeneas to Jesus (see Clark & Hatch, 1981a).22 Elements of verbal and conceptual artistry as well
can be transferred through cento, albeit in a fragmented form.
In the case of Vergilian centos, the three works by Vergil (first century BCE), which were
already canonized at that time (from the second century CE onwards), were known above all to
the elite readership through their formal education (Marrou, 1964, pp. 444–446). However, the
reception of these works, as well as the figure of Vergil, was significantly influenced by the cultural
context of late antiquity and the emerging Christian worldviews. All these should be considered
against the background of the larger framework of the Christianization of Rome, during which
fierce debates took place regarding the question as to whether, and to what extent, authors and
works of the pagan past should be included in the Christian curriculum. If the works of Vergil
could maintain their place, this did not happen without some resistance to their pagan features such
as polytheistic cults and myths, or some parodies of their canonicity.23 In that period, the social and
economic scars of the military power struggles, which spanned a large part of the third century,
were still raw, the religious tension between Christians and pagans was escalating, and the threat
of Germanic invasions had become more worrying. During such a time of instability and radical
change, Christianity, despite its own internal conflicts, appears to have played a unifying and revi-
talizing role in the late Roman world. However, the literary and artistic resources of this new era,
especially in the West, were far from being adequate to compete with their earlier counterparts, and
this holds true for poetry as well. This is one of the reasons why centos appeared.
The rare instances where the same verse fragment is used in different centos are particularly
illustrative. A striking example is found in Proba and Ausonius (see Pollmann, 2017, p. 118;
Ziolkowski & Putnam, 2008, p. 479): The Vergilian fragment pedibus per mutua nexis (Aen. 7.66),
describes the sudden appearance of a swarm of bees “with mutually intertwined feet”, as an omen
of the coming of the mythic hero Aeneas and his men, the future founders of Rome. The expression
per mutua (mutually), which mildly humanizes here the organizational skills of bees, may have
inspired both centonists to introduce human agents instead. In line with the theme of salvation of
her Christian cento, Proba redeployed the fragment to portray Jesus’s crucifixion (Matthew 26:27,
27:29; Mark 15:19 sqq.; Luke 23:33; John 19:18), specifically the nailing of his feet (v. 618):
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Table 5.3 Lines 613–620 of Proba’s Cento Vergilianus
Tum vero ¦ raptis concurrunt undique telis; Aen. 4.571 etc. ¦ Then they came running from all
7.520 directions with drawn weapons.
tollitur in caelum clamor cunctique ¦ repente Aen. 11.745 ¦ 12.462 They raised their cry to the skies
etc. and suddenly everyone
corripuere sacram effigiem manibusque cruentis Aen. 2.167 seized the holy figure. With their
bloody hands
ingentem quercum, decisis undique ramis, Aen. 11.5 they put up a large oak tree with
cut branches,
constituunt ¦ spirisque ligant ingentibus ¦ ipsum, Aen. 6.217 ¦ 2.217 ¦ tied him with huge twisted bands,
2.190 etc.
tendebantque manus ¦ pedibus per mutua nexis, Aen. 6.314 ¦ 7.66 and stretched out his hands and
pressed his feet together
triste ministerium, ¦ sequitur quos cetera pubes, Aen. 6.223 ¦ 5.74 —a terrible undertaking—and the
other young men followed them.
ausi omnes inmane nefas ausoque potiti. Aen. 6.624 All dared an atrocious sin and
enjoyed what they dared.
(Ed. Lucarini & Fassina, 2015) (Trans. Cullhed, 2015, p. 227)
Per mutua is semantically shifted there from reciprocity to physical alignment (of the feet).
Likewise, the meaning of the word nexis, which is the past participle form of the verb nectere, is
changed from “intertwined” to “pressed/fastened”.
Ausonius on the other hand, in his obscene Cento nuptialis, uses the same fragment to depict
the entwined limbs of lovers during sexual intercourse (v. 107).
Table 5.4 Lines 101–109 of Ausonius’s Cento nuptialis
Postquam congressi ¦ sola sub nocte per umbram Once they came together, in the
Aen. 9.631 ¦
6.268 shadows of lonely night,
et mentem Venus ipsa dedit, ¦ nova proelia temptant. and Venus herself inspired them;
G. 3.267 ¦
they wage afresh the fight.
Aen. 3.240
tollit se arrectum, ¦ conantem plurima frustra He raises himself erect; of one who
Aen. 10.892 ¦
9.398 resists in vain
occupat os faciemque, ¦ pedem pede fervidus urget. he attacks the mouth and face,
Aen. 10.699 ¦
12.748 proceeds fiercely step after step,
perfidus alta petens ¦ ramum, qui veste latebat, treacherously steering for the deep,
Aen. 7.362 ¦
6.406 the rod within his garment,
sanguineis ebuli bacis minioque rubentem with elderberries scarlet and with
Ecl. 10.27
dye made ruddy,
nudato capite ¦ et pedibus per mutua nexis, Aen. 12.312 ¦ its head left bare, as their legs
7.66 together entwined,
monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum, Aen. 3.658 a ghastly, shocking monster, huge,
no sight in its single eye,
eripit a femore et trepidanti fervidus instat. he draws forth from his flank and
eagerly presses as shequivers.
(Ed. Green, 1991) (Trans. Evelyn-White, 1919, p.
387–389)
While the meaning of reciprocity of the expression per mutua and the original sense of the
word nexis are preserved here, the agents are lustful lovers instead of industrious bees. While both
86
centonists excluded the pagan prophetic background of the source section, Proba preserved its
epic touch, as she did in the rest of her cento, though transferring it to the suffering of Christ. By
contrast, Ausonius ridiculed here as elsewhere in his work that epic touch, by reusing its linguistic
remnants in an obscene context.
Close readings of this kind, however, can only partially enlighten the semantic shifts imposed
in centos. It may be useful then to analyse them as having more than one layer, and, as Pollmann
suggests (2017, p. 103), their division into micro and macro semantic shifts seems convenient.
Thus, in the previous example about the “fixation of feet”, the variance of bees or humans can be
considered as a micro semantic shift, while the change from the Roman omen and its cultural set-
ting to the Crucifixion and its Christian framework or to the erotic scene with military overtones
are at the macro level, which better reflects translation strategies.
Multimodality and intralingual translation in the case of centos

As has been emphasized by Panofsky (1939, pp. 18–31), Rüpke (2014, pp. 255–269), and Elsner
(2006) among others, in multicultural late antique Rome, there were intense interactions within
the fields of literature and the visual arts between newly developing Christian elements and the
traditional constituents of ancient polytheism. The fourth century CE was for the Latin world a
distinctive period with a lasting effect, where the pagan and Christian cultures existed side by
side and visuality, allegory, and above all intertextuality came to the fore in literature and culture
in general. Hence, it is not surprising that arguably the most impressive examples of the cento
appeared at that time. The complexity of the visual culture of the period seems to have played a
Table 5.5 The anonymous cento De panificio [On bread-making] from the Anthologia Latina
Ipse manu patiens ¦ immensa Aen. 7.143 (quatiens) ¦ He himself, with his hand, patiently rolls
uolumina uersat 5.408 huge volumes,
adtollitque globos. ¦ Sonuerunt Aen. 3.574 ¦ 5.506 then moulds them into balls. Everything
omnia plausu. resounds with the slap of his hands.
Tum Cererem corruptam undis ¦ Aen. 1.177 ¦ 1.297 Then he lets Ceres fall again, mixed with
emittit ab alto. (demittit) water.
Septem ingens gyros, septena Aen. 5.85 He pulls seven huge circles, seven smooth
uolumina traxit, volumes by rolling,
lubrica conuoluens ¦ et torrida Aen. 2.474 (conuoluit) ¦ and the fire dries them unceasingly.
semper ab igni. G. 1.234
At rubicunda Ceres ¦ oleo perfusa G. 1.297 ¦ Aen. 5.135 But then Ceres, bathed in oil, takes on a
nitescit. reddish glow.
Scintillae absistunt, ¦ opere omnis Aen. 12.102 ¦ 4.407 Sparks fly, the mouth of the kiln is boiling
semita feruet. during the work.
Feruet opus redoletque, ¦ uolat uapor G. 4.169 = Aen. 1.436 The product itself is effervescent and
ater ad auras. (redolentque) ¦ 7.466 smells good; a thick vapor rises.
Instant ardentes ¦ ueribusque Aen. 1.423 ¦ 1.212 People gather excitedly and they skewer
trementia figunt, the still trembling loaves.
conclamant rapiuntque focis ¦ Aen. 5.660 ¦ 8.180 With loud shouts, they snatch from the
onerantque canistris. hearths and load them into baskets.
Vndique conueniunt ¦ pueri Aen.5.293 = 9.720 ¦ 6.307 Young boys and unmarried girls rush in
innuptaeque puellae. = G. 4.476 from all directions.
(Ed. Salanitro, 2009) (my translation)
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significant role in the emergence of this unique type of intralingual translation, in which the dif-
ferentiation between source and target texts is minimal at the surface textual level, (i.e., verbal
forms), while being more apparent at the semantic level, and fully manifest at the contextual one.
This is because half-lines taken from Vergil, in addition to their linguistic meaning, must have
functioned for most readers as triggers that evoked mental representations of some mythologi-
cal artworks to which they were constantly exposed in almost all spheres of daily life. Indeed,
myriads of painted and sculpted objects ranging from walls, sarcophagi, and monuments to vases,
furniture, and various personal items with figures and scenes from the visual repertoire of pagan
mythology continued to be created or repurposed in late antiquity. For instance, although statues
of gods and goddesses that were used in worship were banned by the Theodosian Code (438
CE), other pagan sculptures were generally tolerated in public and private spheres (Bright, 2016;
Kristensen, 2013, p. 27). In some cases, pagan and Christian iconographies were intermingled
to such an extent that a Moses dressed as a Roman magistrate was not considered inappropriate
for a funerary painting. Even in centos that seem only remotely mythological one can find some
remnants of this pagan imagery (see Clément-Tarantino, 2013), though isolated in a lexical ele-
ment, such as the word Ceres in the cento on bread making from the collection of Anthologia
Latina. Ceres is the name of the Roman Goddess of agriculture and fertility, and the word also
means “bread”.
Some commentators (Galli, 2013, for instance) see in this short cento a humorous combination
of solemn and playful themes such as the fireballs thrown from Etna during its eruption compared
to the balls of dough turned reddish when baked. This is where the ludic aspect of centos comes to
the fore. In his explanation of cento poetry, Ausonius compares centos to a tangram-like, 14-piece
puzzle called ostomákhion. This helps us to understand the ludic and entertainment dimension of
centos (Evelyn-White, 1919, pp. 395–397; see Pollmann, 2017, p. 102, n. 15). Ausonius’s com-
parison between the cento and this puzzle game brings to mind Goethe’s saying, “Only from
intimately connected seriousness and play can true art arise”.24 Without intending to discuss the
artistic value of cento technique, I want to emphasize that the ludic element is intrinsically and
historically related to the notion of intralingual translation.
A 150-million-year-old fish fossil with a dated (1543) inscription of a passage from Proba’s
Cento Vergilianus (see Figure 5.2), which was brought from a castle in the Tyrol during the
Napoleonic Wars, is part of the permanent collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna,
and according to experts it is “among the oldest artefacts documenting the correct interpretation
of a fossil as a formerly living animal” (Harzhauser & Kroh, 2018, p. 514).25 As the verses are
about the Flood and extinction, the fish fossil constitutes a striking multimodal hypertext. The
Flood was a critical matter of dispute between biblical and natural history in the early modern era
(see Dean, 1985). A cento passage on it (the same one I quoted at the beginning), which can be
seen as a case of intralingual translation, is intersemiotically translated here through a visual lan-
guage. The semantic continuity between the pagan god of sea Neptune, the Biblical Flood, and the
fish fossil provides a striking intertextuality that elaborates the concept of sea as a major natural
force in human life.
One of the most exciting questions that appears here is whether the person who commissioned
those lines to be inscribed on that slab was aware of cento poetry and the identity of the author
of this very section. Although the sketchy museum record and uncritical accounts of some recent
histories of palaeontology keep referring to that cento section as anonymous (Harzhauser & Kroh,
2018, p. 514), we know that Proba was as popular a figure in the early modern period as she was
during the medieval era.26 Whoever chose it may have thought that the fish died during the Flood,
if s(he) was considering the Biblical account as historical.
88
Figure 5.2 Limestone slab with a fossilized fish and lines 307–312 of Proba’s Cento Vergilianus
I think that a very creative analogy was drawn between the petrified remains of a living organ-
ism and the centonized fragments of Vergilian poetry, in that, to identify the fish in the fossil, a
herring, is as difficult for unfamiliar eyes as to identify Vergilian sections in the cento for a reader
unfamiliar with Vergilian texts.
Conclusion
I believe that scholars of social sciences and humanities may have long assigned overwhelmingly
static conceptual meanings to the Latin prefixes inter-, intra-, and trans- in terminologies, and
that this may have contributed to or resulted from over-categorization about linguistic and cultural
phenomena. As the often cited but still contradictory Jakobsonian typology of translation suggests,
the definitions of intra- and interlingual translation seem to be no exception, and this is more than a
problem of labelling or etymology.27 One of the things that systemic approaches have taught us is
that cultures and languages are in constant flux, and none of them are homogenous. This is crucial
when it comes to literature, even more so to experimental literature. Centos, however, can give us
valuable insights into the non-stationary boundaries of meaning, signification, and representation,
hence of languages and cultures. I think that the difficulty of attributing the cento to any of the
existing categories of translation can be instrumental in balancing questions about where transla-
tion occurs and those about how it occurs.
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Notes
1 There are a few earlier examples written during the Early and Middle Empire such as the Medea of Ho-
sidius Geta (second century CE), the longest and one of the earliest extant specimens of Vergilian centos
(Pelttari, 2014, pp. 96–97; Rondholz, 2012, p. 94).
2 The length of the half-lines depends on the position of caesurae (word endings) in the original lines. Au-
sonius gives a list of possible lengths.
3 “The setting of a new text to an existing melody” (O’Sullivan, 2010, p. 1478). This is, indeed, comparable
to cento, which is the setting of new meanings to an existing text. Pavlovskis (1989, pp. 70, 77, n. 26)
draws interesting analogies between musical works that range from Handel’s Messiah (which is a kind of
cento based on the King James Bible) to John Cage and Latin centos, especially Proba’s.
4 Centos continued to be written during the Middle Ages and modern times especially in the Renaissance
and Victorian eras, although they fell into disfavour during the Romantic period (for an extensive but not
exhaustive collection of centos up until mid-nineteenth century see Delepierre, 1874, 1875). While centos
are occasionally written today (for a contemporary collection of centos in English see Welford, 2011; see
also Pavlovskis, 1989, p. 77, n. 26), some scholars identify the legacy of cento in the present-day fanzine
art (see Saint-Amour, 2003, p. 242, n. 58).
5 For a comprehensive survey of the ancient Latin centos, one may refer to Bright, 1984. Many of the
ancient Latin centos, excluding the ones by Proba and Ausonius, are transmitted in an early medieval
manuscript which is known as Codex Salmasianus and held in the National Library of France (Codex
Parisinus Latinus 10318). This is the principal witness to the collection of mostly short Latin poems – of
chiefly North African origin – known as Anthologia Latina (7–18 are centos), whose standard edition is
(Riese, 1906).
6 There are some centos that draw on other authors such as Euripides (see Pollmann, 1997) and Ovid (a
short example titled De aetate is preserved in the Anthologia Latina, 269, Riese, 1906 [1894]). The main
difference between the poetic terms of “collage” and “cento” is that the latter can be composed only with
lines from canonical poems, while any source text can be used for the former.
7 For an excellent historical outline of the reception of ancient centos see Bažil (2002, pp. 3–23).
8 Apart from the obviously negative reception of this composition/transfer technique, some less normative
but terminologically biased accounts of cento seem to struggle to find proper terms to describe it. The la-
bel of “parasitic genre” for instance is another term of this kind (see Tucker, 2009, p. 331; on the negative
connotation of this term in linguistic and literary domain see Gullestad, 2011, p. 302 ff.).
9 One should be cautious with the designation “Greek” or “Latin” for ancient authors because these identi-
ties were interwoven and complex. I use them here to distinguish the language of their literary output.
Indeed, some late antique authors wrote in both languages.
10 Livius Andronicus (c. 280/260–c. 200 BCE) is a proverbial example. Brought to Rome as a war pris-
oner and charged with the education of his noble master’s children, he translated Greek works including
Homer’s Odyssey into Latin and wrote dramas as well, and his translations have been considered the
beginning of Latin literature. It is intriguing that the first works of this influential literary tradition were
written by a native Greek speaker for whom Latin was a second language. Azra Erhat, a member of the
first generation of classicists in Türkiye, also an essayist and translator of Greek classics, wrote a short but
insightful Turkish article (1940) on this from the perspective of translation history; one can notice in it a
silent comparison of the Roman and modern Turkish attitudes in the face of a dominant culture (see Berk
Albachten, 2019, p. 99).
11 This can also be observed in the general strategies of ancient Latin terminologies for which the Greek
terminologies had become both a model and a rival.
12 Suasoriae, 3.7, 23–4 (Håkanson, 1989) reads: “non subripiendi causa sed palam mutuandi, hoc animo ut
vellet agnosci” [not in order to steal but openly borrow as he intended them to be recognized].
13 The following remarks of Eliot revived this topos in the twentieth century:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make
it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole
of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws
it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in
time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
(Eliot, 1999, p. 206)
90
14 One may be surprised to learn that “there are more manuscripts and editions of the Cento [by Proba] than any
other single work by a pre-modern woman” (Stevenson, 2005, p. 69), see also Ermini (1909, pp. 63–65).
15 I think that interlingual translation of centos is subject to similar difficulties as intertextual translation
because it requires to consider the contexts of both the borrowed verses and the cento passages where they
are used (see Clark & Hatch, 1981b, pp. 8–9; on intertextual translation see Venuti, 2013).
16 See Schenkl (1888) for the information about the location of Vergilian verse fragments used in this cento,
as well as for the references of related Bible passages.
17 The view that Vergilian centonists chose their material meticulously has been further supported by quan-
titative studies (see especially Vidal, 1973).
18 Some Christian centos, especially the one by Proba, which is a retelling of the sections from Greek Bible,
are at the same time interlingual translation, see Figure 5.1.
19 The dedicatory letter of Ausonius’s Cento nuptialis [Wedding Cento] comes first to mind (1–23, Green,
1991). For the self-reflexivity of centos see Hinds, 2014.
20 Spolia, or spoils, are architectural fragments that are taken out of original context and reused in a different
context.
21 For the relation between cento and the concept of remix in art, see Frosio (2021).
22 Though the Jesus depicted by Proba differs from the biblical one in being irascible (see Opelt, 1964,
pp. 106–116).
23 For a detailed survey of the legacy of Vergil’s works see Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008, p. 469 ff).
24 “Nur aus innig verbundenem Ernst und Spiel kann wahre Kunst entspringen” (Goethe, 1981, p. 96).
25 Previous explanations of fossils during the early modern period were mostly based on the Neoplatonic in-
terpretation of the concept of universal sympathy, according to which “the stones that resembled animals
and plants could owe those resemblances to their bonds of affinity with various organisms, and not to their
origin as the remains of those organisms”, as Rudwick (1985, p. 19) aptly put it.
26 For the early modern reception of ancient centos see Bažil, 2002, p. 5; García, 1999; Hoch, 1997; Tucker,
2013. For women poets in late antiquity see Stevenson, 2005.
27 To put it differently, the problem seems to lie more in the way we categorize linguistic transfer than in find-
ing better alternatives to the term “intralingual translation” (cf. Mossop, 2016 who proposes “cislation”).
Further reading
On the history and etymology of the term cento:

Belardi, W. (1958). Nomi del centone nelle lingue indoeuropee. Ricerche Linguistiche, 4, 29–57.
Kunzmann, F., & Hoch, C. (1994). Cento. In G. Ueding (Ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, Band
2: Bie-Eul (pp. 148–157). Max Niemeyer.
On centos in general:
Garambois-Vasquez, F., & Vallat, D. (Eds.). (2017). “Varium et mutabile”: mémoires et métamorphoses du
centon dans l’Antiquité. Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne.
On intertextuality in centos:
Mastrangelo, M. (2016). Towards a poetics of Late Latin Reuse. In S. McGill & J. Pucci (Eds.), Classics
renewed. Reception and innovation in the Latin Poetry of late antiquity (pp. 25–46). Universitätsverlag
Winter.
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Bažil, M. (2018). Sensus diversi ut congruant. Semantische Kontext-strategien in den spätantiken Vergilcen-
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6
HOMER INTO GREEK
Intralingual translation in
Greco-Roman antiquity
Massimo Cè
Introduction
This chapter pursues the double aim of presenting an overview of one of the earliest documented
instances of intralingual translation – the practice of rendering the Homeric epics into different
forms of ancient Greek – and situating this translational practice in the context of ancient Greek
discourses of intralingual translation in general. The issues of intralingual translation and Homeric
reception were intimately connected in the ancient Greek tradition. By virtue of their antiquity
and monumentality, the IIiad and Odyssey assumed the principal position in the Greek literary
canon early on, which in turn made them a privileged target for scholarly, philosophical, and artis-
tic practices of all types. In the realm of critical and literary reception, the Homeric epics would
inform – and transform – conceptions of textuality, just as they would shape ancient Greek (and,
later, Roman) views on politics, gender, and religion. Consequently, frameworks for intralingually
translating Homer, which first appeared in embryonic form in the late seventh century BCE and, in
subsequent centuries, were further developed in response to perceived patterns of synonymy and
self-paraphrase in the epics themselves, came to serve as an exemplar for the intralingual (and,
eventually, interlingual) translation of other authors and texts.
Ancient Greek rewritings of the Iliad and Odyssey are attested from ca. 625 BCE, approxi-
mately within a century of the epics’ original composition, and continue to be found throughout
classical antiquity. We have no direct knowledge of a translation of the entirety of either of the two
epics and given the monumental size of the Homeric poems – counting over 27,000 lines of dac-
tylic hexameter – probably none was ever attempted. There existed, however, a vast and diverse
corpus of materials that provides us with numerous partial and abridged versions of the Homeric
epics in ancient Greek. Preserved on ancient writing surfaces, such as stone and papyrus, as well
as through the medieval manuscript tradition, these materials range from poetic rewritings and
glossographic and lexicographic sources to rhetorical and grammatical paraphrases and narrative
epitomes.
The motivation for translating Homer into ancient Greek was at first predominantly practical
in nature but soon acquired a forceful cultural and even political dimension as well. Character-
ized by a unique admixture of dialectal, historical, and artificial elements, the language of the
Homeric epics must have struck speakers of all varieties of ancient Greek as both broadly familiar
95 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-8
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and distinctively alien. Homer’s Kunstsprache can be illustrated with the present infinitive of εἰμί
(“to be”), which exhibits five different forms in the Homeric epics: The Attic-Ionic εἶναι (Il. 1.91,
etc.), the Lesbian or East Aeolic ἔμμεναι (Il. 1.117, etc.), and the Thessalian or West Aeolic ἔμμεν
(Il. 18.364; Od. 9.455, etc.), as well as two artificial formations, ἔμεν (Il. 4.299, etc.) and ἔμεναι
(Il. 3.40, etc.), which are formed by analogy and correspond to no historical language record of
ancient Greek (Wachter, 2009, p. 89).1 As a result, whatever the dialect of Greek spoken by any
given ancient recipient of Homer, at least four – in the case of a Doric speaker conversant with yet
another form (ἦμεν), even five – of these forms need to be translated intralingually in order for a
basic comprehension of the Homeric text to be achieved. At the same time, by assimilating a wide
range of linguistic features from different dialectal varieties of ancient Greek, the Homeric idiom
presents the poems as “glocal” entities in linguistic terms, thereby mirroring the transregional
events of the Trojan War related in the epics. In Homer, therefore, content and language conspire
to project a uniquely Panhellenic outlook, which would prove instrumental in establishing the
Iliad and Odyssey as fundamental reference points for conceptions of Greek identity for centuries,
indeed millennia, to come. The idiosyncratic composition of regionalisms, archaisms, and neolo-
gisms in Homeric language invited strategies of elucidation, including the translation of Homeric
words, phrases, and passages into both vernacular forms of ancient Greek, such as Attic and Koine
Greek, and specifically literary idioms inspired, in part, by the Homeric epics themselves.
In the following four sections, I will treat different types of Homeric intralingual translation in
the chronological order in which they are first attested. This selective journey through the ancient
Greek reception history of the Homeric epics will lead us to consider moments of intralingual
translation in the poetic genres of lyric, tragedy, and epic; glossographic and lexicographic mate-
rials; and prose paraphrases. A fifth and final section will provide an overview of ancient Greek
translation terminology, arguing that our sources do not distinguish between the interlingual and
intralingual translation of texts.
Homeric lyric: Alcman and Alcaeus

Although there is no consensus about the precise date at which the Homeric epics were first fixed
textually, their attested reception history begins in the final decades of the seventh century BCE
(Burkert, 1976; West, 1995; Burgess, 2001, pp. 53–94). Numerous prior literary texts, inscrip-
tions, and vase paintings independently datable to the period of ca. 730–630 BCE may have been
created in response to the Iliad or Odyssey, but none of these supposed references constitutes an
engagement specific enough with either the language or the plot of the Homeric epics to exclude
the possibility that they simply draw on wider (i.e., extra- or pre-Homeric) epic and mythic tradi-
tions. The earliest secure textual references to the Homeric epics take the form of short snippets
(what can be termed “translation moments”) in the archaic Greek lyric poets Alcman and Alcaeus,
whose poetic activity – datable to the last quarter of the seventh and first quarter of the sixth cen-
tury, respectively – accords well with the evidence from Greek vase painting, where specifically
Homeric scenes begin to be depicted from around 630 BCE.
The first of two Alcmanic passages, fragment 77 “bad-Paris, evil-Paris, a disaster for man-
nourishing (βωτιανείρᾳ) Greece”, combines the generically epic epithet “man-nourishing”
(βουτιάνειρα = Il. 1.155; Homeric Hymn 3.363; Hesiod fr. 165.16) with the specifically Homeric
compound formation “bad-Paris” (Δύσπαρις = Il. 3.39, 13.769). While Vasiliki Kousoulini (2013,
p. 431) has questioned the specificity of the reference in “bad-Paris”, calling this term of abuse
for Paris a “topos”, the examples she adduces in support of the word’s conventionality come
from fifth-century BCE Attic tragedy (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 713; Euripides, Helen 1120,
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cf. Euripides, Hecuba 945), thus postdating Alcman by almost two centuries. More likely, there-
fore, the comparative passages themselves draw on Homer or Alcman and should not be viewed as
independent witnesses to a rhetorical commonplace. Furthermore, the fact that the distinctly Greek
viewpoint adopted by the speaker in fr. 77 is at odds with the Homeric context for the abuse (the
Trojan warrior Hector rebuking his brother) need not contradict the specificity of Alcman’s refer-
ence, either. On the contrary, just as the Alcmanic hapax “evil-Paris” (Αἰνόπαρις) – later adopted
by Euripides (Hecuba 945) – shows the poet as an innovator, so does his Greek refocalization of
the rebuke against Paris. In fact, for both “bad-Paris” and “evil-Paris”, the very appreciation of the
extent of Alcman’s innovation depends on the recognition of the Homeric intertext.
Another Alcmanic passage composed in dactylic hexameters, fragment 80, likewise suggests
a reworking of a specific Homeric passage as opposed to a response to the generic epic tradi-
tion: “And Circe at one time, having stopped up (ἐπαλείψασα) the ears of the companions (ὤατ’
ἑταίρων) of stout-hearted Odysseus”. While Alcman here combines two epic formulas, one exclu-
sively Odyssean (καὶ τότ’ Ὀδυσσῆος “at one time . . . Odysseus”), the other found in both Homer
and Hesiod (Ὀδυσσῆος ταλασίφρονος “stout-hearted Odysseus”), more significant are the non-
formulaic words in Alcman’s fragment, which recall with extraordinary verbal precision a line of
the Odyssey (12.47): “But stop up the ears of the companions”. Alcman takes over the Homeric
phrase “the ears of the companions” (οὔατα . . . ἑταίρων) verbatim and undoes the tmesis in “stop
up” (ἐπὶ . . . ἀλεῖψαι). The absence of significant parallels for the detail of stopping up the com-
panions’ ears to shield them against the Sirens’ chant, as well as the word-for-word rewriting of a
unique Homeric phrase in its entirety, strongly favours the view that Alcman, here too, specifically
engages with a Homeric passage as opposed to the epic tradition as a whole. It has been objected
that in the Odyssey it is Odysseus rather than Circe who stops up the companions’ ears, an incon-
gruity already noticed by the scholiast who quotes the fragment. But this change in agent, far from
invalidating Alcman’s direct recourse to the Odyssean passage, can be profitably interpreted as
being predicated on the close relationship between the two passages, which serves to throw the
shift in agency into greater relief (cf. Garzya, 1954, p. 137).
In a poem of Alcman’s near-contemporary Alcaeus, fragment 44, we find the sea-goddess The-
tis interceding with Zeus on behalf of her son Achilles in a scene closely modelled on Iliad book
1. Although none of the three figures is mentioned by name in the surviving papyrus scrap (P.Oxy.
1233 frs. 9.1–8, 3.1–7), the combined reference to “sea-nymphs” (νύμφ[αν ἐνν]αλίαν), “suppli-
cating knees” (γόνων . . . ἰκέτευ’), and “a child’s anger” (τέκεος μᾶνιν) makes the identification
certain (Page, 1955, pp. 281–282). Drawing on two separate Homeric passages, from the structur-
ally prominent and thematically linked books 1 and 18 of the Iliad, Alcaeus gives a précis of the
supplication scene at Iliad 1.493–512.
Special emphasis is given to Zeus’“knees” (γόνων), already a marked reference because repeated
feature in the Homeric account (500, 512). In the supplication scene, Thetis’ son is referred to as
παῖς by the Homeric narrator (496) and as υἱός by the goddess herself (505). The word adopted by
Alcaeus, τέκος, may look back to two instances earlier in Iliad 1, where Thetis addresses her son
directly as τέκνον (362, 414). More specifically, τέκος occurs twice in character speech in Iliad 18:
Thetis uses it once when referring to Achilles (63) and once in addressing him directly (95). While
both τέκνον and τέκος have a strong emotional connotation, τέκος unlike τέκνον is specific to
archaic epic, whose high register Alcaeus imports into his poem. Lastly, in μᾶνιν, while the word
is also present in its verbal cognate μηνίω “to rage” twice in the immediate prelude to the Homeric
supplication scene (422, 488), Alcaeus above all harkens back to the first word of the Iliad, μῆνιν,
which he here translates interdialectally from Ionic to Aeolic. Although the line’s fragmentariness
leaves the syntax of μᾶνιν opaque, the accusative singular form reinforces the recall of the Iliad’s
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incipit, where the “anger”, the theme of the poem, is likewise qualified by a possessive genitive
(Ἀχιλῆος ~ τέκεος). Adrian Kelly’s (2015, p. 26) observation that Thetis’ supplication of Zeus con-
stitutes one of the Iliad’s “momentous, marquee-episodes”, far from disqualifying Alcaeus’ textual
reference to Homer, should be seen to reinforce the specificity of the translational act.
The earliest datable literary references to either of the Homeric epics, therefore, are two pas-
sages of Alcman (frs. 77 and 80) and one passage of Alcaeus (fr. 44), which intralingually trans-
late short sections of the Iliad and Odyssey. These constitute what can be termed “translation
moments” – sequences of translated words occurring within, and framed by, original composi-
tion.2 Specifically, the two lyric poets’ intralingual rewording of Homeric epic takes the form of
interdialectal translation, replacing the Ionic of Homeric epic with Doric and Aeolic phonology,
evident in the substitution of ō (ω) for ū (ου), as in βωτιανείρᾳ for βουτιανείρᾳ (“man-nourishing”)
and ὤατα for οὔατα (“ears”), and of ā (ᾱ) for ē (η), as in μᾶνιν for μῆνιν (“anger”).
Post-Homeric tragedy and epic: formulaic language

Given the central role of the formula in Homeric diction, it is instructive to consider the intralingual
translation history of one of these traditional fixed expressions: “Swift-footed Achilles”, which
depending on the metrical position and syntactical function of the noun-epithet phrase is variously
realized in Homer as, for example, πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς “Achilles swift in his feet”, ποδάρκης δῖος
Ἀχιλλεύς “foot-fast divine Achilles”, and ποδώκεα Πηλείωνα “swift-footed son of Peleus”.
The earliest surviving engagement with Achilles’ formulaic epithets comes from the fifth cen-
tury BCE. While the lyric poet Pindar already comments on Achilles’ speed in language reminis-
cent of his distinctive Homeric epithet (ποσσὶ . . . κράτεσκε “he was strong in his feet”, Nemeans
3.52), the first time in extant post-Homeric literature where Achilles appears in combination with
an epithet is in Greek tragedy, in plays by the Attic dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides.
In the opening line of Aeschylus’ Myrmidons, the first play in the fragmentary Achilleis tril-
ogy, the hero is addressed as “shining Achilles” (φαίδιμ’ Ἀχιλλεῦ, Aesch. TrGF 131 F1). While
the collocation could be regarded at face value as a simple quotation from Homer, where it occurs
five times (e.g., Il. 9.434), the context of the Aeschylean fragment indicates a subtle subversion of
the Homeric usage. When the Myrmidons approach the silent Achilles in the drama, they lament
his reluctance to join the battle. Against this background, the address “shining Achilles” appears
ironic, suggesting that the Aeschylean Achilles in fact falls short of his “shining” Homeric stature.
In Euripides, Achilles’ speed is twice expressed through an accompanying adjectival phrase. At
Electra 439, the hero is described as “light in leap of feet” (κοῦφον ἅλμα ποδῶν), which consti-
tutes a variation on the periphrastic πόδας ὠκύς, which similarly deploys an accusative of respect
(πόδας ~ ἅλμα ποδῶν). At Iphigenia at Aulis 206–207, Achilles is described as “equal to the wind
in his two feet” (ἰσάνεμον . . . ποδοῖν) and “swift-running” (λαιψηροδρόμον), which not only refer
to the hero’s characteristic speed in general terms but again do so by varying specifically Homeric
language. The compound adjective “equal to the wind” (ἰσάνεμος) recalls the goddess Iris’ distinc-
tive epithet “wind-footed” (ποδήνεμος). The other compound adjective, λαιψηροδρόμον, com-
bines -δρόμος (from the root dram- “run”) with λαιψηρός (“swift”), the latter of which qualifies
Achilles at Iliad 21.264, precisely where his speed is shown to be insufficient (καὶ λαιψηρὸν ἐόντα
“although he was fast”) as he is overcome by the river Scamander. Although λαιψηρός is not used
as an epithet there, Achilles is the only Homeric character thus qualified, thereby forging a strong
connection between the adjective and the hero. In sum, the two Euripidean attributes of Achilles
(ἰσάνεμος, λαιψηροδρόμος), while not themselves epithets found in Homer, nevertheless closely
engage with the hero’s formulaic system in the Iliad.
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In later Greek epic, which insofar as it engages with Achilles is represented for us by Apol-
lonius’ Argonautica, Quintus’ Posthomerica, and Triphiodorus’ Sack of Troy, Achilles is more
rarely characterized by swiftness. Apollonius and Triphiodorus highlight the hero’s two attributes
already explicitly mentioned in the Iliad’s opening line (1.1), his “anger” (μῆνιν) and his parentage
(Πηληιάδεω “son of Peleus”). Set in the generation of Achilles’ father, the Argonautica fittingly
refers to the hero as his father’s son when Achilles first appears in the epic (Arg. 1.558 Πηλεΐδην
Ἀχιλῆα φίλῳ δειδίσκετο πατρί “[Chariclo] showed Peleus’ son Achilles to his dear father”). At
his first appearance in Triphiodorus’ Sack of Troy Achilles is likewise called “son of Peleus”
(17 Πηλείδης), but more allusively so: The patronymic here stands alone without the accompany-
ing name (Miguélez-Cavero, 2013, p. 15).
In Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, a similar process can be discerned regarding the Homeric
Achilles’ distinctive quality of swiftness, which is mainly avoided. Although Achilles’ speed is
mentioned three times in the Posthomerica – once using Homeric language (7.633) – other quali-
ties of the hero assume a more central role in the poem. In Quintus, Achilles’ five most common
epithet clusters stress the hero’s greatness (μέγας), greatheartedness (μεγαλήτωρ), facility with the
ash-spear (ἐυμμελίης), godlikeness (ἀντίθεος), and warlikeness (ἐυπτόλεμος). Two of these attrib-
utes, “great-hearted” and “godlike”, also describe Achilles in Homeric epic, but the specific epithets
used there are different. While Quintus deploys a whole range of broadly synonymous epithets to
convey the quality of greatheartedness (i.e., courage), including “great-hearted” (μεγαλήτορος,
3.734, 5.2), “great-minded” (μεγαλόφρονος, 6.86), “mighty-minded” (κρατερόφρονος, 8.150),
and “high-spirited” (ἐρίθυμος, 1.742, 1.756, 5.316; ἐρίθυμον, 4.13), in Homer we find a different
epithet, “great-spirited” (μεγαθύμου, Il. 17.214, 18.226, 19.75), to express the same idea.
The other Achillean attribute which Quintus adapts from Homer by using synonymous epithets
but avoiding the specific Homeric appellation is “godlike”. In Homer the most common way of
referring to Achilles’ divine status is through the epithet δῖος, which occurs as a generic epithet in
the nominative formulas δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς (e.g., Il. 1.7) and ποδάρκης δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς (e.g., Il. 1.121),
as well as θεοείκελος in the vocative (Il. 1.131, 19.155). Rather than applying either of these two
epithets to Achilles, Quintus uses ἀντίθεος (e.g., 3.100), θεοειδής (11.234), and ἰσόθεος (14.180)
to communicate Achilles’ godlike nature. As in the case of “great-hearted”, none of the epithets
used by Quintus are applied to Achilles in Homer, which showcases the Posthomerica’s interest in
transforming Homeric diction, even as it continues the Iliadic narrative.
Homeric glossography: from μῆνις to ὀργή

The systematic glossing of Homeric words, attested directly through papyrus finds and indirectly
through the activity of Alexandrian scholars, has its origins in at least the fifth century BCE.
The present section focuses on the beginning and subsequent development of the glossographic
tradition of Homer in order to spotlight a ubiquitous form of intralingual Homeric translation in
antiquity. Throughout the following discussion the English noun “gloss” (and such cognates as
“glossographer”, “glossography”) reflects the common modern usage of “explanation of a word
or phrase”, while the Greek word γλῶττα (“tongue, language, word”) denotes a particular type of
lexeme that appears as a lemma and becomes subject to glossing.
The Aristophanic comedy Banqueters (Δαιδαλῆς), first performed in 423 BCE, shows us a
father challenging his son to “explain” (ἐξηγήσασθαι) difficult Homeric expressions, including
ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα (“strengthless heads”) (Ar. fr. 233; Kassel & Austin, 1984, pp. 140–141). Galen,
who is our source for the fragment, tells us that the son is asked to provide the “near-equivalent” (τὸ
παραπλήσιον αὐτῇ) for “expressions” (γλῶτται), probably of the sort transmitted in the so-called D
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scholia, that is, the wealth of ancient grammatical and lexical information about Homeric language
contained in the medieval manuscripts of the epics, especially the Iliad (Dickey, 2007, pp. 18–23).
In that corpus ἀμενηνά, in the first of the word’s four Odyssean occurrences (Od. 10.521), is
glossed as ἀσθενῆ (“powerless”) and μένος οὐκ ἔχοντα (“not possessing strength”) (schol. D Od.
10.521c1; Pontani, 2022, p. 238). The word ἀσθενῆ is also found in a gloss attested on a third-
century papyrus of the cognate verb ἀμενήνωσεν “weakened” (Il. 13.562), which is rendered as
α[σ]θενη [εποιησε “made powerless” at P.Ryl. 3.536 verso, 2.20 (Lundon, 2012, p. 22). The noun,
on the other hand, κάρηνα (“peaks, heads”), seems to present no similar lexical difficulties. Unlike
the related singular form κάρη (“head”), which is frequently glossed as κεφαλή (e.g., at Il. 5.214
in P.Mich. inv. 2720 fol. 3 verso, 9; Lundon, 2012, p. 126), κάρηνα is never glossed by itself, even
though forms of κάρηνον are not found in Koine Greek. However, in those instances where the
word, with or without an adjective, designates people (e.g., ἀνδρῶν κάρηνα, “the heads of men”)
or animals (e.g., ἵππων ξανθὰ κάρηνα, “the yellow heads of horses”), there are frequent refer-
ences in both types of scholia to the “periphrastic” (περιφραστικῶς, περίφρασις) or “synecdochic”
(ἀπὸ μέρους) usage deployed. Therefore, Aristophanes’ reference to the Homeric phrase νεκύων
ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα appears to combine lexical and stylistic difficulties, which are overcome by trans-
lating the phrase from Homeric into Attic Greek (ἀσθενῆ κάρηνα or ἀσθενεῖς κεφαλάς “powerless
heads”) or from a poetic into a prosaic register (νέκυας ἀσθενεῖς “powerless corpses”).
In the fourth century BCE, both the philosopher Plato and his student Aristotle take an inter-
est in the glossing of Homeric words. The Platonic work of arguably greatest importance to the
development of Homeric glossography is the metalinguistic dialogue Cratylus. Homeric diction
is glossed in two places in the dialogue, once explicitly, once implicitly (Henrichs, 1971, p. 100
n. 9). At Cratylus 417a, the verb ὀφέλλειν is identified as Homeric and equated with αὔξειν
(“increase”) and ποιεῖν (“create”), of which it is said to be a “synonym” (ἐπωνυμία). At Craty
lus 421a, another verb in this form only attested in Homer (Od. 14.356), μαίεσθαι, is glossed as
ζήτειν “seek”. The lemma’s distribution, combined with the fact that μαίεσθαι becomes a staple
of subsequent Homeric glossographers – in addition to the D scholia (ἐπιζητεῖν “seek out”, schol.
D Od. 14.356; Ernst, 2004, p. 299), it is glossed by Apollonius Sophista (ζητεῖν, Bekker, 1833,
p. 109.30), Hesychius (μ 66 ζητεῖν, ἐρευνᾶν “track”; Latte & Cunningham, 2020, p. 781), and
Photius (Bibl. 531a6–7 ζητεῖν) – strongly suggests that this second Cratylus passage likewise
contains a gloss of a specifically Homeric usage.
Aristotle goes one step beyond Plato, by combining examples of Homeric glosses with explicit
theoretical discussion of the glossing process. In chapter 25 of the Poetics, having stated that
γλῶτται, previously defined as “loan words” (1457b1–5), are characteristic of poetic usage
(1460b11–12), Aristotle proceeds to give three examples of such γλῶτται from the Iliad (Poet
ics 1461a10–15; cf. Pfeiffer, 1968, pp. 78–79): οὐρῆας (Il. 1.50), meaning ἡμιόνους “mules” or
φύλακας “guards”; εἶδος (Il. 10.316), which could refer to a person’s σῶμα “body” or merely their
πρόσωπον “face”; and ζωρότερον (Il. 9.203), whose ambiguous form suggests either the wine’s
quality (ἄκρατον “unmixed”) or the speed in pouring it (θᾶττον “faster”).
Like the γλῶτται of his predecessors, all of Aristotle’s examples concern difficult lemmas to be
explicated by a synonym that is easier to understand. Because Aristotle’s conception of γλῶτται
is restricted to foreign words, drawn from other Greek dialects or different languages entirely,
his glosses more straightforwardly resemble interlingual translations. But structurally Aristotle’s
glossographic procedure is analogous to that adopted by Aristophanes, Plato, and others, which is
to translate individual Homeric words into neutral lexemes of Attic Greek or (in an adaptation of
Aristotle’s terms) to replace the γλῶττα, or “foreign word”, with the κύριον, or “standard word”
(Janko, 1987, pp. 148–150).
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Over time, the practice of Homeric glossing gave rise to a vast corpus of intralingual transla-
tions composed of interlinear and marginal glosses as well as lemmatized word-lists and lexica.
By way of example, take the Iliad’s very first word, μῆνις (“wrath”), which describes the plot-
driving anger of Achilles and is glossed by numerous ancient glossographic and lexicographic
sources. For the lemma μῆνιν (Il. 1.1), the medieval D scholia give ὀργήν “anger” as the basic
definition, but also provide a string of glosses apparently in ascending order of intensity: ὀργή
“anger”, θυμός “rage”, χόλος “fury”, and κότος “rancor”, capped by the Homeric lemma itself,
μῆνις “wrath” (schol. D Il. 1.1; van Thiel, 2014, p. 19). Three of these glosses – all except the most
extreme, κότος “rancor” – can be paralleled from two surviving papyrological glossaries, which
render μῆνιν as, respectively, χόλον ὀργήν θυμόν (P.Mich. inv. 1588, col. 1 l. 1; Renner, 1979,
pp. 311–321) and ὀργήν (P.Achm. 2, l. 21; Collart, 1931, pp. 43–47).
The ubiquity of the gloss ὀργή in these materials – also featured in a related Byzantine lexico-
graphic corpus, the Lexeis Homērikai “Homeric Words” (μ 191; van Thiel, 2002, p. 91) – under-
lines its status as the principal intralingual rendering of the Homeric word. Interestingly, ὀργή is
the only one of the μῆνις synonyms occurring with any frequency that is absent from the Homeric
text itself (it is first attested in Homer’s contemporary Hesiod). The other synonyms, θυμός, χόλος,
and κότος, do not only occur elsewhere in the Iliad but are specifically used there to describe the
anger of Achilles. The origin of the glosses in the Homeric text itself is noted by an ancient scho-
liast, who states, “the poet (Homer) applies synonymous words to Achilles, such as ‘or whether to
stop his fury (χόλον) and restrain his rage (θυμόν)’ (Il. 1.192) and ‘I’m not bothered by your rancor
(κοτέοντος)’ (Il. 1.181)” (schol. D Il. 1.1; van Thiel, 2014, p. 19). The cluster of glosses surround-
ing μῆνις, therefore, offers us a glimpse of the practice of Homeric glossographers, who often
look to Homer for their intralingual translation of individual Homeric words rather than simply
replacing a poetic with a prosaic or a specifically Homeric with a generically Koine Greek word. In
so doing, Homeric glossographers continued the hermeneutic principle of “explaining Homer out
of Homer” (Ὅμηρον ἐξ Ὁμήρου σαφηνίζειν), which directs students of Homeric epic to find the
solution to a query about Homer – whether ethical, theological, or literary – in the Homeric text
itself (Nünlist, 2015). As a result, Homer’s own tendency toward synonymy and self-paraphrase
provided the glossographic tradition with a substantive and methodological model.
In addition to one-to-one noun equivalents, μῆνις is variously qualified by an adjective that
refers to the “persistent” quality of the anger described: (χόλος, ὀργή, κότος) ἐπίμονος “endur-
ing” in the D scholia (Il. 1.1; van Thiel, 2014, p. 19), the Lexeis Homērikai (μ 161; van Thiel,
2002, p. 90), and the lexicon of Hesychius (μ 1225; Latte & Cunningham, 2020, p. 830); (κότος)
πολυχρόνιος “long-lived” in Apollonius Sophista’s Homeric Lexicon (Bekker, 1833, p. 112, 24),
which in turn attributes this interpretation to Aristarchus, a Homeric scholar working in second-
century BCE Alexandria. The interpretation of Achilles’ anger as lasting for a long time does not
go back to any explicit statement in the Iliad itself. Rather, it appears to be based on a popular
etymology associating the root mēn- (“anger”, as in μῆν-ις) with the root men-/mon- (“remain”, as
in μέν-ω). Thus, a phonemic similarity between the two roots likely explains the frequent occur-
rences of ἐπί-μον-ος (“enduring”) as a qualifier of μῆν-ις in the ancient Homeric glosses. The
other adjective, πολυχρόνιος “long-lived”, in turn can be understood as an intralingual rendering
of ἐπίμονος, once the latter had been established in the glossographic tradition.
Homeric prose: rhetorical paraphrases

Most ancient intralingual prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey assume the form of summa-
ries (van Rossum-Steenbeek, 1998; Squire, 2011; Cè, 2021). Prose texts that substantially abridge
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the Homeric source include the book-by-book hypotheses preserved on ancient papyrus and in
the medieval manuscript tradition, such as the bilingual (Greek–Latin) pseudo-Dosithean Her
meneumata; the continuous abridgments of Iliad and Odyssey that form part of larger collections,
such as pseudo-Apollodorus’ Library (with summaries of the Iliad at epit. 4 and of the Odyssey at
epit. 7.1–33); and the intermedial miniaturizations found on the stone inscriptions of the Tabulae
Iliacae.
The earliest extant prosification of Homer that does not make significant use of abridgment can
be found in Plato’s Republic, which paraphrases what has been called “the most famous passage”
of the Iliad (Fernández Delgado, 2012, p. 173). To illustrate the difference between “simple narra-
tion” (ἁπλῆ διήγησις) and “representation” (μίμησις), Plato’s speaker Socrates rewrites the begin-
ning of the Iliad, specifically 1.12–42, in Attic prose. Narration is achieved by having Homeric
characters such as Chryses not speak for themselves (in direct speech) but having the authorial
narrator report their speeches (in indirect speech).
The Republic’s removal of direct speech from the Iliad is accompanied by a removal of meter,
which is explained as a result of Socrates’ “not being a poet” (Resp. 393d7; cf. Naddaff, 2002,
pp. 62–63). The translation from the poetic language of Homer to Plato’s Attic prose brings with
it a host of syntactical changes (Lake, 2011, pp. 488–508). Chief among these is the unemphatic
use of the definite article, which in Homer fulfils the more emphatic function of a demonstrative
(e.g., τὰ δ’ ἄποινα δέχεσθαι “and to receive this ransom”, Il. 1.20) but in Plato means simply
“the” (e.g., τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ στέμματα “the garlands of the god”, Resp. 393e6) or accompanies a
proper name (e.g., ὁ δὲ Ἀγαμέμνων “but [the] Agamemnon”, Resp. 393e4).
On the level of diction, Socrates’ Iliad exhibits a number of striking continuities as well as
innovations. In many instances, the Republic’s rendering continues lexical choices of the Homeric
passage, taking over such collocations as ἄποινα δέχεσθαι (Il. 1.20 “to receive a ransom” ~ Resp.
393e1–2 δεξαμένους ἄποινα) and σκῆπτρον καὶ στέμμα (Il. 1.28 “scepter and garland” ~ Resp.
393e6 σκῆπτρον καὶ . . . στέμματα), with minor variation in mood (aorist in lieu of present) and
number (plural for singular). While some Homeric words are replaced by different, if etymologi-
cally related, parts of speech (e.g., Resp. 393e7 γηράσειν “that she would grow old” ~ Il. 1.29
γῆρας “old age”), many others are simply replaced by synonyms (e.g., Il. 1.22 ἐπευφήμησαν “they
agreed” ~ Resp. 393e4 συνῄνουν).
The most significant changes from the Homeric passage consist in omissions. Accounting for
the 33% condensation of Plato’s translation – which runs to 151 words compared with Homer’s
224 – a landmark of Homeric style, formulaic phrasing as well as many adjectives and cer-
tain periphrastic collocations are suppressed. In the case of noun–epithet phrases, Socrates’ Iliad
either reduces the phrase to its constituent proper name (e.g., Il. 1.36 Ἀπόλλωνι ἄνακτι “lord
Apollo” ~ Resp. 394a3 τῷ Ἀπόλλωνι “Apollo”) or omits it wholesale (e.g., Il. 1.12 θοὰς ἐπὶ νῆας
“to the swift ships”). Other non-formulaic adjectives that are left out include ἀπερείσι[α] “bound-
less” (Il. 1.13 ἀπερείσι’ ἄποινα ~ Resp. 393e3 ἄποινα), while the periphrastic phrases “the city of
Priam” (Πριάμοιο πόλιν, Il. 1.19) and “the son of Zeus, the far-shooter” (Διὸς υἱὸν ἑκήβολον, Il.
1.21) are replaced, respectively, by the explicatory “Troy” (τὴν Τροίαν, Resp. 393e1–2) and the
generic “the god” (τὸν θεόν, Resp. 393e3). Taken together, these changes constitute a simplifica-
tion of the Homeric text, thus bearing out Socrates’ promise to present Homer in the form of a
“simple narrative”.
Plato’s general tendency to omit formulaic phrases is self-consciously highlighted toward the
end of the passage. There Socrates elides four verses (Il. 1.36–39) that contain cult epithets of
Apollo (Ἀργυρότοξ[ε] “of the silver bow”, Σμινθεῦ “Smintheus”) and specify the geographical
domain of his rule (Chryse, Killa, and Tenedos), as well as referring to his parentage (“whom
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beautiful-haired Leto bore”). Instead, the priest Chryses is said to “call on the titles of the god”
(τὰς . . . ἐπωνυμίας τοῦ θεοῦ ἀνακαλῶν, Resp. 394a3–4). The use of the term ἐπωνυμία (“nick-
name, cult title” but also “epithet”) flags the important role that the omission of epithets and other
ornamental phrases plays in Socrates’ rewriting of the Iliad passage.
While Plato’s prose rewriting of the opening of the Iliad seems to belong to a wider cultural prac-
tice, as indicated by contemporary testimony (Plato, Gorgias 502c; Isocrates 9.10–11), Socrates’
Iliad is by far the earliest extant such paraphrase. However, there do exist two later ancient Greek
translations of the Iliad’s opening section, both of imperial date, which can be directly compared
with the passage from the Republic.
The first imperial paraphrase (labelled a παράφρασις in the medieval manuscript), falsely
attributed to Aristides (Rhetores graeci 1.14.1), which renders Il. 1.1–43 into Greek prose, sig-
nificantly extends the ambit of the Platonic version. Plato entirely omits the Iliadic proem, whose
extra-narratival quality cannot easily be accommodated in Socrates’ “simple narrative”, instead
beginning with Chryses’ journey to the Greek camp (Il. 1.12). By contrast, the pseudo-Aristidean
translation commences at the very beginning of the Iliad (Rh. 1.14.1.2–3): “For it is the task of the
Muses to recount accurately the anger with which Achilles was angry at Troy”. The Iliadic incipit
is doubly marked by the quotation of the Iliad’s opening verse as the section title for the paraphrase
as a whole (1.14.1.1) and the etymological figure (τὴν μῆνιν, ᾗ ἐμήνισεν) highlighting the epic’s
first word (μῆνιν).
While the Republic paraphrase reduces the length of the Homeric passage to two thirds, the
pseudo-Aristidean version – at 321 words beside the Iliad’s 314 – is in fact minimally longer
than its Iliadic source passage. Taking into account the addition of definite articles in Attic as
opposed to Homeric Greek, pseudo-Aristides’ paraphrase is roughly equivalent in length over-
all. Unlike Socrates’ Iliad, which omits formulaic epithets and other forms of ornamentation
wholesale, the Ars rhetorica paraphrase routinely maintains them. For example, in translating
the Iliadic proem’s final verse (Il. 1.7 Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς “the son
of Atreus, master of men, and divine Achilles”), pseudo-Aristides endows both characters with
epithets (1.14.1.10–12): Achilles is “the son of Peleus” (Ἀχιλλεὺς ὁ Πηλέως) and Agamem-
non “the son of Atreus, king of the Greeks” (Ἀγαμέμνων ὁ Ἀτρέως βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἑλλήνων).
Although Agamemnon receives a double explanatory gloss (his name and the identity of the
“men” [ἀνδρῶν] as “Greeks” [Ἑλλήνων]) and Achilles’ patronymic is based on the first line of
the poem (Il. 1.1 Πηληιάδεω ~ ὁ Πηλέως), both nevertheless retain the Homeric elaboration of
their names. In the portion of the paraphrase that can be directly compared with the Platonic ver-
sion, pseudo-Aristides supplies equivalents for the Homeric adjectives qualifying ἄποινα (Il. 1.13
ἀπερείσι[α] “boundless”) and σκήπτρῳ (Il. 1.15 χρυσέῳ “golden”), writing ἄποινα οὐκ ὀλίγιστα
(Rh. 1.14.1.20 “no mean ransom”) and σκῆπτρον . . . χρυσοῦν (Rh. 1.14.1.18 “golden scepter”);
in both instances, Plato omits the adjective. Similarly, in Chryses’ hymnic apostrophe of Apollo,
which in Homer comprises both cult titles and regional allegiances but in Plato is reduced to the
periphrastic summary description “the god’s titles”, pseudo-Aristides continues Apollo’s honorif-
ics (Rh. 1.14.1.36 Σμίνθιον, Τενέδιον, Χρύσιον, Καλλίτοξον). Not only are the existing Homeric
epithets semantically and morphologically simplified (Ἀργυρότοξ[ε] ~ Καλλίτοξον and Σμινθεῦ
~ Σμίνθιον), but the relative clause specifying the god’s geographical domain is also replaced
by demonymic epithets (Τενέδοιο ~ Τενέδιον and Χρύσην ~ Χρύσιον); only the more obscure
Killa is omitted wholesale. The artistic quality of the paraphrase is evident by the inverted order
in which the four epithets are given in pseudo-Aristides. In sum, a Homeric locus conspicuously
neglected in Plato’s paraphrase receives an equally conspicuous elaboration in the pseudo-Aris-
tidean version.
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Despite these marked and systematic deviations from the Platonic model, the Homeric para-
phrase in the Ars rhetorica in numerous aspects follows the paraphrastic method of the Republic.
In addition to specific instances of phrasing, Socrates’ Iliad provides primarily a structural model
for the Ars rhetorica’s prosification of the Homeric passage through its replacement of direct
with indirect speech. Particular instances where the phrasing of the Platonic and pseudo-Aris-
tidean paraphrases overlaps but, at the same time, substantially differs from the Homeric model
include the rendering of the Iliadic ἐκπέρσαι Πριάμοιο πόλιν (Il. 1.19 “to fully destroy the city of
Priam”): In Plato the phrase is both softened and simplified (Resp. 393e1–2 ἑλόντας τὴν Τροίαν
“by sacking Troy”), and the same collocation recurs in pseudo-Aristides (Rh. 1.14.1.22 ἑλεῖν τὴν
Τροίαν “to sack Troy”). Likewise, the Ars rhetorica paraphrase follows the Republic in reporting
Agamemnon’s threat to Chryses in indirect speech (Resp. 393e5–394a1 ~ Rh. 1.14.1.27–33). In
reporting Chryses’ prayer to Apollo, however, the author of the Ars rhetorica adopts a slightly
different approach. While the first part of Chryses’ prayer is reported indirectly in keeping with
the Platonic approach (Rh. 1.14.1.35–47 “now he was launching all voices, calling on Apollo as
‘Sminthius’, ‘Tenedius’, ‘Chrysius’, and ‘of-the-beautiful-bow’, mentioning all his names”), the
second part, which contains Chryses’ specific request, is given in direct speech. The transition is
first signalled by the use of the second-person pronoun σοι and the vocative δέσποτα (“lord”; cf. Il.
1.36 Ἀπόλλωνι ἄνακτι “to lord Apollo”) and then confirmed by first- and second-person personal
pronouns (μοι “to me”; σύ “you”) and verbal forms (ἔθυσα “I sacrificed”; ἤτρεψα “I thatched”;
ἔλθοις “please come!”). In a paraphrase that has made consistent – even emphatic – use of indirect
discourse in rendering Homeric character speech and narrative alike, the eruption of Chryses’
voice in direct discourse adds substantial vividness to pseudo-Aristides’ version, not least because
the switch from indirect to direct speech occurs halfway through a single speech. This unexpected
shift from reported to direct speech highlights the character of Chryses and the emotional import
of his speech. Whereas the Socratic Iliad has frequently been noted for its intentional stripping of
Homeric emotionality (Naddaff, 2002, p. 58), the pseudo-Aristidean paraphrase restores some of
the Iliad’s emotion by channelling it into Chryses’ appeal to the god.
Another imperial paraphrase of the same Homeric passage, datable to the third century, sur-
vives on the wooden tablet of a schoolbook from Roman Egypt (MP3 2732). The scribe’s attempt
to write out the paraphrase a second time (at lines 58–61) strongly suggests that the text was not
an original composition, but rather was copied from a pre-existing template through transcription
or dictation. Such a genesis fits the text’s ambitious literary agenda: While, as we have seen, the
Republic reduces the Homeric passage to two thirds of its length and pseudo-Aristides roughly
maintains the Homeric length, the writing tablet’s paraphrase runs to four times the length of
the original passage (Il. 1.1–21). This extension of length comes with the expansion of Homer’s
rhetorical repertoire and a general increase in ornamentation. For example, Homer’s one-time
apostrophe of the Muse as “goddess” (θεά, Il. 1.1) is tripled, resulting in “o Muse” (ὦ Μοῦσα, line
1), “o mistress” (ὦ δέσποινα, line 3), and “o divine Muse” (ὦ θεὰ Μοῦσα, line 11). The diction
of the paraphrase is recherché throughout, including τὴν . . . ἀγανάκτησιν (“vexation”, line 4) for
μῆνιν (“anger”, Il. 1.1) and τὸ ναύσταθμον (“anchor-place”, line 34) for θοὰς . . . νῆας Ἀχαιῶν
(“the swift ships of the Achaeans”, Il. 1.12). Both words are previously attested in the Attic histo-
rian Thucydides (2.41.3, 3.6.2), who can be considered as the source for part of the paraphrase’s
Atticist language.
Elaboration of diction also effects the expansiveness of the paraphrase. In their general tendency
to move away from Homeric modes of expression, the author of the papyrological paraphrase omits
formulaic epithets throughout, opting for other forms of lexical expansion instead. The Homeric
epithet phrases ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν and δῖος (Il. 1.7), which are developed in the pseudo-Aristidean
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paraphrase (Rh. 1.14.1.10–12), are completely suppressed on the tablet (lines 17–18, cf. lines
20–21). By contrast, the papyrological paraphrase renders a number of non-formulaic adjectives,
such as πολλὰς . . . ψυχάς (Il. 1.3 “many souls”), by pleonastically expanding the Homeric phrases
(e.g., line 7 πολλοὶ καὶ ἀναρίθμητοι “many and countless [men]”). In the case of Chryseis, who
receives no epithet in the Homeric passage, the anonymous paraphrast innovates with μονογενής
“only child”, whose quasi-formulaic character is established by its repeated use (lines 36, 46).
Beyond adjectives, the anonymous paraphrast also uses synonymy to expand verbal and nominal
phrases, including λίσσετο (Il. 1.15 “he beseeched” ~ lines 43–44 συνεύχομαι . . . αἰτῶ “I pray and
demand”) and Πριάμοιο πόλιν (Il. 1.19 “the city of Priam” ~ lines 40–41).
The expansion of the Homeric passage in the papyrological paraphrase is centred on Chryses’
plea to the Greeks. Whereas the same speech is rendered in indirect discourse by both Plato (Resp.
393e1–3) and pseudo-Aristides (Rh. 1.14.1.15–21), the tablet version preserves the vividness of
the Homeric original by keeping it in direct speech. Moreover, the five verses of the Iliad (Il.
1.17–21) are enlarged into 19 lines of prose (lines 38–56). This expansion is effected not only
through the lexical and syntactic changes but also by incorporating elements of characterization
(lines 43–44 “I pray and demand” ~ Il. 1.15) and description (line 53 “his garlands” ~ Il. 1.14)
from the Homeric narrative context into Chryses’ direct utterance. By transferring these features
of the Homeric omniscient narrator to the embedded speech of a character, the author of the papy-
rological paraphrase augments the importance of Chryses and the weight of his plea. This interest
in a minor Homeric character, already demonstrated for the pseudo-Aristidean paraphrase of the
passage, suggests a desire to boost the visibility of marginal figures within the Homeric world.
Unlike Plato’s Socrates, whose excision of μίμησις strengthens the Iliad’s primary narrator (Resp.
393d4–5 “not as Chryses but as Homer”), the anonymous and pseudo-Aristidean Iliadic para-
phrasts of the imperial period systematically foreground the embedded speaker Chryses.
Ancient Greek terminology of intralingual translation

Translation is conventionally understood as the conversion of a text, specifically a text’s mean-
ing, from one language into another. It is generally assumed that, by being translated, a text pre-
serves its meaning but changes its language. As a result, Greek renderings of Homer, especially
in antiquity, although demonstrably crucial for the canonization and interpretation of the Iliad and
Odyssey, have been systematically downplayed in both scholarly and larger cultural discourses.
However, this narrow view of translation as necessarily occurring between as opposed to within
languages, which prevents a full appreciation of these texts from the perspective of translation
studies, is problematic not only on conceptual but also on historical grounds. In fact, the notion of
intralingual translation generally agrees with ancient linguistic terminology, as Greek sources do
not differentiate between intralingual and interlingual translation, using the same set of terms for
both textual practices.
One of the three most common ancient Greek verbs denoting interlingual translation in the later
tradition, ἑρμηνεύειν, occurs with that meaning as early as Xenophon in the fourth century BCE
(Anabasis 5.4.5), where it is applied to the interpreter Timesitheus orally translating Xenophon’s
speech from Greek into the language of the Mossynoecians, a people native to the northern shore
of the Black Sea. In the second-century BCE Letter of Aristeas, which presents an intriguing
account of the genesis of the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible, the verb and its syn-
onymous compound formations διερμηνεύειν and μεθερμηνεύειν, as well as the cognate noun
ἑρμηνεία, are again used to refer to the act of interlingual translation (Wright, 2008). It has been
convincingly argued, however, that ἑρμηνεύειν and its cognates are chosen in direct imitation of
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the vocabulary of Alexandrian scholarship, which used the same terms to denote critical exegesis
within Greek (Honigman, 2003, pp. 42–49). Thus, at pains to stress the scholarly nature of the
Alexandrian Bible translators, pseudo-Aristeas’ frequent use of ἑρμην- words may serve to pre-
sent the Septuagint as a “critical translation”. A similar shift between intralingual and interlingual
interpretation can be seen in Dionysius of Halicarnassus. In his treatise on Thucydides (Thucycides
49), Dionysius notes that, if the more obscure diction favoured by the Athenian historian were
to be used in spoken language, listeners would require “translators” (ἑρμηνευσόντων) “just as if
they were listening to the language of a foreign nation” (ὥσπερ ἀλλοεθνοῦς γλώσσης ἀκούοντες).
By comparing the process of elucidating Thucydidean language in Greek with the translation of
a foreign language into Greek, Dionysius highlights the fundamental similarity between inter-
lingual and intralingual translation. The same parallelism is also evidenced by the collocation
of ἑρμηνεύειν with adverbs denoting both languages (e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman
Antiquities 2.12 Ἑλληνιστὶ ἑρμηνευόμενον “being interpreted in Greek”) and types of discourse
(e.g., pseudo-Hermogenes, On the Method of Forceful Speaking 30 πεζῶς ἑρμηνεύσῃ “interprets
in prose”).
While ἑρμηνεύειν preserves an oral dimension throughout, regardless of whether an intralin-
gual or an interlingual rephrasing is meant, the verb μεταγράφειν as a compound of γράφειν
(“to write”) always denotes the production of a written text. In general, μεταγράφειν signifies the
alteration in medium or content to produce a piece of writing. Chiefly, the verb refers to the process
of transcription from an oral to a written form (e.g., Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis 108) and the act
of multiplying a written text by making copies (e.g., Lucian, Against an Ignorant Book-Collector
4). On the level of content, it also refers to the change in wording that accompanies the process
of rewriting, especially in public documents (e.g., Xenophon, Hellenica 6.3.19, referring to the
replacement of “Thebans” with “Boeotians” in a treaty).
Specifically, μεταγράφειν denotes the process of translation. This can be understood as a spe-
cialized form of the verb’s general meanings, combining alteration of medium with change in
content. For the process of translation constitutes an act of both copying an original and trans-
forming it. Instances of μεταγράφειν referring to interlingual translation – from another language
into Greek – include Thucydides (4.50) and Lucian (How to Write History 21). In the context of
the Septuagint, it has been argued that pseudo-Aristeas repeatedly evokes the basic meaning of
μεταγράφειν – and the corresponding action noun μεταγραφή – to cast the Greek translation of the
Bible as an act of transcription, that is, a faithful copying of the original Hebrew (Wright, 2015,
p. 119). Although pseudo-Aristeas thereby may seem to deemphasize the transformative dimen-
sion of the Septuagint, μεταγραφή later becomes an unmarked term to refer to the “translation” of
the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 12.2.6). Since μεταγράφειν also frequently
denotes the rewriting of Greek texts in Greek, the verb’s use can plausibly be extended to include
intralingual translation, for example, between different Greek dialects, even though no such occur-
rence has thus far come to light. The verb μεταγράφειν is generally applied to documentary rather
than literary texts, and when used to characterize the Septuagint sits well with the view of the
Hebrew Bible as a legal document (Brock, 1979, pp. 72–73). However, in Lucian (How to Write
History 21), μεταγράφειν denotes literary translation, referring to the practice of a historian writ-
ing in the Atticist tradition who does not transliterate Roman names (e.g., Fronto rendered as
Φρόντων) but translates them (e.g., Fronto rendered as Φρόντις). Therefore, literary translation,
including that of Homer, can be situated within the domain of μεταγράφειν.
A third verb used in Greek antiquity to describe the process of translation, μεταφράζειν, is
of particular importance not least because it provides the origin for the modern Greek terms
for translation, that is, interlingual translation, such as μεταφράζω (“to translate”), μετάφραση
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Homer into Greek
(“translation”), and μεταφράστης (“translator”). In antiquity, however, μεταφράζειν refers not

only to interlingual translation but also to intralingual rewriting. The former meaning can regu-
larly be found from the first century onward: Josephus uses it to refer to Greek translations from
Phoenician (Jewish Antiquities 8.144, 9.283), Egyptian (Against Apion 1.73), and Hebrew (Jewish
Antiquities 10.218), while in Plutarch it denotes translation from Latin into Greek (Marcus Cato
19.3, Otho 18.1) and, once, from Greek into Latin (Cicero 40.2).
Before Josephus and Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities 3.32.1) already
uses μεταφράζειν to describe the translation of the Roman goddess Feronia (Φερωνία) into Greek,
where her name is variously rendered as Ἀνθοφόρος (“Flower-bearer”), Φιλοστέφανος (“Gar-
land-lover”), and Περσεφόνη (“Proserpina”). At the same time, the Augustan historian expresses
through the same verb the notion of intralingual rephrasing, when he comments on Pericles’
populist practice of “restating in different terms what he has said previously” (Thucydides 45).
Dionysius’ contemporary Philo of Alexandria, in describing the expressive capabilities of Greek,
similarly highlights how the language can “rephrase in different ways” (Moses 2.38 μεταφράζοντα
καὶ παραφράζοντα) one and the same thought. In the same vein, Plutarch uses the action noun
μετάφρασις “translation” to signify the intralingual rephrasing in one’s own words of the speech of
another (Demosthenes 8.2). Finally, the Homeric practice of varying the lexicon by using a range
of synonyms (e.g., “flee”, “elude”) is described as μετάφρασις in the scholia (Il. 22.199–201c;
Erbse, 1977, p. 310). This instance of Homeric self-paraphrase constitutes a special case of the
practice of intralingual μετάφρασις, but one that may itself have served as a model for later glos-
sators of Homer. Elsewhere in ancient Homeric scholarship, μεταφράζειν and its verbal adjectives
μεταφραστικός and μεταφραστέος signify a simplified rewriting, which explains the meaning of a
particular word, phrase, or verse. For example, Apollonius Sophista glosses the compound adjec-
tive δυσαριστοτόκεια, a Homeric hapax used by Achilles’ mother Thetis in self-address (Il. 18.54),
as “she who has given birth to an excellent son destined to an unlucky fate”, but adds that others
“rephrase” (μεταφράζουσι) the word differently, namely as “the unlucky one who has given birth
to an excellent son” (Bekker, 1833, pp. 60, 27–28). Apollonius’ use of μεταφράζειν to introduce
the alternative gloss demonstrates that the verb extends to the sort of intralingual glossing of
Homeric language that is common throughout the ancient scholarly reception of Homer.
In ancient scholarly and literary texts, the verb μεταφράζειν and its cognates denote various
textual habits, ranging from translation from another language into Greek to grammatical and
exegetical paraphrase within Greek. The coexistence of interlingual and intralingual meanings for
the word suggests the fundamental continuity of interlingual and intralingual translation in antiq-
uity. The co-presence of the two usages is not only reinforced by their general synchronicity – both
being attested since the first century BCE – but especially by their combined occurrence in Diony-
sius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch, both of whom use the word to refer to translation between and
within languages. In fact, most ancient occurrences denote the latter kind, that is, Greek-to-Greek
rewriting, in keeping with the verb’s general meaning of “re-phrasing”.
Ancient Greek terminology for denoting the act of interlingual translation also encompasses
the act of intralingual translation. This semantic overlap is due to the history of the terms used for
translation, primarily the verbs ἑρμηνεύειν, μεταγράφειν, and μεταφράζειν, as well as their com-
pounds and derivatives. Since all these words denote cultural practices that are more fundamental
than specifically interlingual translation, the latter is conceptually always already connected to
processes occurring within a particular language, instead of emerging as an entirely separate phe-
nomenon peculiar to the relationship between languages. Consequently, we are more truthful to
ancient Greek translational theory – and, indeed, textual practice – if we recognize the coexistence
of, and fundamental continuity between, interlingual and intralingual translation.
107
Massimo Cè
Notes
1 Unless otherwise indicated, ancient Greek authors and their works, as well as papyri, are cited according
to the “Authors and Works” and “Papyrological Publications” sections of Liddell et al. (1940, pp. xvi–
xxxviii, xl–xlii).
2 Cf. the related notion of Homeric “Übersetzungseinlagen” (Walz, 2011, p. 2410).
Further reading
Armstrong, R. H. (2014). Homer, translation. In G. K. Giannakis (Ed.), Encyclopedia of ancient Greek lan
guage and linguistics (vol. 2, pp. 175–182). Brill.
Cè, M. (2022). The secondary incipit of the Odyssey (Od. 9.39): Quotation, translation, and adaptation in the
ancient reception of Homer. Classical Philology, 117(3), 411–437.
Maronitis, D. N. (2008). Intralingual translation: Genuine and false dilemmas. In A. Lianeri & V. Zajko
University Press.
Montanari, F. (1995). Tradurre dal greco in greco: Parafrasi omeriche nella Grecia antica. In F. Montanari
(Ed.), Studi di filologia omerica antica II (pp. 59–68). Giardini.
Schironi, F. (2018). “The best of the grammarians”: Aristarchus of Samothrace on the Iliad (esp. pp. 76–90).
University of Michigan Press.
References
Bekker, I. (1833). Apollonii Sophistae lexicon Homericum. Reimer.
Brock, S. P. (1979). Aspects of translation technique in antiquity. Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 20,
69–87.
Burgess, J. S. (2001). The tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the epic cycle. Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Burkert, W. (1976). Das hunderttorige Theben. Wiener Studien, 89, 5–21.
Cè, M. (2021). The Ilias Latina in the context of ancient epitome translation. In M. J. Falcone & C. Schubert
(Eds.), Ilias Latina: Text, interpretation, and reception (pp. 39–66). Brill.
Collart, P. (1931). Les papyrus grecs d’Achmı̂ m à la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. Bulletin de l’Institut
français d’archéologie orientale, 31, 39–110.
Dickey, E. (2007). Ancient Greek scholarship: A guide to finding, reading, and understanding scholia, com
mentaries, lexica, and grammatical treatises, from their beginnings to the Byzantine period. Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Erbse, H. (1977). Scholia graeca in Homeri Iliadem: Volumen V scholia ad libros Υ – Ω continens. De Gruyter.
Ernst, N. (2004). Die D-Scholien zur Odyssee. Kritische Ausgabe [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Uni-
versität zu Köln].
Fernández Delgado, J. A. (2012). La parafrasi omerica nei papiri scolastici. In G. Bastianini & A. Casanova
(Eds.), I papiri omerici: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi: Firenze, 9–10 giugno 2011 (pp. 159–
176). Istituto Papirologico G. Vitelli.
Garzya, A. (1954). Alcmane: I frammenti. S. Viti.
Henrichs, A. (1971). Scholia minora zu Homer I. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 7, 97–149.
Honigman, S. (2003). The Septuagint and Homeric scholarship in Alexandria: A study in the narrative of the
Letter of Aristeas. Routledge.
Janko, R. (1987). Aristotle, Poetics I. With the Tractatus Coislinianus; a hypothetical reconstruction of Poet
ics II; the fragments of the On Poets. Hackett.
Kassel, R., & Austin, C. (1984). Poetae comici graeci. Volumen III 2: Aristophanes. De Gruyter.
Kelly, A. (2015). Stesichorus’ Homer. In P. J. Finglass & A. Kelly (Eds.), Stesichorus in context (pp. 21–44).
Cambridge University Press.
Kousoulini, V. (2013). Alcmanic hexameters and early hexametric poetry: Alcman’s poetry in its oral context.
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 53, 420–440.
Lake, P. G. (2011). Plato’s Homeric dialogue: Homeric quotation, paraphrase, and allusion in the Republic
[Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Fordham University].
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Homer into Greek
Latte, K., & Cunningham, I. C. (2020). Hesychii Alexandrini Lexicon. Volumen II (E – O). De Gruyter.
Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., & Jones, H. S. (1940). A Greek-English lexicon (9th ed.). Clarendon Press.
Lundon, J. (2012). The scholia minora in Homerum: An alphabetical list. Trismegistos Online Publications.
Miguélez-Cavero, L. (2013). Triphiodorus: The Sack of Troy. A general study and a commentary. De Gruyter.
Naddaff, R. (2002). Exiling the poets: The production of censorship in Plato’s Republic. The University of
Chicago Press.
Nünlist, R. (2015). What does Ὅμηρον ἐξ Ὀμήρου σαφηνίζειν actually mean? Hermes, 143, 385–403.
Page, D. L. (1955). Sappho and Alcaeus: An introduction to the study of ancient Lesbian poetry. Clarendon
Press.
Pfeiffer, R. (1968). History of classical scholarship from the beginnings to the end of the Hellenistic age.
Clarendon Press.
Pontani, F. (2022). Scholia graeca in Odysseam V: Scholia ad libros ι – κ. Edizioni di storia e letteratura.
Renner, T. (1979). Three new Homerica on papyrus. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 83, 311–337.
Squire, M. (2011). The Iliad in a nutshell: Visualizing epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford University Press.
van Rossum-Steenbeek, M. (1998). Greek readers’ digests? Studies on a selection of subliterary papyri. Brill.
van Thiel, H. (2002). Lexeis Homērikai. Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln.
van Thiel, H. (2014). Scholia D in Iliadem. Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln.
Wachter, R. (2009). Grammatik der homerischen Sprache. In J. Latacz (Ed.), Homers Ilias: Gesamtkommen
tar. Prolegomena (3rd ed., pp. 61–108). De Gruyter.
Walz, D. (2011). Der lateinische Homer in Antike, Mittelalter und Renaissance. In H. Kittel et al. (Eds.),
Übersetzung – Translation – Traduction. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung: 3.
Teilband (pp. 2409–2417). De Gruyter.
West, M. L. (1995). The date of the Iliad. Museum Helveticum, 52, 203–219.
Wright, B. G. (2008). The Jewish scriptures in Greek: The Septuagint in the context of ancient translation
activity. In B. G. Wright (Ed.), Praise Israel for wisdom and instruction: Essays on Ben Sira and wisdom,
the Letter of Aristeas and the Septuagint (pp. 197–212). Brill.
Wright, B. G. (2015). The Letter of Aristeas: ‘Aristeas to Philocrates’ or ‘On the translation of the law of the
Jews’. De Gruyter.
109
PART II
Language varieties and ideology
7
AS A PRESTIGE-ENDOWING
ACTIVITY FOR THE CYPRIOT
GREEK DIALECT
Introduction1
Until the end of the 1990s, Jakobson’s (1959) tripartite categorization for the interpretation of
the linguistic sign was cited as a curiosity, since the dominant, if not exclusive, understanding of
translation as a practice was its interlingual form, which Jakobson himself designated “transla
tion proper”. Since the turn of the millennium, with the strengthening of translation studies as an
academic field, but also as a result of the dramatic changes brought about by globalization and the
popularization of the Internet, intersemiotic translation has also developed exponentially reflect
ing our broader understanding and daily experience of the concept of “text” to include systems of
signification far beyond the verbal. The third type, intralingual translation, on the other hand, is
still quite under-researched, albeit undeservedly so, as we will attempt to show.2
Intralingual translation as a practice, which usually includes cases of modernization from older
forms of a language into the respective modern standard or from specialized registers to lay lan
guage, corresponds to much fewer cases than the other two types of translation outlined by Jakob
son. But the blatant oversight of this category cannot be explained solely on the basis of a smaller
pool of case studies. In what follows, we shall show that it can be partly attributed to the fact that
intralingual translation as a practice inadvertently undermines key premises of the concepts of
nation and nationalism.
Translation and nation

Translation in all its shapes and guises has been employed historically to promote widely different
agendas beyond its obvious function of facilitating understanding across linguistic boundaries. At
times, the promotion of these ideological agendas takes precedence over any communicative func
tion the translations may serve. Canonical texts, and particularly the Bible, classical Greco-Roman
texts, and Shakespeare’s works, have often been translated in order to use the symbolic capital held
by those texts to endorse the validity of whatever agenda they were translated in the service of.
One of the agendas that translation has been instrumental in promoting is the construction of
nations and their respective national identities (see Damrosch, 2014). In the 15th century, the
invention of the printing press in Europe, the rise of new collective identities, and the spread of
113 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-10

humanism paved the way for multiple translations of the Bible into a large number of vernaculars
throughout Europe. The symbolic capital of the Bible consecrated the vernaculars into which it
was translated, endorsing their legitimacy as national languages of the new nation-states.
One of the most politically influential Bible translations was that of Martin Luther. His transla
tion of the Bible (the New Testament in 1525 and complete with the Old Testament in 1534) is con
sidered the key text that triggered the Protestant Reformation. By offering the German-speaking
people the Bible in the vernacular, Luther emancipated them politically and socially. Very soon
after his Bible was published, there was unrest among the peasants, culminating in the Thuring
ian revolt of 1525, despite Luther himself being adamantly opposed to it (for more on Luther’s
translation, see Robinson, 2002, pp. 83–89). Furthermore, Luther’s translation was so sweepingly
popular that it became the blueprint for German literary writing, and eventually for Modern High
German. In the 19th century, translation was used again by the German Romantics to enrich the
German language and literature and to help them both grow into worthy representatives of the new
nation, while forging a German consciousness in the process.
Intralingual translation and nation: diachronic intralingual translation

Diachronic intralingual translation is meant to bridge the gap between older texts and modern
readers. Such modernizing efforts have often been greeted with scepticism or outright hostility,
though, by traditionalists, who claim that such efforts are unnecessary, since the speakers of a lan
guage have access to all its varieties, old and new, and that such translations will only vulgarize the
source text and ruin its literary merits. The fallacious premise underpinning this claim is that the
language on which a particular nation is firmly grounded constitutes a linear, uninterrupted historic
continuum, which all its speakers partake in.
In the case of the English language, for example, according to this premise, modern British
readers can supposedly readily access Shakespeare’s works, written in Early Modern English over
four centuries ago, as part of their heritage. Delabastita (2016, p. 1414) examines the moderniza
tion of Shakespeare for contemporary readers “without taking sides in the controversy over their
legitimacy”, but acknowledges that “this debate is definitely about more than ‘just’ language [as
it is] predicated on a range of ideologically charged assumptions”. Among the many interesting
points he raises, two are of particular relevance to us here. The first deals with English as the
national language of England; if we called the modernizing versions “translations”, he says, “then
Shakespearean English would appear to be an individual and historical dialect of the English
language rather than a language in its own right” (p. 1413). The second one links intralingual
translation with Shakespeare’s position as England’s national playwright; “Doesn’t the English
language disown Shakespeare when one emphasizes his linguistic otherness by calling for transla
tion?” (p. 1414). Such questions illustrate how scepticism towards modernizing Shakespeare via
diachronic intralingual translation are inextricably linked with nation-related questions.
The same narrative, according to which all native speakers have access to all previous forms of
a language, can also be applied to the Greek language, only, in this case, the lineage of this sup
posedly unified linear linguistic continuum, forming the foundation of the nation, can be traced
as far back as 3,000 years ago. Upholding this claim leads to the untenable premise that modern
speakers of Greek can fully access the language of Homer and therefore are in no need of intralin
gual translation. An extreme expression of this stance unfolded at the beginning of the 20th cen
tury, with a rally in 1901 to oppose the translation of the Gospels into Modern Greek and another
one in 1903 to oppose the staging at the Royal Theatre of Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy in Modern
Greek; both protests escalated into riots resulting in fatalities (for more on this see Horrocks, 2010,
114
Intralingual translation as a prestige-endowing activity
pp. 456–457; Mackridge, 2009, pp. 247–254). A milder expression of this narrative persists in high
schools today, in which 2,500-year-old classical Greek texts are still taught in their original form.
In the context of Greek culture, the very term “translation” to describe the modernization
of texts from Ancient Greek into Modern Greek is considered hubris. To avoid challenging
the official narrative, various alternative terms have been suggested, including George Seferis’
‘transcription’ (metagrafi), Odysseus Elytis’ “a Modern Greek form” (morfi sta nea ellinika) in his
translations of the Book of Revelation and Krinagoras or “recomposition and rendering” (anasyn
thesi kai apodosi) in his translation of Sappho’s poetry (all terms mentioned in Maronitis, 2008,
p. 382). So, not only is the practice of diachronic intralingual translation restricted as a result of
the aforementioned premise, but even when it does take place, it is not acknowledged as being
translation.
Intralingual translation and nation: dialectal intralingual translation

Another form of intralingual translation that may inadvertently undermine the concept of nation
is that which takes place across different dialectal varieties of the same language. Once a nation
has chosen the variety that will be considered its standard form, it becomes sceptical or even
outright hostile to all other varieties of the language. This is because the mere acknowledgment
of the existence of other dialectal varieties destabilizes the supposed homogeneity of a nation (cf.
Venuti, 2005, p. 178). The consecration of a particular variety as the standard version along with
its ensuing codification lies at the very core of the nation-building process and the accompanying
imaginary of a “common” language, culture, and history (see, e.g., Mackridge, 2009). Other varie
ties are not to be codified or even written. As a result, translating between the standard and the
various dialectal varieties of a language are met with strong scepticism, mirroring the aversion to
their codification or even their potential to be written.
The boundaries between languages and dialects are porous and depend on historical, political,
ideological, and cultural factors. Our understanding of a “language” as opposed to a “dialect”
depends on how we view the concept of “nation”, since a “national language” is nothing but the
standardized version of one variety, chosen by a nation as its official one. The difference between a
language and a dialect is thus as constructed and as contingent upon historical circumstance as the
nation itself. This is mainly why intralingual translation from the standard variety into a dialectal
variety and vice versa is generally viewed with scepticism, since acknowledging the existence of
dialects alongside the standard variety of a language undermines the narrative of a homogeneous
nation, whose very existence hinges on a common history and a common language (Anderson,
2006).
In light of the aforementioned, Jakobson’s definition of intralingual translation as “an inter
pretation of verbal signs by means of signs of the same language” (Jakobson, 1959, p. 233) is
problematic, because it is porous; that is, whether one is translating within “the same language”,
as Jakobson (1959, p. 233) put it, or from one language to another is directly linked to where we
draw the boundaries of a language in relation to its other varieties be they temporal, geographi
cal, or social. In other words, it is contingent and highly subjective. As Hill-Madsen states (2019,
pp. 541–542, emphasis in the original):
The well-known linguistic concept of dialect continua, the phenomenon by which different
dialects shade into separate languages (Heap, 2006; Trudgill, 2006), means that translation
between closely related and mutually intelligible languages such as Polish, Czech and Slo
vakian or between Danish and Norwegian (Trudgill, 2006) borders on INTRA. Conversely,
115
translation between distant dialects such as the Cantonese and Mandarin varieties of Chi
nese can be seen as bordering on interlingual translation.3
Interestingly enough, but in accordance with its aforementioned versatility to promote the most
contradictory causes, translation has also been used to promote “the preservation of so-called
minor languages, or languages of limited diffusion” (Baer, 2000, p. 362). Once again, canonical
texts have been regularly selected as source texts to be translated into “minor” languages or dia
lectal varieties, so that the symbolic capital of the former can be tapped into in order to sanction
the latter.
To sum up, intralingual translation has, in our opinion, been under-researched, partly because
it inadvertently undermines the concept of nation and nationalism, both inextricably linked with
ideals of cultural, historical, and linguistic uniformity and stability. On the one hand, diachronic
intralingual translation has historically been seen as redundant and, even when it has taken place,
it has rarely been labelled translation; on the other hand, dialectal intralingual translation has also
been frowned upon, because dialects have been viewed with scepticism and were not to be written
or codified, as this could challenge the narrative of national and linguistic uniformity.
Cypriot Greek (CG) and its historical and socio-political background
Historical background
CG is a variety of Modern Greek (see, e.g., Newton, 1972) spoken by around 800,000 speakers on
the island of Cyprus, but also by substantial diaspora communities abroad (Voniati et al., 2020).
As is the case with all other Modern Greek varieties,4 CG derives from Medieval Greek (6th–15th
centuries), itself having derived from Hellenistic Koine (3rd century BCE–6th century CE). It is
believed to have developed as a distinct variety between the 7th and 13th centuries (Aerts, 1986,
p. 388), arguably because, although the island was ruled jointly by the Arabs and the Byzantines
until the 10th century, it was quite isolated from the rest of the Empire (Pantelidis, 1931, p. 324).
The turbulent millennium that followed, during which the island successively fell under the
rule of King Richard I of England and the Knights Templar (1191–1192), the French House of
Lusignan (1192–1489), the Republic of Venice (1489–1570), the Ottoman Empire (1570–1878),
and finally the British Empire (1878–1960), further reinforced the divergence of CG from other
Greek varieties.
In 1960, Cyprus became an independent sovereign state. As the two biggest ethnic groups on
the island were the Greek Cypriot (GC) and Turkish Cypriot (TC) communities, the constitution
of the fledgling Republic of Cyprus recognized Greek and Turkish as its two official languages.
What the glottonyms “Greek” and “Turkish” actually refer to, though, are the respective standard
varieties spoken in Greece and Türkiye, not the local varieties, CG and Cypriot Turkish (CT),
which the members of each community acquire respectively from birth and use in their everyday
communication.5
The new independent state originally encompassed both communities and the island in its
entirety. However, animosity soon grew between the two aforementioned ethnic communities, cul
minating in the inter-communal clashes of the 1960s, which drove the two communities apart and
had drastic repercussions on all aspects of life on the island, including its linguistic landscape. In
1974, the intervention of the Turkish army in response to a coup d’état against the elected Cypriot
government that had been staged with the support of the Greek dictatorial Regime of the Colonels
culminated in the de facto partition of the island, which remains in effect to date. As a result, the
116
two communities became segregated, with the TC community in the north and the GC community
(along with all other Christian ethnic groups) in the south of the island. Despite the segregation,
Standard Turkish (ST) de jure remains one of the two official languages of the Republic of Cyprus;
in practice, though, it is no longer used in everyday communication in the areas controlled by the
Government of the Republic of Cyprus, as there are no longer substantial Turkish-speaking popu
lations there.
In 2003, checkpoints across the UN-controlled buffer zone were opened, allowing the two
communities to cross the demarcation line and meet after 29 years of complete segregation during
which a whole new generation of Cypriots had been born and raised. This event had a profound
impact on all Cypriots; it rekindled a reappraisal of the Cypriot issue and the relations between the
two communities and triggered a series of bicommunal cultural projects, many of which included
collaborations across the divide. Furthermore, it challenged the stereotypical view of the Other as
the enemy and de facto induced Cypriots to reassess their cultural identity. Unsurprisingly, trans
lation once again played an active role in bringing the two communities into contact, usually via
English as the lingua franca, as the younger generations of both communities no longer speak the
language of the Other.
The sociolinguistic situation in Cyprus today

In 2004, the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union. During the pre-accession period, in
1992, Cyprus signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and ratified it in
2002. Consequently, Western Armenian was recognized as a minority language (2002), followed
by Cypriot Arabic (2008). In 2006, Cypriot Sign Language was officially acknowledged as the
language of the deaf, yet another act that officially endorsed the island’s linguistic plurality.
Regarding the Grecophone population of Cyprus, CG speakers have been described as bidi
alectal (Papapavlou & Pavlou, 1998) or bilectal (Rowe & Grohmann, 2013), as they have (near)
native competence in two proximal varieties: CG and Standard Modern Greek (SMG). While CG
is acquired as the first language at home and is used as a vernacular, SMG is learnt mainly through
the education system. As sister varieties stemming from a common ancestor, CG and SMG share
fundamental lexico-grammatical elements. Nevertheless, due to their separate trajectories of his
torical development (see above), the two varieties differ significantly in terms of structure and use,
as they are considerably distinct regarding phonetics, grammar (phonology, morphology, and syn
tax), lexicon/semantics, and even pragmatics (Newton, 1972; Terkourafi, 2007). These differences
are arguably more obvious than the differences between, say, Serbian and Croatian, which have
been recognized as distinct languages in the post-Yugoslav linguistic landscape.
By contrast, CG and SMG are not considered as two distinct, even if related, languages, for his
torical and socio-political reasons (also see Davis, 2014 and Hill-Madsen, 2019, pp. 541–542 on
this). In sociolinguistic terms, CG is considered a dialect of Modern Greek that stands as the Low
variety in its diglossic6 relationship to SMG, which is considered to be the High one (see, e.g., Rowe
& Grohmann, 2013). Thus, SMG is the norm in institutional domains, such as government admin
istration, formal education, and the media. This variety is associated with overt prestige, which
means that it is deemed aesthetically and morally superior and appropriate for usage in more formal
contexts; on the other hand, it is also considered by CG speakers as artificial and distant (Tsiplakou
et al., 2006). Conversely, CG is perceived to have lower status, thus seen as an unsophisticated,
“corrupt” version of SMG. However, CG speakers prefer using it in their daily transactions due
to its covert prestige (Labov, 1966),7 that is, its being perceived as having positive traits, such as
naturalness, sincerity, straightforwardness, authenticity, and thus as signalling solidarity and group
117
identity (see, e.g., Papapavlou & Sophocleous, 2009). Nevertheless, its negative evaluation as an
unrefined variety has resulted in its being restricted to informal use, mostly private, and primar
ily spoken domains of interaction. CG thus lacks an officially codified writing system (Armostis
et al., 2014), which in turn reinforces the perception that the dialect can only exist in its oral form,
whereas the written medium is almost exclusively associated with the standard variety.
These evaluative distinctions were mirrored in the genres in which each variety could be used.
Until the end of the 20th century, the only “higher”/literary genres in which CG was acceptable
were poetry (both popular and “elevated” poetry), staged comedies and vaudeville, radio sketches,
and theatre with either comic or rustic themes, generally written in basilectal8 CG. It could also
occasionally appear in “lower” genres, such as comic strips and caricatures in the press, radio
advertisements (in which, like in radio sketches and theatre, comic and/or rustic themes were
also typically in basilectal CG), traditional folk songs, or the odd off-script comment made by a
television or radio programme host mostly aiming at a comic effect (Pavlou, 2004). SMG, on the
other hand, was used in all other official or semi-official contexts, in public discourse, and “high”
literature.
Goals and methodology

In what follows, we will focus on how intralingual translation has added visibility and legitimacy
to CG, especially since the turn of the millennium.
In terms of methodology, we will adopt Gottlieb’s taxonomy (2018, pp. 51, 59–60), that sug
gests the following six broad categories of intralingual translation:
1 Synchronic, “with original and translation as contemporaries” (p. 51). Examples of this type are
abridged print versions of manuals and expanded online versions of magazine articles (p. 59).
2 Diachronic, “between texts belonging to different ages” (p. 51), which may include moderniza
tions of old or archaic texts.
3 Dialectal, “between different geographical, social or generational language variants” (p. 51).
4 Diaphasic, “making expert texts accessible to the public, adult fiction suited for children, etc.”
(p. 51).
5 Transliteration, “which involves a change in alphabet” (p. 51).
6 Diamesic, “involving a change in language mode, i.e., from speech to writing or vice versa”
(p. 51).
Although this chapter will focus primarily on dialectal intralingual translation, it will soon become
apparent that most of our examples straddle a number of categories, as translation stubbornly
defies all clear-cut categorizations.
Intralingual translation between Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek

Since the turn of the millennium, CG has been gaining increased visibility and a hitherto unimagi
nable acceptability in a wider range of genres, contexts, and media. The following sections offer an
overview of the many expressions of this trend (focusing specifically on the use of intralingual trans
lation from and into CG), which, in the case of Cyprus, is particularly loaded for ideological reasons;
despite the fact that Cyprus has never been part of the modern Greek state, the use of SMG symboli
cally represents the strong cultural ties with Greece and the ethnic roots of the GCs. Conversely, the
use of CG in the public domain is seen as a stance of Cypriot pride and ethnic independence.
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The early days: Cypriot Greek as oral tradition or curiosity

The earliest intralingual translations from CG were the various bilectal dictionaries into the stand
ard Greek variety of each period. Katsoyannou and Armostis (2019) mention the existence of only
three dictionaries up until 1979, all published in Athens: One in 1868 during the Ottoman rule, and
two during the British rule (one of which was a second edition of the 1868 dictionary). Since 1979,
the number of new dictionaries has increased and they are published locally: One in the 1970s, five
in the 1980s, 12 in the 1990s, ten in the 2000s, and 14 in the 2010s. Dialectal dictionaries of CG
are a prime example of intralingual translation, as the standard practice in dialectal lexicography
in Cyprus is the use of SMG as the target language, that is, for providing translation equivalents
and brief definitions for CG lemmas; the use of CG both as a target and as a source language in
a monolectal CG dictionary would be a marked choice, since the target language can only be a
standard variety. Interestingly enough, even the Common Dictionary of Cypriot Greek and Cypriot
Turkish (Hadjipieris & Kabataş, 2015) also uses the respective standard languages for translation
equivalents and definitions of Cypriot lemmas. On the other hand, the second author of this chapter
has recently been asked on several occasions to create an SMG-to-CG dictionary, a request that
reflects the ever-growing interest of CG speakers in tools to help them write in the dialect.
Another case of intralingual translation occurred between 1994 and 1995, when the authorities
attempted to dedialectalize the toponyms on road signs to conform to the phonology of SMG. In
some cases, the general public found the suggested toponyms unacceptable, for example Aglangia
and Lakkia (pronounced as [ɐɣlɐɲˈɟɐ] and [lɐˈcɐ]) instead of Aglandjia and Latchia ([ɐɣlɐˈnd͡ʒɐ]
and [lɐˈt͡ʃʰːɐ]) as normally pronounced in CG (Karyolemou, 2000). The residents of those two
areas expressed outrage at this attempt and their protests annulled the decision, at least on the
road signs, if not also on maps. This case of intralingual translation illustrates both dialectal and
synchronic translation, as well as transliteration with the attempted changes in the written repre
sentation of the toponyms.
In the late 1990s, the IRC9 and electronic mail, and since 2000 text messaging or SMS, became
quite popular means of daily computer-mediated communication in Cyprus. Synchronous commu
nication via IRC chats and SMS text messages offers the means to exchange personal, unofficial
messages that in essence employ oral language, despite being rendered in written form. In the case
of Grecophone Cypriots, the language variety they use in everyday oral communication, as already
mentioned, is CG, a variety, however, that lacks an officially codified writing system; this brought
CG speakers up against the problem of how to render their oral communication in written form.
By a twist of (technological) fate, though, a makeshift solution was employed to address the
lack of a written representation for CG. The early Internet had a number of limitations, includ
ing its limited support for non-Roman scripts. This led Greek-speaking Internet users to resort
to Roman (and in general ASCII) characters to represent Greek, a practice popularly known as
“Greeklish”. This practical solution was liberating for the CG-speaking users, as it provided a
makeshift solution for the problem of the written representation of the dialect, with the additional
benefit that it allowed the representation in writing of CG phonemes that do not exist in SMG.
For the first time ever, GCs were thus exposed to massively reading and writing in dialect which,
even if inadvertently, increased the dialect’s visibility and its legitimacy in the public sphere. In
this instance, we not only have an example of dialectal intralingual translation but also diamesic
intralingual translation, since in practical terms, the oral version of the language was encoded into
writing.
In 2001, the landmark sitcom Vourate Geitonoi [To the Rescue, Neighbours!] was launched on
Cypriot television. The series became an instant hit and retained its popularity until its end in 2010.
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Its originality lay not in its urban setting, as there had been other such series before, but in its use
of a youth slang, which made it extremely appealing to the audience. The series had contradic
tory effects on its many viewers, though. On the one hand, it endowed CG with a certain prestige
and visibility. On the other, it inadvertently reinforced the established stigma that CG is of lower
standing, fit only for peasants in rural environments: This view was reaffirmed by the popularity of
a character named Nastazia, a Bourgeois-Gentilhomme type, who frowned upon the use of dialect
and attempted to express herself in SMG, but who blurted out ludicrous linguistic bricolages, as
she was not well-versed in that variety (cf. Georgiou, 2010).
The interim: Cypriot Greek gradually loses its stigma and becomes more visible
In the early 2000s, with the ever-growing popularization of the use of the Internet and the digital
media, new forms of communication appeared in Cyprus, among which weblogs (aka blogs). Unlike
types of synchronous communication discussed previously, blogs are understood as more permanent
written forms of expression. What was interesting in the case of Cypriot bloggers was that, instead
of using SMG, as would be expected for semi-formal communication, some chose to express them
selves in dialect. Furthermore, in doing so, they ventured to find ways to encode their texts using the
Greek script instead of the Roman one that had been used until then.10 This practice resulted in further
promoting the visibility of CG and, even more importantly, in promoting its use in more elevated,
“serious” or semi-formal cases of writing, for which it had been deemed “inadequate” until then.
In 2007, Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman was staged in CG. The translation was intralin
gual, as its source text was a translation of the play into SMG, rather than the Russian original.
At the time, dialect was used only for plays with rural settings, comedies, and vaudeville, and
was considered unacceptable for “serious”, “elevated” drama. The use of dialect in the Diary was
groundbreaking, as it challenged the norm and used dialect in a “serious” play for the first time.
The whole venture, from the choice of source text and the translation to the direction and staging,
was undertaken by director Spiros Charalambous and actor Marios Ioannou. The single-act play
was staged initially in the capital, Nicosia, but since then it has toured very successfully in towns
and villages throughout the island and abroad, including a staging before a diaspora GC audience
in London, as well as one at a theatre festival in Cairo. The production of the play is such that it
allows for much spontaneity and improvisation, making every staging unique. The use of dialect
by the main character, Poprishchin, was felicitous in that it managed to move the GC audiences
as SMG could never have done, both in the first half of the play when the dialect produces a
much more humorous effect, but also in the second half in which the afflicted and ailing hero has
succumbed to madness. In both cases, the use of dialect effectively rendered the plot much more
pertinent to the GCs, as, through its covert prestige that encompasses feelings of solidarity, it
appealed to their sentiments and built their empathy with the hero, who became the man next door.
The promotion of its most recent staging in 2020 included the following remarks: “A core aspect
of this production is the fact that Poprishchin speaks in the Cypriot vernacular,11 so that his words
are more comprehensible and accessible to the Cypriot viewer. . . . A bittersweet voyage in a sea of
laughter and tears heading towards a redeeming horizon” (“A madman’s diary”, 2020). This state
ment demonstrates that the choice of dialect was not incidental or peripheral, but a conscious, key
decision to foreground the richness of CG and its expressive ability to cater for works of elevated
literature. This pioneering move has been followed by many since then, to such a degree that the
use of dialect is completely acceptable for all kinds of theatrical genres on Cypriot stages today.
During the same year, 2007, the publication of Asterix at the Olympic Games in CG offered
a quite different example of intralingual translation. While the previous case of intralingual
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translation had been the result of two artists’ spontaneous endeavour to break the norm and intro
duce the use of the vernacular in an elevated play, the translator Loukia Taxitari was commissioned
the translation by Mamouthcomix, the publishing house that owns the rights for the series of
Asterix in Greece (Goscinny & Uderzo, 1968/2007). Alongside the reprinting of the title in SMG,
the publisher launched a series of translations into various dialects, namely Cypriot Greek, Pontic
Greek, and Cretan Greek, in addition to the Classical Attic Greek that had already been published
as early as 1992. A loose pamphlet, informing the reader about the respective language variety
and containing a glossary of terms, accompanied all these intralingual editions, dialectal and dia
chronic. The choice of source text was, of course, not coincidental, since this is the only title in the
series that is set in Ancient Greece. The publication of the translations was originally planned for
the period leading up to the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens (Hoogeboom & Selles, 2021). Since
this plan did not pan out, however, the publisher chose to launch them right before the French film
of the same title (Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques, 2008) came out, apparently for marketing purposes
(Hoogeboom & Selles, 2021).
Unlike the previous cases of CG usage, which were initiated at grassroots level, these intra
lingual translations, commissioned by an established publishing house, aimed at capitalizing on
feelings of national pride during the period leading to the 2004 Olympic Games in Greece. Since
Mamouthcomix was not seeking to promote the use of dialect, their initiative can be seen as top-
down and does not challenge any norm, as it is used in a comic book, that is, a work of pop culture.
That said, since Asterix is a canonical comic series and the particular title referring to Ancient
Greece, a topic of high symbolic capital for speakers of all Greek varieties, it inadvertently pro
moted the visibility of the dialectal varieties used.
Although the translator, Loukia Taxitari (personal communication, 23 January 2022), used the
original French text as her source for translating into CG, she also consulted the SMG version.
Using multiple versions as source texts is quite common, especially in literary translation, as any
practising translator would testify. Nevertheless, in terms of translation theory, this practice once
again challenges the Jakobsonian categorization, since it constitutes both an interlingual and an
intralingual translation practice.
Another landmark in Cypriot television history was the sitcom Aigia Fouxia [Fuchsia-Coloured
She-Goat] (2008–2010) set in a Cypriot village in the early 20th century. Unlike previous series
with similar traditional settings, Aigia Fouxia was original in using a humorously anachronistic
language stylization by mixing basilectal elements from diverse subvarieties of CG with modern
CG slang, SMG, and English. Thus, the series became an instant success with an unprecedented
linguistic impact in Cyprus, as it arguably contributed significantly to the legitimization of CG and
to the removal of the stigma associated with its public use. By portraying very relatable characters
who would speak about issues of interest to modern audiences in a language that was humorous
but also fresh, the series increased the covert prestige of the dialect, that is, the feeling of pride in
speaking their variety.
The present: the legitimacy of CG is expanding to more and more genres

By the end of the 2000s, with the advent and rapid spread of social media, and particularly Face-
book and Twitter, Cypriots started changing their means of everyday communication.12 The type
of informal publishing encouraged by these platforms allows anyone to post messages on their
walls, more often than not in dialect. People who until then were discouraged from using their
dialect in public started writing in it on a massive scale. Never before in history had written CG
been produced so massively.
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By 2009, the first tools to transcribe the dialect had appeared. A CG keyboard was originally
devised in the framework of linguistic research by linguist Charalambos Themistokleous. Later,
linguists Spyros Armostis and Dimitris Karayiannis designed CG keyboards to be used on various
computer platforms, for the first time offering to the public a technological means to represent CG
phonemes that do not exist in SMG. Since proponents of dialect use had long been striving to find
ways to actually write in it, they jumped at the technical solution offered by the keyboards. Promi
nent figures such as director and filmmaker Adonis Floridis and printmaker and author Hambis
Tsangaris have been using the CG keyboard ever since to express themselves not only in their daily
communication, but also in their public discourse, which can be categorized as dialectal, diamesic,
and transliteration via the CG keyboard.
Meanwhile, a number of popularized scientific texts started appearing in the press, written
in CG and addressing the general public, including articles on the dialect itself (see Skarpari,
2016; Tsolakidis & Loizidou-Ieridou, 2012). These texts are also intralingual diaphasic transla
tions, since they are essentially specialized texts simplified for the general public. Furthermore,
they are also dialectal intralingual not only in the sense of employing a dialectal variety, but also
from another perspective. As the norm for serious writing is SMG, the authors of these texts find
themselves in the awkward situation of having to inhibit their default tendency to write in SMG,
the variety which they have been inculcated to employ in formal settings, in order to use CG, the
variety they choose to employ defying the norm, ending up constantly switching codes as they are
attempting to translate their thoughts between the two varieties. Although these attempts remain
rare, they are breaking new ground, since they are trying to prove the richness of CG and its ability
to deal with specialized and technical topics.
In 2010, a new National Curriculum for language was introduced, which, for the first time,
included CG in the study of Greek in the context of a proposed pedagogy of critical literacy. As
one of the primary aims of critical pedagogy is the critical awareness of the social-semiotic func
tion of linguistic variation (see Tsiplakou et al., 2018), the new curriculum proposed capitalizing
on variation as a tool for cultivating the students’ meta- and socio-linguistic awareness, which in
the Greek-speaking context of Cyprus inevitably includes CG. The dialect was thereby introduced
not as a distinct school subject, but as a tool to acquire SMG by comparing the structure, lexicon,
and use of the two varieties. However, this unprecedented introduction of CG in the teaching of
Greek and the proposed removal of its stigma through increased sociolinguistic awareness led to
heated debates with even the official Church denouncing the new curriculum and critical literacy.
As a result, the 2010 language curriculum was abandoned in 2013 under the new administration.
Intralingual translation has also been employed in recent popular TV game shows, such as
Paizoume kypriaka [“Playing in Cypriot Greek”] (2011–2014) and Pou sou nefko [Neither Here
nor There] (2013–2014). In the former, the players’ main task was to select the correct rendering
of CG words and phrases into SMG out of five options provided, whereas the latter comprised a
series of challenges, including word games featuring the use of CG. Both shows met with unprec
edented popularity, as they tapped into the dialect’s covert prestige to create a light, playful atmos
phere built on the collective identity of the CG speakers. The use of CG in Ate Olan [“Oh, come
on!”], a 2019 board game based on the classic game Taboo, also used the dialect’s covert prestige
to promote a fun, communal spirit among its players.
Case study 1: The Little Prince

In 2018, translator and Turkish Studies scholar Iakovos Hadjipieris decided to translate Antoine
de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince into CG from an intermediate English translation, as well as
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Greek and Turkish translations (de Saint-Exupéry, 1943/2018). His choice of source text was any
thing but coincidental. The Little Prince has been allegedly translated into 300–400 languages and
dialects, making it one of the most translated books in history, largely due to its easily translatable
core and the universal human values it promotes, such as friendship, love, creativity, and imagi
nation. A major motive for translating The Little Prince into CG was the translator’s love for the
dialect and his confidence in its expressive potential. In a personal communication (Hadjipieris,
8 February 2022), the translator avowed that he chose to translate the Prince precisely because it
is one of the most well-known books in world literature, that is, for its symbolic capital. Further
more, this book has actually been employed in the particular service of preserving endangered
languages, as Marjoleine Boonstra illustrates in her documentary The Miracle of the Little Prince
(Boonstra, 2018).
The publication of the book in CG was received enthusiastically in Cyprus by younger and
older readers alike. Hadjipieris took great pains to promote it through numerous radio broadcasts
and book presentations in bookshops and cultural spaces in the south and the north of the island.
Since the book was aimed at children (albeit not exclusively), it was received very positively even
by the mainstream media. Soon after its publication, the translation was adapted into a one-person
play by Andreas Nikolaidis and staged at the ARTos Foundation cultural centre in May 2019,
under the direction of Kostas Silvestros, with actor Giannis Minos playing all the parts.
Hadjipieris also adapted one of Aesop’s fables, To Liontarin, o Lykos tzi’ o Aloupos [The Lion,
the Wolf, and the Fox] (Hadjipieris, 2020) for CG-speaking children using the local fauna as
heroes, one for each letter of the alphabet. The idea was once again to expand the use of CG to
new genres and audiences.
Following the great success of The Little Prince in CG and encouraged by their friend, transla
tor Iakovos Hadjipieris, TC translators Ahmet Serdar Gökaşan and Hakan Karahasan, who had
already been long pondering a respective venture in the north, decided to translate it into CT in
2019 with the title Güçük Prens – Kıbrıs Türkçesi (de Saint-Exupéry, 1943/2019). In a presenta
tion of this second translation, Hadjipieris said proudly that “now that the Prince has been trans
lated into both major dialects of the island, he has become fully Cypriot” (Mazi/Birlikte, 2020),
implying that the two communities together form indispensable, complementary parts of Cyprus’
cultural identity. The intralingual translation from ST into CT was even more groundbreaking,
as there have been very limited cases of writing and even less of translating into CT. All 1,000
copies of the book’s first edition sold out within the first 25 days of publication, and it is already
running to its third edition, which is a tremendous feat for such a limited local book market. This
unprecedented success demonstrates the people’s appetite for translations into CT and guarantees
that more such ventures are bound to appear very soon.
Case study 2: Waiting for Godot

In 2021, the theatrical group AntiLogos [CounterArgument] staged Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot in intralingual translation in both dialects, with a GC, Giorgos Kyriakou, and a TC, İzel
Seylani, in the lead roles of Vladimir and Estragon respectively, in the UN Buffer Zone.
The staging was conceived and directed by director Kostas Silvestros, who also directed the
stage adaptation of The Little Prince; Silvestros had long been considering a production of Beck
ett’s absurdist play before finally venturing to produce it (CyBC1, 2021).
The play’s script was the result of intralingual translations from SMG into CG and from ST
into CT. The Greek part of the text was an intralingual stage adaptation into CG by the director
himself, based on the published translation of the play into SMG by Alexandra Papathanasopoulou
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(Beckett, 1952/1994). Translator Maria Siakalli was commissioned to produce the play script in
ST and, to do so, she used both Silvestros’ play script in CG and the published translation of
the play in ST by Uğur Ün and Tarık Günersel (Beckett, 1952/2012). Subsequently, during the
rehearsal process, the TC actor İzel Seylani, who played the part of Estragon, rendered it interlin
gually in CT.
The production opened at the bicommunal cultural centre House of Cooperation in the UN
Buffer Zone. The location could not have been more felicitous, as the audience would come from
both sides of the divide, mingling outside the venue as they waited to be ushered in, and be
seated on the rooftop overlooking the UN-controlled Ledra Palace Hotel, the barbed wire, and the
checkpoints, as well as both sides of the divided city. The director painfully remembers that they
had to rehearse at the House of Cooperation, in the no-man’s-land of the UN Buffer Zone, as the
checkpoints were closed after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, but what was even more
shocking and painful for him was to see the two actors heading off in the opposite directions of the
divide after each rehearsal (CyBC1, 2021).
In terms of the language choices made for the staging, what was groundbreaking and absolutely
fascinating was that the two actors spoke in their respective language variety, while surtitles ran in
real time in the background giving access to the audience to the other language variety. The play
itself is so powerful and the effect of setting it in the buffer zone with an actor from each commu
nity so brilliantly effective in underlining the absurdity of the whole situation, that the language
barrier disappeared, and the audience, whatever their ethnic and linguistic background, were not
conscious of the inaccessibility to the Other or their language. Ethnic and linguistic differences
became irrelevant and inconsequential, and what was foregrounded was the characters’ shared
lived experience through good and bad moments in their relationship while waiting in vain for
Godot – a solution to their plight from above? a miracle?
After its initial staging in the UN Buffer Zone, the production toured to many towns and vil
lages on both sides of the divide with great success. According to the director (Kostas Silvestros,
personal communication, 7 February 2022), the production had already been staged 42 times all
over the island, with more appearances being advertised at the time of writing. In October 2021,
the production participated in the Maltepe International Theatre Festival (Uluslararası Maltepe
Tiyatro Festivali), after an invitation by the latter’s director, who was impressed when he saw it in
Kyrenia. At the festival in Istanbul, it was met with great enthusiasm by audience and judges alike
and it received two awards, one for the director and a joint one for the two actors.
This is an intriguing case of intralingual translation, which challenges any strict categoriza
tion. It is dialectal, from the two standards to their respective Cypriot dialects; it is also dia
mesic, since there was a combination of oral and written language in the form of surtitles. The
rendering into CT defies strict categorization even more, as it falls within an impressive number
of categories. The translator worked from the director’s adaptation into CG, which makes it
both interlingual and dialectal, as well as a published translation in ST, which also makes it
intralingual. One might even consider it synchronic, since it toured addressing the “same” audi
ences, albeit in a different context. And, of course, it is still dialectal and diamesic, in the sense
described earlier.
Some closing remarks on intralingual translation

Returning full circle to our initial discussion of intralingual translation and after having examined
a number of different examples in the context of Cyprus, we would like to recapitulate some meth
odological reservations in relation with strict taxonomies.
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Firstly, as we saw in the examples of Asterix at the Olympic Games, The Little Prince, and
Waiting for Godot, the translators used more than one source text. Consulting different editions,
translations in their target language and in any other languages they may have access to, as well as
literary reviews and analyses is common practice for translators, especially when the source text
is a canonical literary text. In such cases, it is practically impossible to separate the interlingual
process from the intralingual one.
Secondly, there is an inherent problem in Jakobson’s definition of intralingual translation
because it hinges upon the definition of “language”, a category that is not delimited via objec
tive criteria but is contingent upon historical, ideological, and political circumstances, and whose
boundaries with “dialect(s)” are porous rather than hard and fast.
Finally, however useful the various subcategories of intralingual translation may be for meth
odological purposes, in real life translation practice stubbornly defies strict categorizations and
more often than not crosses taxonomic boundaries, as became particularly clear in our example
of the translation of Waiting for Godot. The rich and multifaceted practice described previously
stubbornly resists bipolar opposites, such as translation as opposed to adaptation, source-oriented
vs. target-oriented, translating the form or the content, the word or the spirit, and endless others.
Conclusion
Despite all the taxonomic problems described earlier, intralingual translation can legitimately be
perceived as a type of translation, not only because it is sometimes practised alongside interlingual
translation, but also because it shares all the core problems posed by interlingual translation and
opens up yet further fascinating questions of its own, some of which we touched upon in this arti
cle, such as the boundary of a standard language in relation with dialects, the historical continuity
of a language, and power relations among various language varieties.
The examples discussed include some of the most notable cases of (intralingual) translation
that have offered the necessary symbolic capital and by extension have been instrumental in legiti
mizing CG in genres in which it would have been unacceptable not 20 years ago. By presenting a
number of dialectal intralingual translations within the sociohistorical context of their production,
we have showed how they became instrumental in adding visibility and in effect consecrating this
particular variety of Modern Greek among its users. Due to the symbolic capital of its canonical
source texts, intralingual translation has been particularly effective in legitimizing the relatively
recent trend of the expanding uses of CG in increasingly more genres.
Overall, intralingual translation provides a fascinating area of investigation, inextricably linked
to a series of complex questions, and therefore definitely deserves more attention than what it has
hitherto attracted.
Notes
1 We would like to thank Adonis Floridis, Iakovos Hadjipieris, Giorgos Kyriacou, İzel Seylani, Maria
Siakalli, Kostas Silvestros, and Loukia Taxitari for all the information they provided us with in relation to
their use of Cypriot Greek in various genres.
2 Notable exceptions include Berk Albachten (2013, 2014, 2015), Hill-Madsen (2014), Zethsen (2007 and
2009), and Zethsen and Hill-Madsen (2016).
3 Also see Berk Albachten (2014, p. 574) on this.
4 With arguably the exception of Tsakonian Greek (cf. Horrocks, 2010, pp. 87–88).
5 Before the segregation of the two communities, CG was also spoken natively by many members of the
TC community, who were bilingual in CT and CG. Some TC villages were even monolingual, with CG
(which they call Romeika) being their only first language (see Ioannidou et al., 2019).
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6 A diglossic situation exists in a society when two (or more) distinct language varieties are used in a fairly
complementary functional distribution by a single speech community, in the sense that different varieties
are used for a different set of circumstances (Ferguson, 1959; Fishman, 1967). One of the varieties has
elevated social status and is thus considered the “High” variety, while the other one(s) the “Low”.
7 Or co-overt prestige, according to Rowe and Grohman (2013).
8 A basilect is the version of a language variety whose grammar and lexicon deviate the most from the form
of the language that carries the highest prestige; the CG basilect consists of the rural sub-varieties of CG,
which are characterized by emblematically dialectal lexico-grammatical elements (see e.g., Katsoyannou
et al., 2006; Tsiplakou et al., 2006).
9 IRC or Internet Relay Chat is an interactive Internet service for synchronous group communication in
online discussion forums (aka chat rooms) organized by topic. IRC was very popular in Cyprus during the
mid-2000s (Themistocleous, 2010).
10 Indicatively, e.g., Ioannou (2006), who switched to the use of CG dialect as early as 2007, Andreou
(2011), and Aceras Anthropophorum (2009).
11 By “Cypriot vernacular”, the translator refers to the “CG vernacular”, but considers it redundant to men
tion which of the Cypriot vernaculars he is referring to, as the announcement is addressed to GCs.
12 According to Datareportal <https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-cyprus> (accessed 2 February
2022), out of a population of 1.21 million in January 2021, there were 1.04 million Internet users, which
equals to a penetration of 86.1% and 1 million among them or 82.5% of the population were users of
social media at the time.
Further reading
Cerruti, M., & Tsiplakou, S. (Eds.). (2020). Intermediate language varieties: Koinai and regional standards
in Europe (Studies in Language Variation 24). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.24
Findlay, B. (2000). Translating standard into dialect: Missing the target? In C. Upton (Ed.), Moving target
(pp. 35–46). St. Jerome.
Hadjioannou, X., Tsiplakou, S., & Kappler, M. (2011). Language policy and language planning in Cyprus.
Current Issues in Language Planning, 12(4), 503–569. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2011.629113
Kullberg, C., & Watson, D. (2022). Vernaculars in an age of world literatures. Bloomsbury.
Leerssen, J. (2006). National thought in Europe: A cultural history. Amsterdam University Press.
References
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8
INTRA- AND INTERLINGUAL
TRANSLATION FROM A
DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE
The South Slavic folk ballad Hasanaginica
Višnja Jovanović
Introduction
The South Slavic folk ballad Hasanaginica (literally The Wife of Hasan Aga) had been passed
down through generations for probably more than a century before its publication in Alberto
Fortis’ travelogue Viaggio in Dalmazia (A Journey to Dalmatia; 1774/1974). The discovery of
Hasanaginica by the European intelligentsia soon led to it being translated by well-established
literary figures: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1 (1775) into German; Walter Scott2 (1798) into
English;3 Alexander Pushkin (1835) and Anna Akhmatova (1950) into Russian; Prosper Mérimée
(1827) and Adam Mickiewicz (1841) into French.4 To date, Hasanaginica has been translated into
more than 40 languages, and it has frequently been retranslated into German and English (Jones,
2010). However, although Hasanaginica has proved popular in foreign languages,5 the name of its
source language has been the subject of heated debates. The ballad’s language has been variously
described as “Morlacchian” (Goethe, 1775/1975, p. 75); “Serbo-Croatian” (Burkhart, 2006, p. 26;
Butler, 1980); “Bosnian” (Bulić, 2014, p. 12); “Croatian” (Lukežić, 2005); “Serbian” (Stefanović
Karadžić, 1846/1975, p. 310); “Bosnian–Croatian–Serbian” (Jones, 2010); and “South Slavic”
(Mecklenburg, 2015, p. 80).
From a modern perspective, Hasanaginica is understandable to speakers of as many as four
modern South Slavic standards – Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.6 Despite the high
degree of mutual comprehensibility, these modern standards are today considered to be separate
languages. For most of the twentieth century, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin were
regarded as different varieties of the Serbo-Croatian language, which was spoken in the country
of Yugoslavia. When Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s, Serbo-Croatian was administratively
replaced with the successor languages to Serbo-Croatian: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and later
Montenegrin. These new languages corresponded to the newly created nation states of Serbia,
Croatia, Bosnia, and later Montenegro. The ballad Hasanaginica, however, precedes standardisa
tion of any of these South Slavic languages. Many linguistic features present in Hasanaginica
are mutual to all of these standards, making the ballad’s linguistic classification ambiguous and
complex in modern terms. Consequently, the poem seems to resist translation as well. For, if
Hasanaginica is in, say, Croatian, how can we translate it into, say, Serbian, when the very original
already reads as a Serbian text? By extension, one may ask: If Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-11 130

Intra- and interlingual diachronic translation
Montenegrin are separate languages, as their official statuses suggest, how come they resist being
mutually translatable?
The ballad’s trajectory through various linguistic, historical, and political entities can serve
as a starting point to investigate different categories of translation. The linguistic fluidity sur
rounding the ballad calls into question the rigidity of Roman Jakobson’s (1959/2012) concepts
of intra- and interlingual translation. Intralingual translation refers to translation that operates
within a single language, whereas interlingual translation refers to translation that operates
between separate languages. An implicit premise of Jakobson’s (1959/2012) definition is the
ability to distinguish between the source and target languages. With Hasanaginica, this is a com
plicated task, thus challenging the idea that intra- and interlingual translation are clearly identifi
able categories. This chapter aims to determine the cause of this instability from a diachronic
perspective.
The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part introduces the theoretical and methodolog
ical framework. The second part presents a historical overview of South Slavic languages spoken
in former Yugoslavia. The third part investigates Hasanaginica’s background and discusses the
ways in which literature, languages, and their borders evolve – with a view to demonstrating how
the passing of time affects how we identify intra- and interlingual translation.
Theoretical and methodological framework

In his seminal essay “On linguistic aspects of translation” (1959/2012), Roman Jakobson distin
guishes three types of translation:
a Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other

b Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
some other language.
c Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs
of nonverbal sign system.
(Jakobson, [1959] 2012, 127; bullet points and emphasis added)
Although Jakobson presents three categories of translation, it is the distinction between intra- and
interlingual translation that is central to this investigation, as the chapter focusses on the domain
of verbal expression. Jakobson’s “three kinds of translation” are based on the “ways of interpret
ing a verbal sign” (Jakobson, 1959/2012, p. 127). As these “ha[ve] been worked out in terms of
the relations (differences and similarities) between the basic types of the two codes, in which the
respective entities are encoded” (Toury, 1986, p. 1113, emphasis in the original), it is safe to refer
to them as types of “translational relations”.
Jakobson’s (1959/2012) typology has been widely commented upon (Berk Albachten, 2014;
Davis, 2014; Derrida, 1985; Gottlieb, 2018; Hermans, 1997; Krstić, 2021; Pym, 1992/2010; Stur
rock, 1991; Torop, 2002; Toury, 1986, among others). Examined from multiple perspectives (semi
otic, cultural, sociological, sociolinguistic, multilingual, historical, philosophical), its critique
revolves around six points: The relationship with interpretation, scope, polysemiotic mediums, lin
guistic borders, translation unit, and monolingualism. Moreover, several re-categorisations have
been proposed (Gorlée, 2010; Gottlieb, 2018; Huang, 2015; Jia, 2017; Torop, 2002; Toury, 1986).
This chapter builds on the criticism regarding the difficulty of discerning linguistic boundaries
(Berk Albachten, 2014; Davis, 2014; Derrida, 1985; Pym, 1992/2010; Toury, 1986).
131
Višnja Jovanović
In this chapter, intra- and interlingual translation are contextualised from a sociolinguistic
approach, which has proven to be a promising field of research (in demonstrating how these con
cepts, devised on semiotic principles, become unstable in sociopolitical contexts (Berk Albachten,
2014; Davis, 2014; Hermans, 1997). The sociolinguistic approach has been prominent in the study
of Serbo-Croatian and its successors, as it provides “optimally adequate tools for the exception
ally complex Yugoslav language, social, and cultural situation (national, ethnic, political, confes
sional, cultural, historical, etc.), closely connected with this paradigm by the nature of things”
(Radovanović & Major, 2001, p. 1). Radovanović and Major imply that the linguistic landscape
in question is almost inseparable from the accompanying sociocultural factors; addressing it in
isolation, hence, becomes insufficient. Even though a substantial number of projects embracing a
sociolinguistic approach to the study of former Yugoslavia directly engages with translation prac
tices, the accent has been on interpreting current linguistic trends rather than expanding theoretical
concepts. The contributions are therefore primarily attributed to the domain of Slavic rather than
translation studies.
The diachronic research in this chapter combines two methods: Comparative method and inter
nal reconstruction. The key difference between these two fundamental tools of diachronic linguis
tics7 is reflected in their scope: The comparative method is a “treatment of comparable elements in
[two or more] related languages” (Lehmann, 1993, p. 27), whereas internal reconstruction “relies
on data in only one language” (p. 31). The employment of both is necessary insofar as the chapter
explores relations between as well as within languages.
A historical overview of South Slavic languages

If we acknowledge that every text has a diachronic structure in the sense that it is tied to the his
tory of the language in which it was created, as Steiner suggests, then it is crucial to situate the text
within the linguistic context of its composition:
An informed, avid awareness of the history of relevant language, of the transforming ener
gies of feeling which make of syntax a record of social being, is indispensable. One must
master the temporal and local setting of one’s text, the moorings which attach even the most
idiosyncratic of poetic expression to the surrounding idiom.
(Steiner, 1975, p. 25)
This section will therefore attempt to reconstruct a timeline of the development of South Slavic
languages spoken in former Yugoslav territories. The aim of this chronological overview is to
examine the key conditions and documents that led to the joint standardisation of Serbian and
Croatian so as to gain a better understanding of the circumstances that led to the language’s later
demise. The focus, therefore, will be on the nineteenth century onwards.
Jones (2010, pp. 286–287) shares his impression of the language in Fortis’ version of
Hasanaginica:
To modern Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian readers, the poem’s language is markedly old-fash

ioned and regional. This is hardly surprising for a folk poem gathered almost a century
before a standard language was established (though, interestingly, it was folk poetry from
the regions where Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian speech had most in common which gave
the basis for this standard).
132
The event that Jones considers to be the establishment of a standard language took place in
March 1850, when Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene representatives8 gathered in Vienna to dis
cuss the creation of a common literary language, leading to the signing of the document known
as the Vienna Literary Agreement. Having rejected the idea of creating an artificial hybrid
dialect not used by people, the eight intellectuals decided to “designate the southern dialect
as literary” (The 1850 Literary Agreement, 1850/2004, p. 168). The Vienna Literary Agree
ment concerns the adoption of the written standard, unnamed in the text of the agreement. The
choice of this dialect, today known as Eastern Herzegovinian dialect (istočnohercegovački
dijalekat; Milanović, 2010, p. 131), was a compromise. Its long-term significance lies in the
Croatian adoption of the Štokavian dialect as the basis for its standard at the expense of the
Čakavian and Kajkavian dialects (Petrović & Gudurić, 2010, p. 22). The Eastern Herzegovin
ian dialect (istočnohercegovački) was selected on the grounds that “nearly all the folk poems
are created in this dialect” (The 1850 Literary Agreement, 1850/2004, p. 168). Hasanaginica
is no exception.
The Vienna Literary Agreement set the grounds for a common national language: Serbo-Croa
tian emerged in 1918 and remained in official use until the early 1990s – although it was variously
defined and regulated throughout the succession of four states: The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats,
and Slovenes (1918–1929); the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–1941); the Federative People’s
Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–1963); and the Socialist Federal Republic (SFR) of Yugoslavia
(1963–1992).
Joint national standardisation was abandoned with the breakup of SFR Yugoslavia in the early
1990s. Serbo-Croatian was replaced in administration by Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian (Bugarski,
2004, p. 12), and later Montenegrin. In 2017, linguists from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herze
govina, and Montenegro, the four successor states where Serbo-Croatian was spoken, signed the
“Declaration on the Common Language” – a petition calling for all linguistic varieties stemming
from Serbo-Croatian to be recognised as one variety, with a general note that “every state, nation,
ethno-nation, or a regional community is free to independently codify its variety of the shared
language” (Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku, 2017). The petition’s requests have yet to be put into
practice: Despite the endorsement of the general public on all sides of the borders, institutional
interest remains low.
Whether Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin are one language or four separate lan
guages in their own right is a highly sensitive issue these days, which inexorably leads away from
intellectual engagement into the realms of political discourse and ideology. Bugarski (2004, p. 18)
tries to explain this duality:
If we discard various ideological extremes, is there a way of deciding whether Serbo-Cro

atian is still one language or is it now several languages? I believe that this dilemma can
no longer be resolved in a straightforward and unqualified way. The question must rather
be posed on two or three levels simultaneously. On the linguistic and communication level,
Serbo-Croatian can still legitimately be regarded as a single entity. Its different national
norms are extremely close to each other structurally, a fact reflected in the unimpeded com
munication among speakers of average education from, say, Belgrade, Podgorica, Zagreb
and Sarajevo. In contrast, on the political and symbolic level there is clearly no more Serbo-
Croatian, since – as already stated – this term does not occur in the legislation of the new
states on formerly Yugoslav territory, where their separate standard languages serve as major
symbols of national identity and statehood.
133
Višnja Jovanović
The official status of the successor languages has been legally regulated by the respective constitu
tion of each individual successor state.
While the matter appears constitutionally clear, in practice pinpointing the exact number of
Serbo-Croatian’s successors has been the subject of much debate. Some are willing to grant only
Serbian and Croatian the status of a language, whereas others acknowledge Bosnian and Montene
grin too. This chapter does not aim to challenge the current position of these languages or to further
politicise the linguistic question by attempting to discern linguistic borders. When discussed from
a contemporary perspective, the chapter will refer to Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin
as separate languages – respecting their official statuses, as recognised by the respective countries
responsible for their standardisation. In taking up this position, there is no attempt to legitimise the
new standards but rather to use it as a means to explore how the complex phenomenon of linguistic
fluidity influences translation categories.
On Hasanaginica
The South Slavic folk ballad Hasanaginica (also Asanaginica, Hasan Aginica, Asan Aginica)
revolves around the tragic destiny of the eponymous protagonist – noble wife of the Ottoman
military commander Hasan Aga. While lying in a tent high in the mountains, wounded after a
battle, Hasan Aga calls for his wife. Whether out of decorum or shame, Hasanaginica fails to
visit her wounded husband. This enrages Hasan Aga, who orders her to leave their home. He not
only divorces her, but also takes away their children and sends her back to her family. Her brother
quickly arranges a remarriage. During the wedding procession, Hasanaginica sees her children
one last time and dies of sorrow while bidding them farewell. Over the centuries, scholars have
been fascinated not only by the poem’s extraordinary beauty, but also by the mystery surrounding
its origins.
As far as it is known, Hasanaginica was first printed in Fortis’ travelogue Viaggio in Dalma
zia (A journey to Dalmatia; 1774/1974). In a chapter describing the customs of Morlacchi (For
tis, 1774/1974, pp. 43–105) – a Dalmatian inland mountain people – Hasanaginca appears as
an example of Morlacchian literature (Fortis, 1774/1974, pp. 98–105). Thought to be Slavicised
Vlachs, the Morlacchi spoke a Slavic dialect. Many early publications assert that Hasanaginica
was written in “Morlacchian” (Goethe, 1775/1975, pp. 75), following Fortis. Nevertheless, the
ballad’s origins are complex and further complicated by Fortis’ (1774/1974) decision not to reveal
his sources.
Based on the poem’s content, most scholars claim Hasanaginica originated in the region of
Imotski (Mahmutćehajić, 2010, p. 540; Murko, 1975, p. 355). Over the course of the seventeenth
century, this inland strip belonged to the Bosnia Eyalet of the Ottoman Empire. In the aftermath
of the Great Turkish War (1683–1699), the Ottomans lost most of Dalmatia and the control of
this territory was split between two city-states: Venice and Dubrovnik. In 1717, Imotski passed to
Venetian rule. The toponym Imotski is mentioned in the ballad along with two historical figures
known to have lived nearby in the seventeenth century (Jones, 2010, p. 282). These historical ties
have given scholars reason to believe the ballad dates from the period before 1717, the time when
the Ottomans still ruled over this territory (Mahmutćehajić, 2010, p. 540). Some entertain the idea
that the poem might have originated in Christian times, but at a time when the memory of the Otto
man reign still persisted (Jones, 2010, p. 280). Alternatively, it has been suggested the ballad could
have come to Dalmatia from Bosnia (Nakaš, 2010).
Fortis (1774/1974) is thought to have written down the ballad in Dubrovnik. The original text in
a Slavic language entitled “Žalostna pjesanca plemenite Asan-Aginice” was published alongside
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an Italian translation (Fortis, 1774/1974). More than a century after Fortis’ (1774/1974) publica
tion, Franz Miklosich (1883) printed the so-called Split Manuscript, claiming this was the text
Fortis consulted during his Dalmatian trip (p. 11). The original Split Manuscript is missing, fur
ther complicating the issue of authenticity. Today, Fortis’ (1774/1974) and Miklosich’s (1883)
texts are considered two versions of the most famous variants (Nakaš, 2010, p. 289). More than a
dozen other variants exist (Gesemann, 1923; Ivić & Mladenović, 1984; Medenica, 1979; Thomas,
2014) – some relatively similar, some so widely different they could be considered poems in their
own right (Butler, 1980). Nowadays the most widespread version is Vuk Stefanović Karadžić’s
reduction from 1846 (1846/1975), which irons out Fortis’ (1774/1974) inconsistencies and follows
the rules of modern orthography.
In any discussion on intra- and interlingual translation, determining the source language is
important. However, in the case of Hasanaginica this is far from easy. Studying the literary lan
guage of the past is generally problematic, “because of the problem of obtaining a sufficiently
clear bird’s eye view of the period in question” (Crystal, 1987, p. 43). The task becomes even more
complicated when the language under study has changed and evolved. The fact that it is difficult
to separate the two categories of intra- and interlingual translation characterises the language of
Hasanaginica. This is why it is important to explain the ballad’s literary and linguistic ties with
different modern communities.
The first obstacle to specifying the ballad’s source language lies in the belief Hasanaginica
originally belonged to an oral tradition. The ballad was written down at least a century after its cre
ation. Damrosch (2009, p. 25) tackles the issue of the transition “from orature to literature”, noting
that “writing is a fairly recent invention” and that we tend to forget “the earliest written works were
usually versions of songs or stories that had been orally composed and transmitted” (Damrosch,
2009, p. 26). If we presume Hasanaginica stems from orature, the problem that emerges concerns
possible deviations in different variants of the same work.
Hasanaginica’s presumably verbal content was transformed into multiple texts. As outlined
earlier, the ballad was recorded with slight – and occasionally not-so-slight – variations. Can we
consider all these texts mere variants of a single original, even if certain versions vary greatly?
Or, should each inscription be treated as an entity in its own right? Should we talk about For
tis’ (1774/1974) or Miklosich’s (1883) Hasanaginica rather than Hasanaginica the folk ballad?
Francis Jones’ translation into English, for example, depends solely on Fortis’ publication. Is not
the “authoritative” version – such as the version Stefanović Karadžić (1846/1975) – also a con
struct, a mere attempt at reconstructing the original rather than an insight into the authentic manu
script? Moreover, improvisation is a general characteristic of the oral folk tradition. Parry (1930,
pp. 80–81) cites the example of Serbian poets “guslars”, who used ready-made “formulae” to
recite thousands of verses without deviating from the metric scheme, to argue that Homer’s oeuvre
was originally oral rather than written. The complex storytelling techniques enabling variation in
oral composition along with the consequential existence of several written versions challenge our
perception of an artwork as a fixed structure, reminding us literature may not always be embedded
in textuality.
The shift from the spoken to the written medium removes the work from its original context. In
discussing the traditional difference between “written” and “oral” communication, Derrida (1988,
p. 9) asserts that an oral text exists in the moment and is tied to a speaking subject and the context
in which it is uttered. What is written, however, not only transcends the specific timeframe but also
operates independently of any speaking subject. The written can potentially dwell in different con
texts, freed from its original context. The written version of Hasanaginica has enabled the ballad
to travel along the temporal axis. Yet the departure from orature causes a rupture with the original
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context, a “breaking force” which is “the very structure of the written text” (Derrida, 1988, p. 9).
This affects the language and how we view the text’s potential translational relations: The rupture
with the original context and the ability to travel along the temporal axis prevent the text from
belonging to one specific category.
Derrida’s (1988, p. 9) “breaking force” is a precondition for the text’s afterlife (Benjamin,
1923/2012). How does this contextual rupture specifically affect the text’s language? What is the
relationship between a text and its language? If an oral utterance is an expression tied to a par
ticular moment, does this mean the name of its language is fixed, that it is unaffected by possible
fluidity in linguistic identity? Is, by extension, the language of a text susceptible to change – in
accordance with the prospective alterations in the unity, identity, or standardisation of the lan
guage – despite the fixedness of the text itself? The folk ballad Hasanaginica, with its multiple
variants and variations, challenges the idea of a text’s permanent nature.
Derrida’s (1985) approach to Jakobson’s (1959/2012) tripartite division is from the angle
of philosophy of language, and he finds Jakobson’s division problematic on several counts. In
commenting on the synonyms that accompany each of the three translation categories, Derrida
(1985) suggests that Jakobson (1959/2012) provided a tautological definition in explaining inter-
lingual translation as translation proper, as both denote “translation in the ordinary sense, inter-
linguistic and post-Babelian” (Derrida, 1985, p. 173). Importantly, Derrida maintains Jakobson’s
(1959/2012) notions of intra- and interlingual translation are contingent on the presupposition
“that one can know in the final analysis how to determine rigorously the unity and identity of
a language, the decidable form of its limits” (Derrida, 1985, p. 173). Two important factors are
introduced – “the unity of a language” and “the identity of a language” – but Derrida (1985) does
not elaborate on how these two factors may proliferate or alter over time.
How to determine the boundaries of a language has also been examined by Toury (1986) and
Berk Albachten (2014). Toury underlines the difficulty of placing interdialectal translation within
Jakobson’s (1959/2012) framework, stating that translation between dialects poses “a borderline
case”, which is “usually appended to the intralingual, but at times also to the interlingual type of
translating” (Toury, 1986, p. 1113). Similarly, Berk Albachten (2014, p. 574) extends this criticism
by asking how we can distinguish between languages and dialects and creoles. While Toury (1986)
provides no illustration, Berk Albachten (2014, pp. 574–575) mentions Turkic languages – vari
ously regarded as independent languages or dialects of Turkish. Moreover, Berk Albachten (2014,
p. 574) acknowledges the pivotal role of a temporal determinant in asking how “the boundaries
[can] be drawn between different historical stages of development of a language” as well as in
wondering whether “the borders of a language [should] be determined by lack of intelligibility”.
Criticism of Jakobson’s definitions from a “temporal” point of view can be found in Davis (2014),
while the problems posed from a “spatial” perspective are illustrated by Pym (1992/2010).
Having embraced a cultural approach, Pym (1992/2010) urges that the materiality of a text’s
movement – across space and time – should be taken into account in the study of translation.
His section “Translation can be intralingual or interlingual” expands the discussion regarding
interdialectal translation, mentioned by Toury (1986). Pym (1992/2010) stresses the primacy
of the interlingual (p. 23), questioning the assumption that there is “a radical division between
interlingual and intralingual transfer” (p. 24). Pym (1992/2010) questions the separation on two
grounds. First, he brands the distinction superfluous inasmuch as “[t]he kinds of translation
that can take place between idiolects, sociolects and dialects are essentially no different from
those between more radically distanced language systems” (1992/2010, p. 24). Much before
Pym (1992/2010), Steiner (1975, p. 47) had suggested that the problems occurring in intra- and
interlingual translation are the same – the difference being that translation between languages
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renders these problems more visible, but he does not question Jakobson’s (1959/2012) distinc
tion. Sturrock challenges Jakobson’s (1959/2012) typology, stating, “the problem of translation –
that is, of synonymy – remains the same whether the translation be affected between two natu
ral languages or within one language” (Sturrock, 1991, p. 309) and noting the assignment of
“rewording” only to the intralingual category is invalid as both intra- and intralingual translation
are actually “forms of ‘rewording’” (Sturrock, 1991, p. 309). Second, Pym (1992/2010) goes a
step further than Sturrock (1991) in asserting, “there are no natural frontiers between languages”
(Pym, 1992/2010, p. 24).
In considering the relationship between translation and culture, Pym arrives at the idea of
using translation (whether intra- or interlingual) as a means of determining the level of cultural
proximity by applying a simple formula: If translation occurs, the two cultures are distant; if
translation is unnecessary, this is a sign of cultural continuity (1992/2010, p. 25). Contrary to
expectations, yet in line with his statement “there are no natural frontiers between languages”
(Pym, 1992/2010, p. 24), the level of transformations in a translation does not increase with
cultural distance (Pym, 1992/2010, p. 24). While Pym acknowledges cases of “bicultural com
munities” – “where it is difficult to decide if translation crosses a cultural frontier or not” (Pym,
1992/2010, p. 26) – the borderline cases involving cultural hybridity fall outside the schematisa
tion. Although Pym (1992/2010, p. 26) declares, “[c]ulture is not geo-politics” and “[t]ransfer
and translation concern situations of contact and exchange, not linear separation”, he, paradoxi
cally, tries to determine cultural borders, reproducing a black-and-white map of what gets trans
lated and what remains untranslated.
Berk Albachten (2014), Davis (2014), Derrida (1985), Pym (1992/2010), and Toury (1986) all
highlight the issue of linguistic borders – both spatially and temporally. As though foreseeing the
problem, Jakobson (1959/2012, p. 218) states, “differential bilingual grammars” are the instru
ments that “should define what unifies and what differentiates the two languages in their selection
and delimitation of grammatical concepts”. Jakobson (1959/2012) puts too much faith in linguis
tics in the narrow sense of the word and the primacy of a purely grammatical criterion. While such
a definition could probably exist in a vacuum, it is surely naïve to think that grammar can over
rule external factors such as sociopolitics. Linguistics in a broader sense, and sociolinguistics in
particular, embrace a wide range of non-grammatical components that partake in the making of a
language, as this chapter has hoped to demonstrate.
Jakobson’s (1959/2012) synchronic approach to translation disregards the temporal dimension.
Those criticising Jakobson’s intra- and interlingual translation often resort to Ferdinand de Saus
sure’s scholarship. Pym (1992/2010, p. 24), for example, points out, “[t]hose who travel on foot
or have read the diachronic part of Saussure know that there are no natural frontiers between lan
guages”. Saussure (1959/2011, p. 179) opens a chapter on diachronic units by asserting, “[s]tatic
linguistics works with units that owe their existence to their synchronic arrangement” and then sug
gesting, “in a diachronic succession the elements are not delimited once and for all”. To support this
statement, Saussure (1959/2011) offers instances from different branches of linguistics, indicating
the conceptual issue of defining the scope of a “unit” – be it synchronic or diachronic. The inability
of moulding a diachronic unit further conditions our understanding of diachronic identity.
To say that two words as different as [Latin] calidum and [French] chaud constitute a dia
chronic identity means simply that speakers passed from one form to the other through a
series of synchronic identities in speaking without there being a break in their common bond
despite successive phonetic changes.
(Saussure, 1959/2011, p. 182)
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This reaffirms Pym’s (1992/2010) comment on the permeability of linguistic borders and serves
as a basis for Davis’s (2014) argumentation.
Using the example of the English language, Davis (2014) revisits Jakobson’s (1959/2012) sys
tematisation mainly through the questioning of “linguistic unity”, following the direction indicated
by Derrida (1985). While concluding that Jakobson’s (1959/2012) division is rooted in synchrony,
Davis (2014, p. 588) urges that linguistic identity, one of the pillars of Jakobson’s definition,
cannot be claimed independently from all considerations of the temporal dimension. Her paper
adopts a historical perspective in the attempt to clarify the borders between various stages in the
English language. Linguists agree that texts written in early forms of English, dating from seventh
century CE, are inaccessible to the modern readership in their authentic form; yet, they disagree
as to whether this language, commonly referred to as “Old English” or “Anglo-Saxon”, is in fact
English. A diachronic inquiry into linguistic boundaries spotlights the tension between intra- and
interlingual translation. In Davis’ opinion, we are unable to find a clear line between translation
that takes place within one language and that which takes place between languages because trans
lation is a continuous process. Davis (2014, p. 587) argues it is translation, both interlingual (Old
English to Latin) and intralingual (Old English to more modern variants), that has enabled the
continuity of the English language and secured its unity up to the present day, despite the radically
different historical variations, which exist between Old English and its more modern counterparts.
Translation, then, is to thank for an uninterrupted lineage that has bypassed understanding as the
principal criterion in establishing internal linguistic boundaries.
Davis’ (2014) essay expands Saussure’s (1959/2011) claim on the preservation of diachronic
identity through a seamless succession of synchronic ones (p. 182). Davis (2014) uses the term
linguistic identity without discerning between synchronic and diachronic identities as Saussure
does. Saussure’s (1959/2011) distinction helps to closer examine the notion of vertical transla
tion – that operating between different historical idioms. Nevertheless, Saussure’s (1959/2011)
differentiation does not solve the problem of how we distinguish between the two identities. Davis
(2014, p. 587) argues the processes of continuous (intralingual) translation has allowed for the
preservation of English linguistic identity despite the loss of comprehension between its early and
modern version. Debating on the relationship between Old English and modern English, Davis
(2014, p. 58) refers to the epic poem Beowulf:
The question of whether Beowulf is written in English thus misses the point, since it assumes
that we can ascertain the identity and history of “English” without taking into consideration
the translation history that enabled the reading, editing, publication, and institutionalization
of texts like Beowulf.
Davis (2014), therefore, stresses the importance of translation history in determining the temporal
borders of a language.
Hasanaginica’s case is different: Textual translation (intralingual) has contributed little to
its preservation and institutionalisation – even if we count Stefanović Karadžić’s (1846/1975)
abridged version as an intralingual translation. If our discussion is restricted to Fortis’ Hasanagi
nica (1774/1974), textual translation has played no role whatsoever. Notwithstanding the archaic
and regional texture, the language of Fortis’ variant is still understandable today for the speakers
of Serbo-Croatian successor languages. If we extend Saussure’s (1959/2011) observations to the
identity of a language in general rather than to its individual elements, we soon realise the question
of whether Hasanaginica is in Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian misses the point as it ignores the his
toricity of the idiom in which the ballad was written and its development – which has not been one
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of “seamless succession” but one of rupture and ramification. Following Saussure (1959/2011), we
conclude that there are two possible scenarios: A series of synchronic identities can result either
in continuity or in change. The example of English described previously is presented as one of
continuity; Serbo-Croatian, along with its predecessors and successors, is considered to be one
of change. The evolution of languages, then, substantiates the claim asserting what is translated
inside and what outside the language is contingent on the way speech varieties and languages are
delimited.
Let us analyse the possible translational relations between the successors of Serbo-Croatian.
From the moment Serbian and Croatian (or any other successor pair) were standardised sepa
rately henceforth, we can translate between these two languages, and it is an example of interlin
gual translation by Jakobson’s (1959/2012) standards, operating between two distinct languages.
While codified as two varieties of Serbo-Croatian, the translation between Serbian and Croatian
was between different standard varieties of the same language, which is an example of intralin
gual translation. What about the translation process operating from an idiom that precedes any
standardisation (as that of Hasanaginica), with a language standardised in modern times, which
is actually one in the series of descendants of the pre-codification idiom? Would such vertical
translation be classified as intra- or interlingual? Vertical translation between different historical
stages, where multiple modern versions originated from a historical one, problematises Jakob
son’s (1959/2012) distinction between intra- and interlingual translation. It seems neither fully
intralingual by virtue of the shift in linguistic identity, nor fully interlingual by virtue of retained
comprehensibility.
This brings us to Berk Albachten’s question as to whether “the borders of a language [should]
be determined by lack of intelligibility” (2014, p. 574). This is the model Dixon (1997, p. 7) pro
poses when introducing the distinction between a language in the linguistic and in the political
sense. Is comprehension a criterion? The examples of Beowulf and Hasanaginica suggest: No. The
English of Beowulf is not understandable for a modern English readership yet some linguists still
consider it to be one language.
The language of Hasanaginica is understandable to the modern Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/
Montenegrin-speaking audience but no continuity exists between the ballad’s idiom and modern
standards. Fluidity did not affect the language but its identity: The language has not changed
beyond recognition, but its integrity has not been preserved. The example of Hasanaginica sup
ports the statement that a lack of mutual intelligibility between separate linguistic varieties is not
the necessary condition for considering languages to be separate.
Pym’s (1992/2010, p. 25) formula for determining cultural proximity appears then as a promis
ing tool for crystallising boundaries without succumbing to political divisions:
It is enough to define the limits of a culture as the points where transferred texts have had
to be (intralingually or interlingually) translated. . . . In this way, translation studies avoid
having to link up all the points of contiguity in the way that political frontiers do.
(Pym, 1992/2010, pp. 25–26, emphasis in the original)
The unsaid premise of this approach is there has to be a one-to-one correspondence between a
language and a culture, which leaves instances of linguistic and cultural hybridity outside the
equation. To this end, the model has both linguistic and cultural implications. Real-life evidence,
however, refutes the viability of Pym’s (1992/2010) approach for linguistic purposes, inasmuch as
the formula presupposes that mutual intelligibility determines the borders of a language – which
has been disproved from a diachronic perspective in the examples of Hasanaginica and Beowulf
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as outlined earlier. Nevertheless, Pym’s (1992/2010) model does present the advantage of bringing
cultural paradigms to the fore. The fact that Hasanaginica does not need to undergo translation to
be understood by those speaking Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin is a sign of cultural
proximity according to Pym’s (1992/2010) model. Conversely, Beowulf, which can only be under
stood by a speaker of modern English in translation, would be an example of cultural distance
despite the English language’s unbroken lineage. Pym’s (1992/2010) model is therefore applicable
to diachronic idioms as well as to synchronic lects.
In the context of literary heritage, Damrosch (2009, p. 25) writes about striking the right bal
ance when approaching centuries old literature: “In reading across time, we need to keep both
aspects alive, neither submerging ourselves in antiquarian details nor absorbing the work so fully
into our own world”. The same could apply to a diachronic assessment of linguistic aspects. The
standardisation of Serbo-Croatian and its development came sometime after the composition
(and inscription) of Hasanaginica. Therefore, we should not impose the modern linguistic debate
on Serbo-Croatian successors upon Hasanaginica; rather, we should acknowledge the ballad’s
historicity.
Hasanaginica teaches us that the tension between early and modern times is embodied in the
inability to impose a lect’s contemporary parameters onto a work from the past. Inevitably, any
answer favouring one language over the others would be an appropriation formulated in the wake
of nationalisation of non-material cultural heritage galvanised by the breakup of SFR Yugoslavia.
The modern standards in their current form and institutionalisation are a relatively recent inven
tion in Hasanaginica’s trajectory. Hence, any answer favouring one language variety over another
would be based on a reconstructed variety, as there is no actual continuity in tradition – despite the
preserved intelligibility. Hasanaginica, undoubtedly, belongs to the cultural heritage of all three
linguistic communities – and to many more literary traditions through which it has passed. Yet, the
debate over whether its language is Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian is highly problematic insofar as
the ballad precedes the division and labelling of these languages as we know them today. How
ever, from the perspective of translation studies, there are a series of practical issues that need to
be considered.
How does the temporal uncertainty of linguistic borders affect Hasanaginica’s translational
relations? We can honour the ballad’s historicity and avoid identifying it with a specific language
but, from the perspective of translation studies, refusing to specify the source language becomes
problematic for distinguishing between intra- and interlingual translation. Let us first consider
possible translation directions. After all, translation, as a practical act, needs workable solutions.
If we remove the ballad’s long and complex history from the equation and focus on the text in
one of its preserved forms – say Fortis’ (1774/1974) manuscript – we are left with an ambiguous
entity incorporating grammatical features common to Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. The most
important mutual features are the Štokavian dialectal basis and the (i)jekavian pronunciation. All
three modern standards have adopted Štokavian as their dialectal basis; consequently, between
whichever modern standards we decide to translate (Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian), the Štokavian
dialectal basis remains intact. With pronunciation, the situation is slightly different, as Serbian
also standardises both ekavian and (i)jekavian; Bosnian and Croatian, however, codify only (i)
jekavian. From the synchronic point of view, translating from (i)jekavian to ekavian could be
regarded both as interlingual (from Croatian/Bosnian into Serbian) and as intralingual translation
(from Serbian into Serbian). From the lexical perspective, the situation is further complicated
by the presence of obsolete vocabulary in Fortis’ Hasanaginica (1774/1974). Modernising the
vocabulary in the translation into any of the discussed standards would be regarded as intralin
gual translation.
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This odd mixture of intra- and interlingual translation stems from the anachronism between
the text of the original and the timeline of the modern standards which have developed from a
diachronic idiom. A vertical translation between a historical variety of a language that precedes
codification, on the one hand, and modern standards developed from this particular historical vari
ety, on the other, escapes the confines of Jakobson’s (1959/2012) dichotomy. For this reason,
Jakobson’s (1959/2012, p. 128) suggestion to turn to “differential bilingual grammars” is of little
use. The “purely” grammatical criterion is obsolete in cases where one translation has both intra-
and interlingual properties. The studied example shows a single text and a single translation in
one direction can embody both intra- and interlingual translation. This supports the claim that
translation categories are not self-evident but determined contextually – not only in the contextual
framework of time and space but also in that of the text itself.
Overall, this chapter’s findings substantiate the main argument, that intra- and interlingual
translation are not distinct stable categories. This chapter’s diachronic perspective demonstrates
that languages constantly evolve, and it is indispensable to take this aspect into consideration
when disusing and constructing translational types. Referring to the story of Babel, Derrida (1985,
pp. 165–166) stresses precisely the incompleteness of the structure:
The “tower of Babel” does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhib
its an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing
something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics.
...
What the multiplicity of idioms actually limits is not only a “true” translation, a transpar
ent and adequate interexpression, it is also a structural order, a coherence of construct.
The structure is incomplete as language is inherently bound to evolve, eventually multiplying or

reducing in number. It is exactly on the basis of this inability to define a language as a fixed and
durable structure that Derrida (1985) calls into question Jakobson’s (1959/2012) widely accepted
categorisation of translation. The perpetually changing linguistic landscape is exemplified by the
South Slavic languages under study in this chapter. Over time, languages either continue or cease
to exist; in death, they multiply or vanish. With these changes in the linguistic landscape, trans
lational relations are bound to shift. Any form of stability can only be illusory and temporary. As
a result, translation categories cannot be predetermined but need to be established in relation to a
concrete context.
Conclusion
Hasanaginica embodies multiple ambiguities. First, the ballad was composed in the Eastern Her
zegovinian dialect. Selected as the literary standard in the mid-nineteenth century, owing to its
transitionary character, the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect later brought the Croatian, Bosnian, and
Serbian idioms even closer together. Many of its features have entered all three modern standards.
Furthermore, multiple variants and multiple reductions of a single variant exist. Likewise, the
poem’s presumed transformation from orature into literature with the help of intermediators leaves
room for speculation. These factors have placed the ballad at the centre of debates on the linguis
tic debate, especially after the SFR Yugoslavia’s breakup. While this chapter avoids adopting a
political and nationalistic stance, the already prolific research surrounding the ballad’s cultural and
linguistic ambiguities – some of which is deeply ideological – has proven a fruitful starting point
in the investigation of the relationship between intra- and interlingual translation.
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Departing from Jakobson’s (1959/2012) arguable neglect of the multidimensional nature of the
relationship between various kinds of translation, this chapter has explored the temporal dimen
sion through the case study of Hasanaginica. The unstated premise of Jakobson’s (1959/2012)
definition is that in order to establish what is translated inside and what outside the language, one
needs to be able to specify the “source” and “target” language. Adopting a diachronic approach,
the chapter has revealed the problematic nature of this premise, since it is impossible to always
clearly determine what counts as a language, especially prior to standardisation. Moreover, the
evolution of a language tends to obscure its temporal borders. And, thanks to the invention of
writing systems, literature is able to transcend its original context and travel through time. Hasan
aginica’s rupture with the original context, accompanied with its language’s subsequently fluid
identity, has caused a lack of balance between the past and the present in linguistic terms.
This chapter’s sociological reassessment of Jakobson’s (1959/2012) definitions of intra- and
interlingual translation reveals that the distinction is conceived from a synchronic perspective. In
vertical translation, the distinction between the two categories is less valid: The distinction can
only be applied to cases where linguistic unity has been preserved, but it fails to encompass the
cases of linguistic discontinuity – as in the case of Serbo-Croatian lects. Hasanaginica’s language
has gone through multiple phases: Pre-standardisation (when Hasanaginica was created/written);
a joint literary standard; a joint national language; development of the joint language and establish
ment of new national languages. Throughout these phases, understanding has remained intact –
proving that mutual intelligibility does not affect linguistic borders. Translating from a diachronic
idiom, which precedes any codification, into synchronic languages that have developed from that
diachronic variety is problematic as the translation product features both intra- and interlingual
properties. This makes it impossible to label the translation as fully intralingual or fully interlin
gual, tying it to a textual context.
This chapter attempts to broaden our understanding of the importance of the sociopolitical
component in translation studies. The chronological overview of Serbo-Croatian and its succes
sor languages has shown how these languages were sociopolitically regulated – at times brought
together, at times separated by official state means. As codification is a social act, the results indi
cate that the social factor plays a role in delimiting languages and the constitution of translation
categories. Hence, in translations that involve standards, categories cannot be discerned solely on
the basis of linguistic criteria, that is, independently of their diachronic codification.
Notes
1 See, for example, Miloš Trivunac’s essay (1932).
2 See, for example, Milan Ćurčin (1925).
3 Over the course of last few years, Vukova zadužbina (Vuk’s Foundation) published edited volumes in
German, English, French, and Russian, which contain a selection of texts from Stefanović Karadžić’s
oeuvre, including Hasanaginica, and an overview of their reception across Europe in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Please see Further Reading.
4 For more on French translations, see, for example, Mihailo Pavlović (1974).
5 Among others, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was fascinated with Hasanaginica. See, for
example, Ranka Kuić’s essay (1970).
6 The way of collectively referring to Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin in the post-disintegra
tion context is quite problematic. This chapter, which borrows Ranko Bugarski’s now widely accepted
terminology, opts for the Serbo-Croatian successor languages phrasing. This is neither to imply that these
individual linguistic varieties have no history prior to the Serbo-Croatian phase nor that they have directly
developed from Serbo-Croatian. Rather, the term denotes an administrative succession. It should be noted
that Montenegrin is a belated successor of Serbo-Croatian, standardized in mid-2000s. The debate sur
rounding Hasanaginica involves Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.
142
7 The term “diachronic linguistics” is synonymous to that of “historical linguistics”.

8 In addition to the two Serbian signatories, Stefanović Karadžić and Daničić, the document was ratified
by five Croatian representatives – Ivan Mažuranić, Dimitrije Demeter, Ivan Kukuljević, Vinko Pacel, and
Stjepan Pejaković – and one Slovenian delegate – Franz Miklošić.
Further reading
Ćurčin, M. (1925). Ser Valtera Skota Hasanaginica (Hasanaginica of Sir Walter Scott). Nova Evropa.
Kuić, R. (1970). Kolridž i Hasanaginica (Coleridge and Hasanaginica). Prilozi za književnost, jezik, istoriju
i folklor, 26(1‒2), 79‒96.
Pavlović, M. (1974). Slovenska antiteza u francuskim prevodima Hasanaginice (The Slavic antithesis in
French translations of Hasanaginica). Naučni sastanak slavista u Vukove dane, 4(I), 473‒484.
Suvajdžić, B. (Compiler). (2015). Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, 1787–1864–2014: Мündliches Volksgut der
Serben (Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, 1787–1864–2014: Serbian traditional oral heritage) (Anete Đurović,
Trans.). Vukova zadužbina, Čigoja štampa.
Suvajdžić, B. (Compiler). (2016). Vuk Stefanović Karadžić: Serbian traditional oral heritage. (Sandra
Josipović, Trans.). Vukova zadužbina, Čigoja štampa.
Suvajdžić, B. (Compiler). (2017). Vuk Stefanović Karadžić: Le patrimoine oral serbe (Vuk Stefanović
Karadžić: Serbian traditional oral heritage) (Brigitte Mladenovic, Trans.). Vukova zadužbina, Čigoja
štampa.
Suvajdžić, B. (Compiler). (2018). Вук Стефанович Караджич: Сербское устное народное наследие (Vuk
Stefanović Karadžić: Serbian traditional oral heritage) (Ekaterina Yakushkina, Trans.). Vukova zadužbina,
Čigoja štampa.
Trivunac, M. (1932). Geteov prepev Asanaginice (Goethe’s translation of Asanaginica). Letopis Matice srp
ske, 106(332), 16–20.
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9
TRANSLATION FROM
ENGLISH INTO SCOTS
John Corbett
Introduction
The translation of English into Scots raises some key theoretical problems for scholarly under
standing of intralingual translation. In their discussion of the place of intralingual translation in
Translation Studies, Zethsen and Hill-Madsen (2016, p. 705) offer an inclusive definition of the act
of translation that would embrace intralingual modes:
A translation is a text which conforms to the following conditions:
• A source text (verbal or non-verbal) exists or has existed at some point in time.
• The target text has been derived from the source text (resulting in a new product in
another language, genre, medium or semiotic system).
• The resulting relationship is one of relevant similarity, which may take many forms
depending on the skopos.
Obviously, the definition is pillared on certain key concepts, such as “source text”, “deriva
tion” and “relationship”, which may themselves require a second round of definition.
It is the “obvious” qualification that follows the definition that concerns us here. While the transla
tion of English language texts into Scots evidently falls within the scope of the proposed inclusive
definition of translation, the status of such translations as “intralingual” or “interlingual” depends on
other “key concepts”, most pertinently, definitions of “language”. This issue applies to other source-
text and target-text pairs: Translation of Chinese television programmes in and out of Mandarin
and various mutually unintelligible Chinese “dialects” can be considered intralingual translation (cf.
Chan, 2018). By comparison, a Portuguese text is interlingually translated into Spanish, a language
with which it shares much of its vocabulary and grammatical structure. The intra/interlingual distinc
tion will depend on what status the language variety of the source and target texts have at a particular
time. In the case of English and Scots, the former might be considered a “national” language and the
latter a “dialect” of it; the translation from one variety to the next would be intralingual. However,
if as many Scots language activists would argue (e.g., McClure, 1997; Purves, 2002), Scots has the
status of an autonomous, national language, then English-Scots translation would be interlingual.
145 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-12

John Corbett
The present chapter argues that the case of English-Scots translation demonstrates that clear-
cut definitions of language, and of intra/interlingual translation, are not necessarily helpful in
understanding the motivations and intended impact of particular instances. In the case of Scots,
the definition of the variety as an autonomous language distinct from English, and English-Scots
translation as interlingual, masks the intricate cultural and linguistic relationships that make trans
lations into Scots desirable and successful.
Although the literature of various languages has been translated into Scots (Corbett, 1999;
Findlay, 2004), the translation of English occupies a special place. Any discussion of intralingual
translation from English to Scots immediately raises the question of whether Scots is the same
language as English. The affirmation of the difference of Scots from English is embedded in the
more general history of translation into Scots. The work generally regarded as the foundation
of literary translation into Scots – Gavin Douglas’ Eneados – famously proclaimed that it was
“written in the language of the Scottish nation”, although Douglas’ earlier and later compatriots
conventionally cited Chaucer as a prime exponent of “our” tongue (McClure, 1981). Later in the
16th century James VI of Scotland wrote Essays of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesie (1584),
which included a treatise for his courtly poets and literary translators that again proclaimed a sure
but undefined difference between English and Scots, while acknowledging that the former was
“lykest our langage”.
Translation from English into Scots is a relatively recent phenomenon – while translation into
Scots from other European languages dates from the 15th century, translation from English into
Scots largely dates from the 19th century onwards. That fact in itself is worth noting: As we shall
see, the act of translating from English into Scots is itself an act of self-determination, the assertion
of a distinct linguistic and literary identity for the northern tongue, even while its southern neigh
bour assumes the role of a global language. Translations from English into Scots take place against
a background of resistance to the hegemony of English as a lingua franca, first in the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and later globally. This chapter discusses the
role of English-Scots translations from different perspectives: As an act of resistance against what
was shortly to become global English, as an attempt to claim or reclaim key texts in the Anglo-
American literary canon for Scotland, as a strategic move to assert the linguistic status of Scots in
the political domain, and as an educational project to promote literacy in Scots across generations.
The different perspectives will demonstrate that the intralingual nature of English-Scots transla
tion does not depend wholly on the relative status of each language variety. However, the relative
status of each variety is relevant, and so we begin by addressing the thorny issue of whether Scots
is or was an autonomous national language.
Is Scots a language?
As we have already noted, there has always been some uncertainty about the status of Scots as a
language independent of English. Both English and Scots have their origins in the Anglian variety
of Old English (Macafee & †Aitken, 2002). Scots, however, descends from the Old Northumbrian
branch of Anglian, and is characterised by a greater number of vocabulary items taken from the
Scandinavian languages brought to Britain by the Vikings who invaded and settled northern Eng
land from the 8th to the 11th centuries. Speakers of this Anglo-Norse hybrid pushed north into
what is now southern Scotland, and the language that developed from this hybrid, Scots, subse
quently spread throughout the lowlands of the independent Scottish kingdom. Its diffusion was
accelerated by forced population movement from the north of England in the wake of the Norman
Conquest of 1066 (McColl Millar, 2020).
146
Translation from English into Scots
Scots became the spoken and then the written language of the Scottish court, the earliest extant
records dating from the late 14th century. Older Scots came to be the medium of a range of writ
ten genres, literary and non-literary, including translation from Latin and French (Corbett, 1999).
Notably, from the 15th century, it became the medium of the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland,
prior to that body’s dissolution in 1707. As the language of parliamentary record, as well as the
spoken medium for much of the population, Scots had a legitimate claim to be understood as the
separate language of an autonomous nation (Aitken, 1984).
However, the picture is not quite so clear-cut. Scots and the different varieties of English were
clearly, up to a point, mutually intelligible, both in speech and writing, during a period when
neither language boasted a fixed standard variety. As McClure (1981) has shown, many Older
Scots writers referred to their own language as “Inglis” (“English”). Only towards the end of the
15th century did occasional natives and outside observers begin to make a claim that “Scottis”
and “Inglis” were different enough to be considered separate languages (McClure, 1981), and
even then, those who insisted on making the difference largely did so for ideological rather than
linguistic reasons.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the 1603 Union of the Crowns merged the Scottish kingdom
with that of England and Wales, and then the 1707 Treaty of Union combined the separate parlia
ments into a unitary legislative body for Great Britain. During this period there was a distinct lan
guage shift in the language of record in Scotland: There was a movement towards written English
forms. With the codification of Standard English in the 18th century, the shift in written language
was followed by a shift amongst the middle and upper classes in Scotland towards anglicised spo
ken forms, and a hybrid variety, Scottish English, was born (Jones, 1995). This variety of speech,
anglicised in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary preference, continues to be distinct both
from southern English accents and from accents of “Broad Scots”.
From a linguistic perspective, “Broad Scots”, “Scottish English” and “Standard English” exist
on a continuum, and it is difficult to say where one merges into another. Broad Scots is charac
terised by a set of regional and social accents, certain grammatical preferences and a frequent
recourse to a wider range of “northern” vocabulary items which can be classified as overt or covert
Scotticisms (Dossena, 2005). This set of regional and social accents is not confined to Scotland
itself; the plantation of Scottish settlers in the north of Ireland in the 17th century led to a thriving
and sustained variety, Ulster Scots, being established there. “Scottish English” is characterised by
a set of accents that move from Broad Scots towards prestige southern English realisations (while
not fully arriving there) and by a less frequent recourse to Scotticisms.
Contemporary Scottish speakers tend to move back and forth along the continuum depending
on the repertoire of forms at their disposal and how they judge their appropriateness to different
social contexts (Stuart-Smith, 2003). From this purely technical perspective, the three varieties
might be considered a single language. However, one key difference between “Broad Scots” and
“Scottish English” is that the former might at least potentially be considered an emergent national
language. That is, Broad Scots has the potential to be codified in such a way as to serve again as a
language of official record and a medium of education, as well as serving as a vehicle for literature.
If this potential were to be fulfilled the Scots–Scottish English–Standard English continuum would
be more closely comparable to, say, that between Spanish, the hybrid “Portiñol” and Portuguese.
That is, the two ends of the continuum would consist of two separate languages of common origin
that to some extent are mutually intelligible, and there would be the possibility of speakers adopt
ing a hybrid form for cross-linguistic communication.
An appreciation of the ambivalent and contested nature of Scots as a variety of English or as a
separate language is fundamental to an understanding of the nature of English-Scots translation.
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John Corbett
Modern translations into Scots from English generally function as an assertion of the status of
Scots as an independent language. However, as we shall see, it is ironic that, to reach a broad
readership, these translations tend to depend on the at least partial intelligibility of Scots texts to
readers (including Scottish readers) who have been educated in Standard English.
Reappropriating origins: translations from Old English

Chris Jones (2006, 2010) has written extensively on translations of Old English (OE) literary
texts into Present-day English, arguing that such interlingual translations are motivated in part by
the “strange likeness” between the two, historically separate varieties. The tension between the
familiar and the strange also characterises interlingual translations from Old English into Scots. As
Corbett (2001) observes, notable translations of Anglo-Saxon poetry into Modern Scots verse have
been published by Alexander Scott (1920–1989) and Tom Scott (1918–1995), two poets (unrelated
to each other, despite their surname) who were associated with the second wave of the Scottish
Renaissance (c. 1945–1965). The first wave in the 1920s is associated primarily with the Modernist
poet “Hugh MacDiarmid”, whose experimental, synthetic approach to the composition of poetry
in Scots was adopted by a younger generation of cultural nationalists in the wake of the Second
World War. In the mid-1940s, Alexander Scott translated the Old English elegies “The Seafarer”
and “The Wanderer” into dense, literary Scots and also drew upon “The Battle of Maldon” for his
own poem “Sang for a Flodden” (Robb, 2007, p. 47). Around 1960, Tom Scott translated further
Scots versions of “The Seafarer” and “The Wanderer” and also a version of “The Dream of the
Rood”. Corbett (2001) compares two Scots versions of “The Seafarer” in relation to the critical
framework of the translator’s visibility, as proposed by Lawrence Venuti (1995). Venuti argues that
the use of “dialect” in a translation is a foreignising strategy. Corbett argues that translation into
Scots complicates the ideas of domestication, foreignisation and visibility common in translation
studies: He concludes that Alexander Scott’s “Seaman’s Sang”, a version of the Old English elegy
“The Seafarer”, is composed in a form of literary Scots that is more accessible than Tom Scott’s,
particularly in its eschewing of grammatical complexity for a forthright speaking voice, and that
it can thus be considered a domesticating translation from the perspective of a Scottish reader.
Even the material culture depicted in the poem is Scotticised: The Anglo-Saxon harp becomes
the Scottish “clarsach” and the drinking of mead becomes the “drinkin o drams” (Corbett, 2001,
p. 166). Tom Scott, however, chooses a denser Scots literary medium, that is, it is characterised
by a higher frequency of usage of more archaic and obscure Scots vocabulary and coinages. The
grammar is more complex than is found in Alexander Scott’s version, and Tom Scott’s lines do not
attempt to simulate the spoken voice. Like many texts in literary Scots, for Scottish readers, it is
simultaneously domesticating (it is in what many Scots would recognise as their “mither tongue”)
and foreignising (it is nonetheless difficult to understand). A Present-day English gloss of “The
Seafarer” might be “I can sing a truthful song of my life/how, wandering, in troublesome days/
enduring the hard knocks of time/I’ve borne bitter pain in my breast/Known much care in my ship/
Among the rough surge of the waves”. Alexander Scott’s version (Scott, 1994, pp. 13–15) begins:
Anent mysel I’ll tell ye truly:

hou, stravaigin the sea in trauchlesome days,
aye tholan the dunts o time,
I’ve borne strang stounds in my briest,
kennan my ship the hame o monie cares.
Amang the coorse girn o the swaws.
148
Tom Scott’s version (Scott, 1993, pp. 83–84) of the same lines is more difficult for readers imme
diately to comprehend:
A suthfast sang I can sing o my life,

Vaunt o vaigins, hou I vexious tyauvin
In days o sair darg hae dreeit aften.
Bitter the breist-pangs I hae abydit,
Kent abuin keels care-trauchlit wonnins,
Mangset o the mainswaw.
It might reasonably be asked why two Scottish cultural nationalists should be drawn to the
translation of Old English (OE) verse at all. There are several possible answers to this question,
one simply being the continuing presence of Old English philology in the undergraduate English
curriculum of the “ancient” Scottish universities. Alexander Scott studied English Literature at
Aberdeen University and Tom Scott at Edinburgh University, and both would have encountered
poetry in OE as part of their studies. A Glasgow graduate of the same generation, Edwin Morgan,
also translated OE verse in the 1940s, albeit into English, and it is likely that part of the attrac
tion for his generation was that the martial ethos of Beowulf and the bleakness of the OE elegies,
in particular, resonated with those who returned to their studies after military service in the war.
However, there are other possible explanations. The attraction of “The Seafarer” to Scots poets
who were self-consciously extending the Modernist ethos in Scottish literature was not only the
OE original but the celebrated and controversial foreignising version by Ezra Pound, published
alongside his translations of ancient Chinese texts in Cathay (1915). While neither Alexander nor
Tom Scott’s version of “The Seafarer” directly borrows from Pound’s version (in the same way
that, as we shall see, Edwin Morgan’s Scots version of another poem from Cathay does), it is sali
ent that the two Scottish poets are treading the same path as a founding figure of Anglo-American
literary Modernism.
Perl (2014) has argued that one of the distinguishing, and counter-intuitive, features of literary
Modernism was the rejection of the aesthetics of the present and the recent past, with their sup
posed fragmentation and decadence, in favour of the supposed unitary ethos of past civilisations,
distantly removed in time and space. By translating canonical works of Old English, both Alexan
der Scott and Tom Scott assert that literature in Scots has the potential to transcend, for example,
the homely sensibility that dominated verse in Scots from the late 18th century until the early 20th
century.
A further possible explanation for translation from Old English into Scots is indicated by Alex
ander Scott’s epigraph to his version of “The Seafarer”: Not “From Old English” but “Fae the West
Saxon”. By avoiding the label “English” to refer to the language of the source text, Alexander
Scott implies that the Anglo-Saxon dialects should be considered equally the ancestors of English
and Scots. In other words, “Old English” is also “Old Scots”. As noted in the preceding section,
both Scots and Standard English derive from the Anglian variety of Old English, and both can be
considered “cousins” of the West Saxon branch of the language. The translation of West Saxon
into Scots is one means of claiming this early manifestation of “English” literature for the Scottish
literary tradition. By doing so, the Scots poets complicate the cultural history of the English liter
ary canon, undermining the hegemonic claim of global English to have an antecedent literature
that gave rise to a singular tradition. Rather, the tradition of literature in lowland Scots is extended
back to embrace the earliest extant literature in a language that is part of a common ancestral herit
age of Present-day English and Scots.
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John Corbett
The act of appropriating Old English literature for the Scottish canon via the translation of a
West Saxon elegy into different varieties of Scots also complicates the notion of “interlingual”
translation. While Northumbrian OE is a more direct ancestor of Present-day Scots than West
Saxon, there are more resonant echoes in contemporary Scots than in Standard English of the
language of the OE elegies, as Chris Jones has observed. Jones (2006, p. 166) notes the “greater
density of Old English cognates in Scots vocabulary than in Standard English” and argues, “a
larger number of Scots words still share a consonantal palette with their Old English ancestors”.
The Scots versions of Old English insist on difference while alerting readers and listeners to simi
larity. This tension is evident in other English-Scots translations.
Reclaiming the canon: translating Shakespeare, Pound, and Williams

If the translation of canonical Old English poems into Scots constitutes a claim for common
origins, and, implicitly, equal linguistic status, then translations into Scots of later canonical
texts have other purposes. Corbett (1999) argues that one function of the translation of canoni
cal poetry into Scots is to supplement the Scottish literary tradition by importing exemplars of
literary genres and movements that were lacking domestically. This form of translation is clearly
interlingual. Thus, for example, the relatively sparse tradition of 17th-century drama in Scots
is supplemented by a vigorous 20th-century tradition of translating Molière (Peacock, 1993).
The celebrated poet Edwin Morgan (1920–2010) tended to reserve Scots for some of his many
translations rather than his original poetry – amongst his most celebrated work in Scots are his
versions of Mayakovsky poem sequence Wi the Haill Voice and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano
de Bergerac. Morgan also translated two English texts into Scots, a version of Ezra Pound’s
English translation of one of the Chinese poems form Cathay (1915) and a small section of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Up to a point, Morgan’s version of Pound’s “Lament of the Frontier Guard” serves a similar
cultural function to Alexander and Tom Scott’s versions of “The Seafarer” in that it associates
poetry in Scots with a founding Anglo-American Modernist text. However, unlike the Old English
translations by the two Scots Modernists, Morgan’s version of a poem from Cathay is explicitly
a translation of Pound, rather than new, direct translations of Li Po’s source text. It can be argued
that by translating the OE elegies and Pound’s English version of Li Po, the Scots poets are engag
ing with the Anglo-American Modernism of Pound, at least as much as with Anglo-Saxon or
ancient Chinese cultures. Moreover, by the time Morgan was entering his maturity as a poet, in the
1960s, the tide of Scots Modernism was ebbing. It is clear from the first lines of Morgan’s version
of Pound that his Scots is a wilful mixture of literary archaisms and urban demotic: The medium
is treated with both gravity and irony. It wears its near incomprehensibility on its sleeve; Morgan
appears to be aware that only a knowledge of Pound’s English original will allow most readers to
make sense of the Scots translation.
“Lament of the Frontier Guard”

By the North gate, the wind blows full of sand.
Lonely, from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
(Pound, 1915, p. 16)
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“Murnin o the Merches-Gaird”

By the Nor’Yett, the wund blaws fu o saun,
Lanelie fae time’s jizzen tae thir days!
The wid crines, the gress yallas at hairst.
I sclim tours an tours
tae vizzy the barbour straths:
Oorie barmekin, the lift, the braid desart.
(Morgan, 1996, p. 370)
Here, Morgan moves towards post-Modernism in his use of an innovative, “synthetic” literary
amalgam of archaic and contemporary Scots: The sense is opaque but recoverable (with reference
to the original or to a dictionary of Scots). However, the identity of the speaker is elusive, elided
by the non-specificity of the language. In its recourse to urban demotic as well as literary archa
ism, Morgan oscillates between from earlier generations of Scots Modernists like Hugh MacDiar
mid, Tom Scott and Alexander Scott and contemporary neo-Modernists like Tom Leonard, whose
touchstones were not Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot but rather William Carlos Williams and the Black
Mountain poets.
One of Leonard’s celebrated “Glasgow poems” can be read as an intralingual translation of
Williams’ “Just to Let You Know”. In personal correspondence, Leonard denied that it was a trans
lation, claiming that it was inspired by the American poet’s refrigerator poem. However, it fits the
definition of translation proposed by Zethsen and Hill-Madsen (2016, p. 705), noted at the start of
this chapter. There is a clearly identifiable source text that Leonard’s target text depends upon and
there is “relevant similarity” between them. The plums in Williams’ icebox find cultural equiva
lents in the cans of beer (“special lager” or “speshlz”) in Leonard’s fridge. From the perspective
that Scottish and American English can be considered as two examples of vernacular World Eng
lish (rather than two separate languages), then the Scots version is intralingual.
Jist ti Let Yi No
(from the American of Carlos Williams)
ahv drank
thi speshlz
that wurrin
thi frij
n thit
yiwurr probbli
hodn back
furthi pahrti
awright
they wur great
thaht stroang
thaht cawld
(Leonard, 2011, p. 38)
Those familiar with Glasgow discourse will no doubt appreciate the appropriateness of Williams’
“forgive me” being translated by Leonard into the grudgingly concessive “awright”. While the
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literal details of the target text differ in such details from the source text, the neo-Modernist ethos
remains intact: Like Williams, Leonard is concerned with making poetry from the resources of
everyday speech, conveyed as authentically as possible. In the Scottish poet’s case, this means
rendering the idiom of the city in an adapted orthography that attempts to convey the sound of
Glasgow speech with phonetic accuracy.
Morgan and Leonard’s Scots translations of Pound and Williams, then, give us, respectively, an
ironic, post-modern take on a foundational Modernist poem and a less ironic pastiche of an iconic
neo-Modernist text. By insisting on specifically localised forms of the vernacular (i.e., Glasgow
speech), both destabilise the notion of a “national” Scots language. Intralingual translation occurs
among varieties that are powerful or stigmatised to different degrees.
The classification of a translation as intralingual or interlingual, then, depends on how transla
tor and reader understand the status of Scots. The stance taken by translators and, indeed, read
ers, need not be consistent. Morgan’s other published translation from English takes on the most
revered monument in the English canon, William Shakespeare, and reappropriates his “Scottish”
play for the Scots language. The “literary Scots” chosen by Morgan for this excerpt is less local
ised and therefore has the capacity to represent the nation; indeed the translation seems largely to
be an exercise in reclaiming the “Scottish play” for Scotland (cf. Maley & Neely, 2004). Morgan’s
short excerpt from Shakespeare’s Macbeth inspired no fewer than two full-length Scots versions
of the play by other translators, David Purves and Robin Lorimer, whose translations are discussed
by Derrick McClure (1999). It is perhaps worth recalling that one of Shakespeare’s several sources
for Macbeth was at least indirectly John Bellenden’s 16th-century Chronicles of Scotland (1536),
a Scots vernacular translation of his compatriot, Hector Boece’s Latin Scotorum Historia (1527).
Bellenden’s Scots version (Batho & Husbands, 1941, pp. 150–151) has passages that foreshadow
Shakespeare’s drama, as in Macbeth and Banquo’s first meeting with the “weird sisters”:
Quhen Makbeth and Banqhuo war passand to Foreß, quhair King Duncan wes for ƿe tyme,
thai mett be ƿe gaitt thre weird sisteris or wiches, quhilk come to ƿame with elrege clething.
The first of ƿame sayid to Makbeth: “Haill, Thayne of Glammys!” Ƿe secund sayid: “Haill,
Thayne of Cawder!” The thrid sayid: “Haill, Makbeth, ƿat salbe sum tyme King of Scotland!”
Ƿan said Banquho: “Quhat wemen be ȝe, quhilkis bene sa vnmerciful to me and sa propiciant
to my companȝeoun, gevand him nocht onlie landis and grete rentis bot als triumphand king-
dome, and gevis me nocht?” To this ansuerit ƿe first of ƿir wiches: “Wee schaw mair feliciteis
appering to the ƿan to him; for ƿocht he happin to be ane king, ȝite his empyre sall end vnhap
pely, and nane of his blude sall eftir him succede. Be contrair, ƿou sall neuer be king, bot of ƿe
sall come mony kingis, quhilk with lang and anciant lyage sall reioise ƿe crovun of Scotland.”
Thir wourdis beand sayid, ƿai suddanlye evanyst oute of ƿair sycht.
Bellenden’s version of Boece was, in turn, “translated out of the Scottish” into English for Raphael
Holinshed by one of his assistants, William Harrison. The second edition of Holinshed’s chroni
cles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587) became Shakespeare’s main source for his version of
the Scottish play (Carrington, 1958, p. xiii). The vocabulary of Morgan’s version of Shakespeare
is archaic and formal, a pastiche of the kind of 16th-century written Scots found in Bellenden:
LADY MACBETH
Aye, ye are Glamis, ye are Cawdor, and ae thing mair
ye sall be, ae thing mair. But och, I traistna
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sic herts as yours: sic fouth o mense and cherity:

ower-guid for that undeemous breenge! Ye’d hae
the gloir, the gree, the tap-rung, but ye want
the malefice the tap-rung taks.
(Morgan, 1996, p. 227)
Morgan’s excerpt was clearly meant to be read rather than performed, but it inspired two full-
length Scots translations of Shakespeare’s play (Lorimer, 1992; Purves, 1992). McClure (1999,
pp. 49–50) compares these two versions, coming to the following conclusion:
Using the now well-recognised distinction between source-oriented and target-oriented

translations, Lorimer’s clearly represents the former and Purves’s the latter. Purves has
given a modern Scots reading (and hearing) audience as much of Shakespeare as he thinks
they will understand and tolerate in Scots; Lorimer has endeavoured to convey as much of
Shakespeare as can possibly be conveyed at the risk – indeed, in the certainty – of startling
and challenging his audience.
To support his conclusion, McClure (1999, p. 41) cites two passages by Purves and Lorimer, which
respectively translate Macbeth III.i:
MACBETH.
Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;

As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept
All by the name of dogs: the valu’d file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him clos’d.
(Shakepeare)
O ay, A’m gled ti hear it. A daursay

ye micht be cawed men o a kynd – lyke hoonds,
stray curs, toozie tykes, shilpit whuppits,
an ill-faured mongrels is aw cryit dugs.
Thair pedigrees refleks thair mony byuss
Qualities – sum guid rinners, sum soumars,
sum gleg, sum strang, an sum guid huntars –
ilkane haes sum spaicial meith Naitur
haes gien it.
(Purves, 1992)
Aye, i the register ye pass for men,

like hunds an grewhunds, ratches, lyin-dugs,
sleuths, collies, spainyels, messan-tykes, hauf-wowffs,
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at’s aa caa’d dugs, but in the kennel-beuk

they’r sorted out intil the swift, the slaw,
the weirers, hunters, hame-keepers, ilkane
according til the giftie Naitur’s bountith
in him hes set.
(Lorimer, 1992)
McClure, then, argues that in attempting to deliver a Scots version of Macbeth that would be act
able (it was in fact performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe), Purves sacrificed the experimen
talism of Shakespeare’s verse for a more accessible Scots. Lorimer follows Morgan more closely
in making fewer concessions to immediate intelligibility. Their Scots versions combine archaisms
and coinages, often compounds, and the target texts, while impressive, are often semantically
opaque. The contrast between Purves’ and Lorimer’s versions can be compared to that between
Alexander and Tom Scott. McClure identifies the contrast as one between source-oriented (or
domesticating) and target-oriented (foreignising); but the latter effect is more complex and lay
ered. For non-Scottish readers both the Purves and the Lorimer texts might be equally foreignising,
while, for Scottish readers, the Scots of the Lorimer text might, like that of Tom Scott’s “The Seav
aiger”, be both strangely familiar and startlingly unfamiliar. What makes Lorimer’s translation
accessible to readers, if not theatre-goers, is, of course, the widespread familiarity in the English-
speaking world with the source text.
The translation of political texts from English to Scots

So far, we have argued that the literary translations from English to Scots in the period of the 20th
century following the Second World War can be understood as part of a rising cultural and political
nationalism in Scotland. The translators sought to problematise the origins of English by reclaim
ing Old English texts for Scots and to appropriate canonical English texts for a Scottish literary
tradition. While use as a literary medium is one possible criterion for evaluating the status of a
language variety, others are just as important or even more so; for example, sociolinguists point to
the use of a variety as an educational medium, its use in the country’s capital, its use in parliament
and so on (Corbett, 2003). The use of Scots in the literary domain, while according that variety
some prestige, is no guarantee of its recognition as a full language.
As the 20th century closed, political changes resulted in greater legislative autonomy for the
nations of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. The establishment of devolved parliaments
or assemblies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales in 1999 saw the potential, at least, of par
liamentary business being conducted in indigenous languages other than English. Welsh, Gaelic,
Irish and Scots were candidates for use as languages of debate, public record and signage in the
newly devolved institutions. Perhaps surprisingly, in the early decades of these institutions there
was more evident use of Scots in the Northern Irish public sphere than in Scotland itself.
In Northern Ireland, the case for using Scots in the Northern Irish Assembly and in other aspects
of the public sphere was strengthened by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which stated, “All par
ticipants recognise the importance of respect, understanding and tolerance in relation to linguistic
diversity, including in Northern Ireland, the Irish language, Ulster-Scots and the languages of the
various ethnic communities, all of which are part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland”
(cited in Ferguson, 2018, p. 335). In the early years of the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland,
as a consequence, there was funding for translation of public documents into both Irish and Ulster
Scots. An example is the 2001 Annual Report of the North/South Ministerial Council (NSMC)
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which is available in all three languages. The following opening passage (NMSC, 2001a, p. 6;
2001b Ulster Scots version: 6) indicates how the English source text was translated into the Ulster
Scots target text:
The North/South Ministerial Council (NSMC) was established on Thursday 2 December

1999 on the entry into force of the British-Irish Agreement, which was signed by the British
and Irish Governments as part of the Agreement reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations
in Belfast on Good Friday, 10 April, 1998 (“the Agreement”). The Agreement stipulates
that the North/South Ministerial Council will bring together those with executive responsi
bilities in Northern Ireland and the Irish Government to develop consultation, co-operation
and action within the island of Ireland – including through implementation on an all-island
and cross-border basis – on matters of mutual interest and within the competence of each
Administration, North and South.
Tha Noarth/Sooth Cooncil o Männystèrs wus stellit oan Thursday 2 Decemmer 19 an 99
quhaniver tha British-Airish Greeance wus poustie gat. Tha British an Airish Govermenns
pit thair hann tae thon as pairt o tha Greeance at wus wun tae oot o tha Monie-Pairtie throch
inben Bilfawst oan Guid Friday, 10 Aprile, 19 an 98 (“tha Greeance”). Tha Greeance gars
tha Noarth/Sooth Cooncil o Männystèrs bräng thegither tha boadies at haes guidin ontaks
in Norlin Airlann an tha Airish Govermenn tae graith apen discoorse, complutherin an jeein
ben tha islann o Airlann – takkin in bi wye o throchin oan tha steid o tha hale islann an athort
tha meerin – anent maittèrs tha baith o thaim leuks tha gate o an at ilka Owerance, Noarth
an Sooth, haes tha wisin o.
In an analysis of the translation of another piece of “Civil Service prose”, John Kirk (2013) identi
fies some of the translation strategies used in the attempt to fashion out of Scots a new medium
for public discourse, many of which are evident even in the prior short passage, for example,
respellings of grammatical and lexical items (tha, “the”, Airish, “Irish”), avoidance of English
lexical items in favour of Scots items or forms (poustie gat, “entered into force”; apen discoorse,
“consultation”), and lexical periphrasis (pit thair hann tae, “signed”). Kirk observes that the kind
of Ulster Scots, or Ullans, represented by such translations was provided by a small “cadre” of
language activists who were commissioned by civil servants and did not represent a form of Scots
that the wider Scots-speaking population was likely to adopt with any enthusiasm. Kirk (2013,
p. 299) concludes that this attempt to forge, through translation, a form of Scots suitable for pub
lic discourse is “not easily teachable and is unlikely to extend beyond its inventor cadre”. Frank
Ferguson (2018, p. 338) suggests that the more successful forms of Ulster Scots “were those who
used a light or strategic deployment of the language, rather than those who tended towards a denser
utilisation”.
The dilemma facing those attempting to use translation to extend the functional domains of
Scots usage from the literary domain to the non-literary public sphere is therefore similar to that
facing the translators of Old English elegies or canonical literary texts: A relatively “thin” or
“light” and “accessible” Scots increases intelligibility, while the frequent recourse to more archaic
language, coinages and maximally differentiated linguistic forms increases the expressiveness of
the medium, but at the risk of losing even those who might claim to be users. This dilemma was
also faced by those who framed the most substantial Scots document yet produced by the Scottish
Parliament, the Report on Inquiry intil the role o educational an cultural policy in uphaudin an
bringin oot Gaelic, Scots an minority leids in Scotland (Education, Culture and Sports Commit
tee, 2003a). This report was translated from English into a number of languages commonly used
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in Scotland: Arabic, Chinese, Gaelic, Punjabi, Urdu and (unusually) Scots. The passage from the
report (paragraphs 96 & 97; pp. 15–16) explicitly refer to translation. In the subsequent excerpt,
the Scots translation follows the English version (Education, Culture and Sports Committee,
2003b, pp. 15–16) below:
96. Immediately apparent from the submissions received, are the similarities between
prevailing attitudes towards Community Languages and Scots. In a submission from, Hilary
McColl, Educational Consultant, the perception that learning another language, or making
provision for maintenance of community languages, will interfere with learning English.
This again relates to the idea that monolingualism is the accepted “norm”. The Centre for
Education for Racial Equality in Scotland (CERES) believe that there is a “lack of apprecia
tion of bilingualism”.
97. There is the same lack of statistical data with regard to Community Languages as
there is with Scots. The point made repeatedly in submissions was that people are stigma
tised for speaking a Community Language rather than the education system valuing and
making provision for languages other than English. It is worth bearing in mind that many
children who speak a community language may effectively be trilingual, not bilingual, in
that in addition to their community language they may speak a dialect of Scots as well as
English in the playgroup and in the local community. Their trilingualism does present a
challenge to the education system, but it is more productive to view this challenge as a
“resource” to be developed rather than as a “problem” to be eradicated.
96. Immediately apparent fae the submissions ingaithered is the similarities atween pre
vailin attitudes tae Community leids an tae Scots. A submission fae Hilary McColl, Educa
tional Consultant, expressed the perception that learnin anither leid, or makkin provision for
the uphaud o community leids, will intromit wi the learnin o English. This aye relates tae the
idea that monolingualism is the acceptit “norm”. The Centre for Education for Racial Equal
ity in Scotland (CERES) doots that there a “want o appreciation o bilingualism”.
97. The same want o statistical data exists for Community leids as exists for Scots. Ower
an ower in submissions the point wis made that folk speakin a Community leid is flyted
at insteid o the education system giein respect tae an makkin provision for leids ither nor
English. It is worth haudin in mind that mony bairns that speaks a community leid micht
weel be trilingual, no bilingual, for in addition tae their community leid they micht speak a
dialect o Scots forby English in the pleygroup an the local community. Their trilingualism
does gie the education system a challenge, but it is mair productive tae regaird this chal
lenge as a “resource” tae be biggit on raither nor a “problem” tae be reddit oot.
Admittedly, some of the characteristics that Kirk (2013) observes in the Ulster Scots translation
are also evident here. There are again grammatical and lexical respellings (tae, “to”, oot, “out”;
pleygroup, “playgroup”), avoidance of English lexical items in favour of Scots items or forms
(leids, “languages”; ingaitherd, “received”), and lexical periphrasis that often prefers concrete
ness to abstraction (reddit oot, “eradicated”). However, the frequency of such usages is lower and
the recourse to obscure archaisms is less evident, and the result is that the Scottish report is more
accessible than its Northern Irish counterparts. In a discussion of such texts at around the time they
were being formulated, Corbett and Douglas (2003, p. 203) observed that, if they were to have a
value beyond the purely symbolic, “Civil Service Scots has to be linguistically accessible, codi
fied and fixed so as to be teachable to all those who have to draft and read leaflets and reports.” In
other words, in public documents, Scots remains trapped in a space between the intralingual and
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the interlingual. “Civil Service Scots” in Scotland and Ulster depends for full intelligibility on the
reader’s access to the Standard English source texts, which act as a gloss for the target text. At
present, Scots translations draw on the spoken vernacular and more literary resources to fashion
a medium that represents its users’ aspirations that it be autonomous from English; however, the
target language remains, as it were, under construction.
The fact that the translation into Scots of public documents, in Scotland and Northern Ireland,
has not developed to any substantial extent since 2003 can, no doubt, be explained by many fac
tors. However, one factor must be that the general literacy in both Scotland and Ireland is based
on Standard English. For most readers of public documents, the most accessible form remains
Standard English. A text presented in Scots to either a literate Scottish or a Northern Irish reader
makes demands that a text in English does not. The reader who is schooled in English may not feel
the need for a supplementary translation in Scots (unlike the target readership of, say, Arabic, Chi
nese or Urdu translations of Scottish governmental texts). While translations of public discourse
into minority languages used by immigrant communities serve a transactional function, the use of
Scots remains largely symbolic. For this to change, more Scottish readers would need to feel com
fortable with texts in Scots. It is in the acknowledgement of this fact that the final set of translations
is considered here: The translation of popular children’s fiction into Scots.
Promoting Scots literacy: the Itchy Coo translations

Since the early 2000s, the translation of children’s books from English to Scots has become a cor
nerstone of the success of an imprint, Itchy Coo, established in 2002, and dedicated to improving
literacy in Scots. James Robertson (2013), one of the three founders of the imprint, with Matthew
Fitt and Susan Rennie, gives a detailed account of the first decade of the project, and an evaluation
report by Robertson et al. (2011) is available online. All three founders were concerned that pub
lishing in Scots had long been a piecemeal and sporadic operation, and, in collaboration with the
then Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) and Black and White publishers, they procured
National Lottery funding for a series of books, aimed at children from nursery to advanced second
ary school age, which would be supported by the provision of further educational materials and
schools outreach. Early productions included an alphabet book in Scots, shorter fiction and poems,
and a non-fictional history of the Scots Parliament. While these were relatively successful, com
mercially, the biggest success of the enterprise was The Eejits (2006), a translation by Matthew Fitt
of Roald Dahl’s The Twits, boasting the original illustrations by Quentin Blake. Robertson (2013,
p. 116) reflects on its success thus:
Published not just with the permission but the enthusiastic support of the Dahl estate, this
title struck an immediate chord with both adult and young readers, and went on to sell many
thousands of copies and go through several reprints. It has also proved very effective as an
educational tool, since many children are already familiar with the original English version
before they read The Eejits: comparative readings can lead on to discussions about vocabu
lary differences, language usage in different situations, the distinction between accent, dia
lect and language, and so on. Typically, Scottish children report that they enjoy reading or
listening to The Eejits because they find it “funnier” than The Twits. They respond to the
story in Scots (as they do to most of the Itchy Coo books) initially because they recognise
the words and sounds as their words, and their sounds: even when some of the vocabulary
is unfamiliar, they are no more averse to acquiring new Scots words from a Scots text than
they are to acquiring new English words from an English text.
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John Corbett
The commercial success of Fitt’s version of Dahl led to other translations in a similar vein.
The Eejits was followed by translations of Dahl’s George’s Marvellous Medicine (Geordie’s
Mingin Medicine, translated by Fitt, 2007), Fantastic Mr Fox (The Sleekit Mr Tod, translated
by Robertson, 2007), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Chairlie and the Chocolate Works,
translated by Fitt, 2016), Revolting Rhymes (Reeking Rhymes, translated by Fitt, 2018) and
Matilda (Matilda in Scots, translated by Anne Donovan, 2019). Translations of other English
works include versions by Robertson of A.A. Milne’s children’s stories, Winnie-the-Pooh in
Scots (2008) and The Hoose at Pooh’s Neuk (2010); and Julie Donaldson’s stories, adapted as
The Gruffalo in Scots (2012), The Gruffalo’s Wean (2013) and Room on the Broom in Scots
(2014). Fitt also turned his hand to a specifically Dundonian version of Julie Donaldson’s
Gruffalo sequel, The Dundee Gruffalo’s Bairn (2013), one of a number of localised Scots ver
sions of the story that include The Doric Gruffalo’s Bairn (2013), translated by Sheena Black-
hall, The Shetland Gruffalo’s Bairn (2013) by Christine de Luca, and The Glasgow Gruffalo’s
Wean (2013), translated by Elaine C. Smith. Donaldson’s The Troll has also been translated
into different varieties of Scots by Itchy Coo’s stable of translators – it became Da Trow
(2016) in Christine de Luca’s Shetlandic version. In addition, stories by Raymond Briggs
have been translated by Matthew Fitt as The Snawman (2020), and Briggs’ Big Friendly Giant
(BFG), became, in Susan Rennie’s adaptation, GFG – The Guid Freendly Giant (2016). As
part of an Edinburgh City of Literature project, Fitt contributed the text to a Scots graphic
novel version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (Kidnappit, 2007) illustrated by Alan
Grant, an endeavour that combined the Itchy Coo team’s characteristic desire to use transla
tion to extend the generic possibilities of Scots with, like the Macbeth translations discussed
earlier, the appropriation of a canonical Scottish text for the Scots language. While all of
these were Itchy Coo editions, the success of the project has seen similar interventions in the
children’s market by other publishers. Susan Rennie, who left the Itchy Coo team in 2002, has
continued to produce translations into Scots, notably a series of versions of the comic books
featuring Hergé’s adventures of Tintin, as well as popular stapes like Judith Kerr’s The Teeger
that Cam for his Tea (2018), and the Shetlandic poet, Christine de Luca, clearly inspired by
the Itchy Coo volumes, produced her own version of Dahl’s George’s Marvellous Medicine as
Dodie’s Phenomenal Pheesic (2008).
Itchy Coo remains the principal outlet for Scots translations of children’s literature, and the
most important of its recent publications is Matthew Fitt’s version of the first volume in J.K
Rowling’s series of Harry Potter novels, translated as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stane
(2017). This translation can again be understood – somewhat tenuously, perhaps – as a reappro
priation by Scotland of a text that has strong Scottish associations, insofar as its author wrote it in
Edinburgh, where she still resides. But, in this instance, the more salient factors in the choice of
translation must have been the commercial value of the property and the status endowed on Scots
by having one of the most popular novels of recent decades, amongst both children and adults,
available in the language. The opening paragraphs of the novel gives a sense of the distance
between the English and Scots versions:
Chapter One
The Boy Who Lived
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were per
fectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved
in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.
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Mr Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a
big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache. Mrs
Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came
in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on her
neighbours. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no
finer boy anywhere.
(Rowling, 1997, p. 1)
Chaipter Ane
The Laddie Wha Lived
Mr and Mrs Dursley, o nummer fower, Privet Loan, were prood tae say that they were
gey normal, thank ye verra much. They were the lest fowk ye wid jalouse wid be taigled up
wi onythin unco or weird, because they jist didnae haud wi havers like yon.
Mr Dursley wis the heidbummer o a firm cawed Grunnngs, that made drills.
He wis a muckle, beefy-boukit man wi a stumpie wee craigie, although he did hae a
gey muckle mowser. Mrs Dursley wis a skinnymalinkie, blonde-heidit wummin whase
craigie wis jist aboot twice as lang as ither fowk’s, which wis awfie haundy as she
spent sae muckle time keekin ower gairden fences, nebbin at the neebors. The Dursleys
had a wee son cawed Dudley and tae them there wisnae a brawer laddie in the haill
warld.
(Rowling, trans. Fitt, 2018, p. 1)
Grammatically, the target text is practically identical to that of the source text, and the main dif
ferences are in vocabulary and spelling. As a translation designed in part to promote literacy in
Scots, it clearly offers the kind of potential Robertson notes earlier, in his description of the uses
of the Roald Dahl translation in classrooms: Pupils might attend to familiar and perhaps unfa
miliar Scots vocabulary and to the ways in which spelling conventions indicate and diverge from
pronunciation. The way that spelling is a negotiation between visual expectations and strict pho
netic representation is evident in the choices made by Fitt, for example, English “was” becomes
Scots “wis” here rather than the more phonetically accurate “wiz”. Pupils might also debate
whether English “director” is exactly equivalent in register to the Scots “heidbummer”. In short,
despite the argument that Scots is a separate language, one of the implicit goals of the Itchy Coo
translations in particular is not so much to educate readers in a new language but to extend their
repertoire in reading and writing. Both familiar and unfamiliar Scots terms that readers might
or might not have heard in their daily lives, and seldom, if ever, read are introduced into a text
translated from a familiar source. Even if readers have not read the original novel, they are likely
to have seen the film.
The purpose of the Itchy Coo translations is explicitly to promote literacy in Scots among
their readers, but this newly activated literacy is not necessarily at the expense of English, which
assumes the role, perhaps paradoxically, of being a resource for the maintenance of Scots. Robert
son (2013) does imagine a future – or present – in which younger readers extend their literacy by
reading the English version after consuming the Scots one; however, this vision still foresees the
competent user of Scots being an equally competent user of English.
The Itchy Coo translations from English have been so successful as to have become, somewhat
unexpectedly, the core activity of the ongoing Itchy Coo series of “braw books for bairns o aw
ages”. The evaluation of the first decade (Robertson et al., 2011) includes survey responses from
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John Corbett
44 individuals working in education, politics and the creative industries. Comments elicited about
the translations indicate their developing importance to the project:
• The “translation” aspect of Itchy Coo publication of myths and children’s classics is one of the
most interesting and worthwhile pieces of curriculum development that I ever observed in a
long career in schools and teacher education. (60)
• The translations of Roald Dahl and of course Winnie the Pooh were brilliant. (63)
• I am always recommending Winnie the Pooh in Scots because I am fascinated by the impact of
the Scots language on the character of Christopher Robin. I never enjoyed these stories when I
was wee and I don’t think I ever read a full volume. I read the Itchy Coo translation from cover
to cover over a couple of nights. (65)
• The translations into Scots were superb; Comedy that teaches subliminally. (69)
• Forward-looking, street-credible, professional appearance, no concession to twee nostalgia.
The use of translated texts was inspired. (70)
If the positive response from a largely well-informed and sympathetic group of educationists
and fellow professionals might be expected, the broader response on the Amazon UK website
(accessed in January 2020) for, say, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stane is more mixed. Not
all of those who post comments on the Amazon website are, of course, Scottish, but even amongst
the Scots there are interesting comments that suggest that the Itchy Coo team and those follow
ing in its footsteps have much still to do. One of the Amazon respondents, on receiving the book,
assumed that it must be written in Scots Gaelic. Another, whilst extolling the virtues of Fitt’s trans
lation, comments, “It just sounds so alien to read Harry Potter in slang but it is absolutely worth
it!” Other commentators are quick to state the difference between Scots and Gaelic and to assert
the status of Scots as a language, not “slang”. A further commentator gives evidence that the Itchy
Coo translations can prompt Scots literacy and extend the Scots repertoire even of Scots speakers:
There was a puckle o words ah wisna afa sure o and ah think they must come fae all ower
Scotland bit ah kent maist o fit ah’ve read so far. Ah live in England so jist get te spik Scots
te the dog nooadays cos naebody else kens fit ah’m oan aboot. Me and the dog are baith
enjoying this book.
[There was a number of words I wasn’t very sure of, and I think they must come from all
over Scotland but I understood most of what I’ve read so far. I live in England so just get to
speak Scots to the dog nowadays because nobody else understands what I’m on about. Me
and the dog are both enjoying this book.]
To sum up, then, over the last two decades the Itchy Coo project has overseen and stimulated a sus
tained and commercially and critically successful series of translations of English children’s books
into Scots. They have done this as part of a broader educational and cultural project to promote
literacy in Scots amongst the younger generation. The fact that translation from English turned out
to be one of the central pillars of the Itchy Coo project as it developed might not be, in hindsight,
too surprising. The stories and novels of Roald Dahl, Julie Donaldson and J.K. Rowling have a
brand recognition that new writers have not yet acquired, and there is clearly a public appetite to
read their work in alternative versions. It is evident from the Amazon comments that while some
readers are put off by the Scots versions, many do find in them the familiar co-mixed with the
alien that characterises all translations from English into Scots. One challenge facing the translator
into Scots is that there is no common, fixed core that can act as a standard: Most readers admit to
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finding words that they are not “afa sure o”. The dialectal differences amongst the diverse varieties
of Scots are acknowledged in the different local versions of Julie Donaldson’s stories. However,
those translations that are simply tagged as “Scots” do not simply unlock a latent but pre-existing
literacy amongst their readers – they are in the process of creating a common Scots written reg
ister that is not yet fixed but which may emerge through the consumption of the translations and
the discussions they provoke, particularly about how formal vocabulary or abstract concepts are
expressed in English and Scots.
As we saw in the previous section of this chapter, the establishment of devolved parliaments
in Scotland and Northern Ireland at the turn of the century saw definite but stalled attempts in
both polities to make public documents available in Scots alongside English and other community
languages. The Itchy Coo project to promote Scots literacy dates from around the same time. It
is likely that if, in future, documents in the public sphere are more widely accepted and used by
the broader public, it will be because of an enhanced literacy in Scots and a greater acceptance of
Scots as a legitimate language – both of which will have been promoted, in large part, by transla
tions from English.
Scots language activists may be justified in asserting the status of Scots as a legitimate, autono
mous language; much writing and indeed translation into Scots from different languages, includ
ing English, affirm that part of the motivation for doing so arises from the desire to show that
Scots is capable of functioning as a fully independent language. However, literacy levels in Scots
remain low, such that the success of a translation into Scots from English depends in part on the
readers’ familiarity with the source text. Effectively, the Scots target texts continue to function as
intralingual translations. Only if and when literacy levels in Scots improve might translations from
English to Scots properly be considered interlingual translations.
Further reading
Corbett, J. (2006). “Nae mair pussyfootin. Ah’m aff, Theramenes”: Demotic neoclassical drama in contempo
rary Scotland. In J. McGonigal & K. Stirling (Eds.), Ethically speaking (pp. 17–35). Brill.
Corbett, J. (2007). A double-realm: Scottish literary translation in the twenty-first century. In B. Schoene
(Ed.), The Edinburgh companion to contemporary Scottish literature (pp. 336–344). Edinburgh Univer
sity Press.
Findlay, B. (2000). Translating standard into dialect: Missing the target?. In C. Upton (Ed.), Moving target
McClure, J. D. (2006). European poetry in Scots. In T. Hubbard & R. D. S Jack (Eds.), Scotland in Europe
(pp. 89–104). Brill.
McClure, J. D. (2020). Translating Polish poetry into Scots. ANGLICA-An International Journal of English
Studies, 29(3), 177–193.
References
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532). Cambridge University Press.
Batho, E. C., & Husbands, H. W. (Eds.). (1941). The chronicles of Scotland, compiled by Hector Boece (Vol.
2, J. Bellenden, Trans.). Scottish Text Society. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://digital.nls.uk/
publications-by-scottish-clubs/archive/107313232
Carrington, N. T. (1958). Shakespeare, Macbeth. Cambridge University Press.
Chan, L. T.-H. (2018). The dialect(ic)s of control and resistance: Intralingual audiovisual translation in Chi
nese TV drama. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 251, 89–109. https://doi.org/10.1515/
ijsl-2018-0005
Corbett, J. (1999). Written in the language of the Scottish nation: A history of liteary translation into Scots.
Multilingual Matters.
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Corbett, J. (2001). The seafarer: Visibility and the translation of a West Saxon elegy into English and Scots.
Translation and Literature, 10(2), 157–173. https://doi.org/10.3366/tal.2001.10.2.157
Corbett, J. (2003). Language planning and modern Scots. In J. Corbett, J. D. McClure, & J. Stuart-Smith
(Eds.), The Edinburgh companion to Scots (pp. 251–273). Edinburgh University Press.
Corbett, J., & Douglas, F. (2003). Scots in the public sphere. In J. Kirk & D. O Baoill (Eds.), Towards our
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Ferguson, F. (2018). Home to a ghost: Ulster-Scots language and vernacular in Northern Irish culture since
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Findlay, B. (Ed.). (2004). Frae Ither tongues: Essays on modern translations into Scots. Multilingual Matters.
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its literature and language (pp. 277–304). Rodopi.
Leonard, T. (2011). Outside the narrative: Poems 1965–2009. Word Power Books.
Lorimer, R. (1992). Shakespeare’s Macbeth translated into Scots. Canongate.
Macafee, C., & †Aitken, A. (2002). A history of Scots to 1700. Retrieved from A Dictionary of the Older Scot
tish Tongue vol. XII, xxix––clvii. https://dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/history-of-scots/
Maley, W., & Neely, S. (2004). “Almost afraid to know itself”: Macbeth and cinematic Scotland. In E. Bell &
G. Miller (Eds.), Scotland in theory: Reflections on culture and literature (pp. 97–106). Rodopi.
McClure, J. D. (1981). “Scottis, Inglis, Suddroun”: Language labels and language attitudes. In F. Riddy &
R. Lyall (Eds.), Proceedings of the third international conference on Scottish language and literature,
Mediaeval and Renaissance (pp. 52–69). Glasgow and Stirling University.
McClure, J. D. (1997). Why Scots matters. Saltire Society.
McClure, J. D. (1999). When Macbeth becomes scots. Ilha do Desterro, 36, 29–51.
McColl Millar, R. (2020). A sociolinguistic history of Scotland. Edinburgh University Press.
Morgan, E. (1996). Collected translations. Carcanet.
NMSC. (2001a). Annual report. North/South Ministerial Council.
NMSC. (2001b). Annual report (Ulster Scots Version). North/South Ministerial Council.
Peacock, N. (1993). Molière in Scotland. Glasgow University.
Perl, J. (2014). The tradition of return. Princeton University Press.
Pound, E. (1915). Cathay. Elkin Mathews.
Purves, D. (1992). The tragedie o Macbeth. Rob Roy Press.
Purves, D. (2002). A Scots grammar: Scots grammar and usage (2nd ed.). The Saltire Society.
Robb, D. (2007). Auld campaigner: A life of Alexander Scott. Dunedin Academic Press.
Robertson, J. (2013). Pittin the word(s) oot: The Itchy Coo experience of publishing in Scots in the
twenty-first century. In J. M. Kirk & I. Macleod (Eds.), Scots: Studies in its literature and language
(pp. 103–124). Rodopi.
Robertson, J., Fitt, M., & Mitchelson, M. (2011). The story of Itchy Coo: Evaluation report 2001–2011. Itchy
Coo. Retrieved January 16, 2020, from www.itchy-coo.com/resources/The+Story+of+Itchy+Coo.pdf
Rowling, J. (1997). Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone. Bloomsbury.
Rowling, J. (2018). Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stane (M. Fitt, Trans.). Itchy Coo.
Scott, A. (1994). The collected poems of Alexander Scott (D. Robb, Ed.). Mercat Press.
Scott, T. (1993). The collected shorter poems of Tom Scott. Agenda/Chapman.
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Stuart-Smith, J. (2003). The phonology of modern urban Scots. In J. Corbett, J. D. McClure, & J. Stuart-Smith
(Eds.), The Edinburgh companion to Scots (pp. 110–137). Edinburgh University Press.
Venuti, L. (1995). The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. Routledge.
Zethsen, K. K., & Hill-Madsen, A. (2016). Intralingual translation and its place within translation studies –
a theoretical discussion. Meta: Journal Des Traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, 61(3), 692–708.
https://doi.org/10.7202/1039225ar
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10
IN SUBTITLES AND RECEPTION
The case of the movie Roma
Laura Vilardell
Introduction
After winning the Golden Globe for the Best Foreign Language Film in January 2020 for his movie
Parasite, the South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho famously declared the following: “Once you
overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing
films” (translated by Sharon Choi; Jackson, 2020). With this statement, Bong Joon-ho encouraged
audiences to watch movies produced abroad in subtitles. In Spanish-speaking countries, however,
there has always been a general preference for dubbing. This trend started for Mexican Spanish in
1938, with the first dubbed Disney movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In Spain, dubbing
has always been the preferred modality, not only in cinema, but also on television (O’Sullivan &
Cornu, 2019, p. 23). For movies released before 1991, Disney offered only one dubbed version of
Spanish, using what was called español neutro (neutral Spanish), a no-accent version that could
be distributed in all Spanish-speaking countries. However, since 1991 the company has decided to
offer two different Spanish-dubbed versions of each movie – one for Latin American countries and
one for Spain (Mendoza, 2015).
The traditional preference for dubbing among Spanish speakers seems to be challenged by the
global preference toward subtitles (Patel, 2016). For example, the eighth article of the last reform
to the Mexican Federal Law of Cinematography, published on 22 March 2021, established that
“films shall be shown to the public in their original versions and subtitled in Spanish, in accor-
dance with the terms established in the Regulations” (Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 2021).
In this chapter, my focus is twofold: (1) I aim to investigate the reasoning behind the decision
to create a new version with a different geographical variant of the same language. To do so, I first
explore the literature on subtitling and intralingual translation and then focus on the controversy
over the subtitles translated from Mexican Spanish to Iberian Spanish in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2019
Oscar-awarded movie Roma. (2) I focus on immediacy from the point of view of consumers, who
can give instant feedback on an audiovisual product in countless ways, such as on social media
platforms. To illustrate this point, I present the immediate reception of Roma’s subtitles on Twitter.
In the following sections, I provide a brief overview of recent literature on the translation of
subtitles, introduce the concept of intralingual translation, and then suggest criteria for assessing
subtitles, based on Mossop et al. (2019).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-13 164

Intralingual translation in subtitles and reception
The product: intralingual translation and subtitles
Preliminary remarks
The term “intralingual translation” was coined by Roman Jakobson in 1959 and reviewed by sev
eral scholars afterward (Denton, 2007 and Pillière, 2010, among others). It consists of rewording
a message within the same language code to ensure communication. According to Neves, intralin
gual translation in audiovisual products – known as “subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing”
(SDH) or “closed captioning” (CC) – was originally considered a transcription or adaptation
intended for deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals; it was rarely attributed to language varieties
emerging from different social groups or geographical areas.
In audiovisual translation (AVT) studies, however, the literature suggests designating this prac
tice as either translation or intralingual subtitling: “At present, there is a widely held consensus
that SDH delivers intralingual or interlingual ‘translation’” (2019, p. 83). This understanding is
shared by O’Sullivan and Cornu (2019, p. 16) and Johnson (2019, p. 418); in contrast, Díaz Cintas
and Remael (2014, p. 14) use the term “intralingual subtitles”. In order to avoid confusion, in this
chapter I use the term “intralingual translation” to indicate the act of translating, while I use “intra
lingual subtitling/subtitles” to refer specifically to the product, the subtitles themselves.
The following section summarizes the conceptualization of subtitling for audiovisual content,
from the 1990s to the present, then suggests a classification system for subtitles.
Overview of the literature on audiovisual subtitles and classification
Linguistic aspects
Scholars in the 1990s concurred that intralingual translation was intended exclusively for deaf or
hard-of-hearing individuals and that it was performed live. In the early 2000s, AVT scholars added
three additional target audiences: Language students, karaoke singers (Díaz Cintas, 2001), and
children (Bartoll, 2004, p. 58). However, regardless of the target audience, the final product was
still considered a “transcription” (Bartoll, 2004, p. 57) or “captioning” (Díaz Cintas, 2003). The
only exception that Bartoll noted concerned the purpose of the subtitles, as he argued that there
were two different types: Documentary subtitles, which are literal transcriptions, and instrumental
subtitles (Nord, 1995, as cited in Bartoll, 2004, p. 57), which blend transcription and transla
tion. Other scholars, such as Romero-Fresco (2009), Szarkowska et al. (2016), and Lugea (2019),
termed this distinction edited versus verbatim subtitles (Lugea, 2019, p. 24).
In 2016, Karen Korning Zethsen and Aage Hill-Madsen broke down the concept of intralingual
translation into three categories: Dialectal INTRA, for different geographical or social variants of
the language; diachronic INTRA, when the original and the translation are chronologically distant
from one another; and intergeneric INTRA or functional INTRA, which is employed, for example,
while translating a technical text for a general audience.
Technical aspects
Gottlieb (1997, pp. 71–72) distinguished between open and closed subtitles. While open subtitles
are always on view, closed subtitles can be displayed or turned off, according to the end users’
preferences. Following Bartoll, the first distinction for subtitling an audiovisual product is whether
we consider the subtitles as a process or as an end result. When considered as a process, the
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Laura Vilardell
emphasis can be placed either on the translation process or on the technical aspects of subtitling
(Bartoll, 2004, p. 58). In contrast, considering subtitles as an end result focuses on the target audi
ence and its reaction. Bartoll argues that process and end result have different characteristics, even
though, in some cases, elements of the two could potentially be combined. The variables that affect
the work of the subtitler, according to Bartoll, are “language, purpose, the addressee, time and to
a lesser degree the product to be subtitled”. Those that are restricted to the technicians implement
ing the subtitles are “the means of broadcast, localization, placing, filing, mobility, optionality, the
product and the colour, as all of these require special technical resources for each case”. For the
end user, the variables are “language, the addressee, purpose, means of broadcast, localization,
placing, mobility, filing, optionality and the product” (2004, p. 58).
Suggestion for classifying intralingual subtitles

Following the Skopos theory of translation, before any translation process takes place, one must
understand the purpose of the translation, its function, and how the translator responds to the tar
get audience’s needs (Reiß & Vermeer, 2014, p. 86). In the case of subtitles, there are two broad
distinctions: Those intended for people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing, where the sounds are
described (these subtitles are known as SDH in the UK and closed captions in the US; Neves,
2019, p. 83), and those intended for people who can hear, but for some reason have trouble under
standing the dialogue.
Once the target audience has been identified, the subtitling process can be classified according
to two categories: Technical and linguistic.
• Within the technical aspects, I agree with Bartoll that subtitles need to be regarded both as a
process and as an end result. However, for the technical aspects of the process, I propose to add
synchrony between images and text as another category in the list of variables, as it is key to
delivering the message and making it sound real (Martínez Sierra, 2004, as cited in Chaume,
2005, p. 11).
• Regarding the linguistic aspects, the first distinction would be the language combination:
Interlingual translation (from L1 to L2) and intralingual translation (from L11 to L12). Both cat
egories can have open and/or closed simultaneous subtitles. Unlike other authors who restrict
simultaneous subtitles to intralingual subtitling, my suggestion is broader, following the con
cept of respeaking. According to Romero-Fresco, respeaking uses speech recognition to convert
voice to live subtitles with the right mechanics and the minimum lag possible, using different
colours for different characters (2011, p. 1). After all the adaptations (punctuation, technical
aspects, and so on), Romero-Fresco concludes, “respeakers often end up paraphrasing, rather
than repeating or shadowing, the original soundtrack” (2019, p. 96). Nowadays, artificial intel
ligence can be combined with respeaking, as simultaneous subtitles can be generated by the
increasingly widespread practice of auto-generated subtitles (or automatic captions), without
any human interaction. In the case of translation within the same language, subtitles are done
by an automatic speech recognition system (ASR), while the interlingual translation process
combines ASR with machine translation (Matamala, 2019, p. 75).
However, as shown by Romero-Fresco, auto-generated subtitles still need a “manual review pro
cess to eliminate errors” (2019, p. 106). Consequently, the ideal scenario is to merge artificial
intelligence with respeaking and then to submit the final product to a quality assurance process
through the guidelines shown in the next subsection. This assesses the quality of the subtitles and
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ensures that they fulfil the expectations of the target audience. In order to guarantee that the subti
tles meet the audience’s expectations, the post-production step needs to prioritize the fight against
artificiality (Chaume, 2005, p. 9). Díaz Cintas agrees: “Translating only the linguistic component
without taking into account the value of the other semiotic dimensions of the film would certainly
be a recipe for disaster” (2009, p. 9). The dialogues need to sound plausible in the target language
or geographical variant. In the following section, there is an overview of the quality control param
eters that I argue subtitlers need to follow to identify problems.
Parameters for analyzing the quality of intralingual subtitles

Subtitles are commonly revised twice, once by the original subtitler and once by someone else,
normally a peer. For both revisions, the criteria need to be clear and systematic. Some companies
establish their own quality control process (QC); Netflix, for example, uses a process based on an
artificial intelligence (AI) prediction model (Govind & Balachandran, 2015). However, from the
point of view of linguistic and cultural adaptation, I suggest that the revision parameters provided
by Brian Mossop et al. (2019) handily summarize the most common aspects of subtitle QC. Mos
sop and his colleagues identify and define five categories of problems:
• Group A – Problems of meaning transfer, related to accuracy and completeness.

• Group B – Problems of content, related to logic and errors.
• Group C – Problems of language and style, related to mechanics (grammar, spelling, and punc
tuation), coherence, cohesion, smoothness, and word combinations.
• Group D – Problems with presentation, related to placement in text, typography, and
organization.
• Group E – Problems related to specifications, related to complying with the guidelines given by
the client or the employer.
Even though these are broad categories, the subcategories of each group are defined clearly, and
the authors provide examples. I will use this approach to illustrate the controversy over the intra
lingual translation of the subtitles of the movie Roma.
Target audience, streaming services, and reception
The changing role of audiovisual consumers:

from theatres to streaming services
In the 1960s, cinema required gathering in a certain place to watch an already selected audiovisual
product. Therefore, the relationship between producer/filmmaker and spectator followed a “top-
down” model in which the bond between the two was “fundamentally asymmetrical” (Thompson,
1995, as cited in Jones, 2019, p. 183). As a result, “consumers were forced to assume a compar
atively passive role” (Jones, 2019, p. 183).
The arrival of television and home video technology led to a slight change of the “top-down
logic” (Jones, 2019, p. 184), as users had slightly more freedom of choice and did not have to pay
every time they decided to watch a movie. Audiovisual producers reacted quickly. Following a
niche strategy, they focused on fans, offering extra content, such as spin-offs. This not only brought
revenue to producers but also gave birth to an unstoppable phenomenon: “fandom” communi
ties (Jones, 2019, p. 185). These groups became the seed for online fan forums and fansubbing
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Laura Vilardell
(Pérez-González, 2007, p. 265). The technology also led to piracy, a fundamental element that is
still present today: Anyone could spread illegal copies of any content without control (Orrego-
Carmona, 2018, p. 324). However, for the most part, the “top-down logic” remained, as television
networks still decided the broadcasting schedule of shows on TV, which in turn obeyed the criteria
of “profit-focused corporations” (Cubbison, 2005, p. 51, as cited in Jones, 2019, p. 186).
How the message is read: the digital revolution

and the power of active audiences
The digital revolution brought a radical change in entertainment consumption and reception. In
2021, 4.9 billion people, 63% of the population worldwide, had access to the internet (ITU, 2022)
and thus had full control over when and where to watch a show (Orrego-Carmona, 2018, p. 323).
Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, declared that Netflix wanted to put an end to the limitations of shows
broadcast at a certain time on a certain day: “For 100 years, you could only watch an episode of
a show, say, at 8 o’clock on Thursday night, or you go to the theater. Now, it’s much more flex
ible” (Döpfner & Hastings, 2021). The freedom derived from this change also allowed consumers
to become active contributors to the reception of audiovisual content. I argue that two different
concepts are essential for understanding the paradigm shift in the consumption of audiovisual
products: Media and active audiences.
Lisa Gitelman defined media as the technology by which we can communicate. “A medium
is a set of associated ‘protocols’ or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that
technology” (2006, pp. 13–14). In the case of the internet, the “numerical representation” or codi
fication of content online poses risks regarding the “customization and manipulation” of contents
(Jones, 2019, p. 186).
The change of paradigm carried with it the empowerment of audiences. Huimin Jin described
the term active audiences as the ability of individuals to react to a message (2012, p. 103). Orrego-
Carmona pointed out a subcategory: “Engaged audiences [that] interact online in discussions,
forums, social media and websites dedicated to the content of their preferences” (2018, p. 324).
The empowerment of audiences “can be seen as an alternative source of media power” (Jenkins,
2006, p. 4), as consumers’ knowledge is gathered in a single space, thus leading to what Jenkins
calls “participatory culture” (2006, p. 3) and Lévy (1997) labels “collective intelligence”. How
ever, the audience does not always express itself in the same way and through the same media. In
the following section, I shed light on reception, based on the different ways to process the feedback
of active audiences. Finally, I propose that social media is an element to consider when examining
the immediate reception of a product.
Revising the methodology of reception analysis

Changes in media and the advent of active audiences have led scholars to reinvent methods for
measuring reception, particularly data gathering and data processing. In the following list, I pro
pose new ways of assessment, based on the empowerment of users and immediate reception:
• Data gathering: While other studies (Orrego-Carmona, 2015; Perego, 2016; Szarkowska et al.,
2016) use eye-tracking to analyze the reactions of individuals, for this project I propose social
media comments as a data source, which permits a broader, more inclusive sample. Following
Jenkins (2006), the idea is to determine collective intelligence, in this case within a non-fandom
community. The methodology gathers and then analyzes comments within a particular social
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media thread that were posted during a certain period of time. Orrego-Carmona validates the
method in these terms: “Tweets could provide valuable information for scholars seeking to map
audience preferences and reactions” (2019, p. 378).
• Data processing: I base my approach to data analysis on Stuart Hall’s theory of reception
(1973). He argues that media texts are coded by the producer and decoded by the target audi
ence. Focusing on the decoding process, he established three different “encoding versions”:
Dominant or hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional (Hall, 1973, pp. 16–18). I categorize the
data in the following case study using these three types.
The digital revolution not only altered the behaviour and role of audiences, but it also changed
the production of audiovisual products. To explore this change, I focus on the way that Netflix has
selected language combinations for its subtitling. I centre my analysis on Netflix because it is a
dominant media producer – Döpfner revealed that Netflix had 200 million subscribers around the
world in 2021 (Döpfner & Hastings, 2021).
Coding the message: artificial intelligence versus tradition

As stated in the introduction, in the case of Spain, “there is a culture of dubbing” (Benavides,
2018), “because they do not like to read subtitles” (Gil Ariza, 2004). However, the days of dubbing
may be numbered.
It is an open secret that some companies track our behaviour. Through artificial intelligence,
they can establish certain patterns of conduct, and this information is priceless when they need to
launch or to improve their products. Netflix has long been committed to this model. Todd Yellin,
Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, shared their strategy with Wired UK: “The three
legs of this stool would be Netflix members; taggers who understand everything about the content;
and our machine learning algorithms that take all of the data and put things together” (Plummer,
2017). Indeed, the company’s decisions are based on “machine learning and statistical modelling”
(Dye et al., 2020) of a large dataset of subscribers’ preferences. The variables include the num
ber of users who watched a certain show, their location, and their language preference. Once the
data is collected and cleaned, artificial intelligence foresees both the “audience size” (Dye et al.,
2020) and “the per-language consumption”, that is the expected number of viewers per language
(Kumar et al., 2018). According to the results obtained from the prediction, they determine the
most successful language combination and the post-production process (dubbing, subtitling, or
audio description).
The following section offers a case study of the controversy that emerged over the intralingual
translation in Spanish in the subtitles for the 2019 Oscar-winning movie Roma.
Case study
Background
Netflix bought Roma in 2018 after “an intense bidding war” and “for far more than its cost”
(Thompson, 2018), and it was released the same year. It is set in the 1970s in a very specific neigh
bourhood of Mexico City, though the topic of the movie is universal: The fight against patriarchy
(Cuarón, 2018). Languages play a key role in the picture. Mexican Spanish is the dominant lan
guage, while the indigenous language Mixtec is spoken by the maids, and English is only rarely
spoken. According to the director, Alfonso Cuarón, “A film like this, in Spanish, indigenous, in
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black and white and a drama, not a genre movie, we know it would have huge difficulty just find
ing space to be shown in theaters” (Roxborough, 2018). Maybe that was why Cuarón and Netflix
decided to “break the rules of the display market and go to independent theatres” (Gutiérrez,
2018).1 Described by Thompson (2018) as a “mind-blowing digital game-changer”, Roma was
not screened by the most popular theatre chains, such as Mexico’s Cinépolis and Cinemex, or
Spain’s Espectarama. The causes are twofold: First, the format of the movie required specific
high-quality systems, and second, big chains opposed Netflix’s unwillingness to respect the theat
rical window – that is, the time that the movie would be exclusively available in movie theatres.
On 20 November 2018, Cuarón used his Twitter account to encourage the independent theatres
of Mexico to organize film screenings of his movie, stating that so far only 40 theatres had made
it available. After his effort, a total of 100 theatres showed the movie in Mexico. In Spain, it was
only available in five cinemas: Cines Verdi Madrid (two screens), Cines Verdi Barcelona (two
screens), and Cines Albéniz in Málaga (ABC, 2018). Eventually, according to El País, the movie
“was launched in more than 500 cinemas of about 40 countries” (Koch & Belinchón, 2018).
Jordi Soler, a Mexican writer established in Spain, watched the movie at Cines Verdi in Barce
lona. Outraged after the experience, on 16 December 2018 he tweeted: “In Spain @alfonsocuaron’s
Roma is subtitled in peninsular Spanish, which is paternalistic, offensive and deeply provincial”
(Soler, as cited in Green, 2019). His tweet gave rise to a major controversy: It got 1,065 retweets
and had 3,980 likes. The debate reached the filmmaker, Alfonso Cuarón, who, in Spain’s news
paper El País, stated that the decision was “parochial, ignorant and offensive to Spaniards them
selves” (Morales et al., 2019). On 10 January 2019, Netflix decided to drop the Iberian subtitles
and only kept the original closed captions. Currently, if the viewer does not choose to display sub
titles, the Mixtec conversations are subtitled in Mexican Spanish, but the English dialogue is not
subtitled. If subtitles in Spanish are chosen, the Mixtec dialogue is subtitled in Mexican Spanish,
and the English dialogue is subtitled in English.
Analysis of the changes

In order to understand the magnitude of the debate over the film’s subtitles, I provide here a brief
sample of examples. As stated before, the methodology of analysis follows Mossop et al. (2019,
pp. 137–157), who classify problems in translation in five broad groups: Meaning transfer, con
tent, language and style, presentation, and specifications. More information is provided under the
section “Parameters for Analyzing the Quality of Intralingual Subtitles” of this article.
• Example 1 (minute 9:22)
Original: “Se enoja el soldado, se baja el soldado y le disparó” [al niño]. (Literal translation:
*gets mad the soldier, gets out the soldier and shot him [the kid]).
Iberian translation: “El soldado se enfada, se baja y le dispara”. (Literal translation: The
soldier gets angry, gets out and shoots him [the kid]).
All the problems found in this first example can be categorized as problems of language and style.
In the original version, one of the children speaks about a scene he witnessed. To do so, he uses
repetitions and changes verb tense from present to past in the same sentence. Even though the shift
in verb tense does not follow a logical sequence, this is the way the child speaks, and it is part of
his identity. The subtitler for the Iberian Spanish version decided to omit the repetition (under
lined), which is a problem of style (it is not a problem of meaning transfer because it is correct to
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omit the subject in this context in Spanish), to change the verb tense (in bold), which is a smooth
ing of the tenses, and to change the position of elements (italicized), also related to smoothness.
While the original structure of the sentence is Vp+S+Vp+S+Vpast, the translation’s structure is
S+Vp+Vp+Vp (Vp stands for verb in present tense).
• Example 2 (minute 1:58:42)
Original: “No, mi amor, tengo que ir a checar las llantas del coche”. (Literal translation: No,
my dear, I have to go check the tyres of the car).
Iberian translation: “No, tengo que mirar las llantas”. (Literal translation: No, I have to go
see the rims).
In this case, the problems are related to meaning transfer. The first problem is underlined and is
related to the completeness of the message, as the translation omits some words, such as “my dear”,
“to go”, and “of the car”, resulting in information retention. This incompleteness is very obvious
when the original audio is played, and the subtitles of the Iberian translation are shown. This is
where the work of the translator, according to Díaz Cintas and Remael (2014, p. 55), is exposed
and can be criticized. The second problem, accuracy, is italicized and is related to the verbs checar
and mirar. While checar is “to check”, which involves an action taken by the speaker, the Ibe
rian translation is mirar, that is “to see”, a verb that does not imply any kind of action taken by
the speaker. The same process occurs with the noun llanta. In Mexico, this word means “wheel/
tyre”, while in Spain it means “rim”, which is the metal that holds the tyre. Thus, when the mother
announced to her children that she had to go to check the tyres of the car, in Iberian Spanish the
message was that she had to see the rim (the car is omitted, as well as the verb “to go”).
Original: “Y, además, quiero un coche más chico”. (Literal translation: And, also, I want a
smaller car).
Iberian Translation: “quería un coche más pequeño”. (Literal translation: I wanted a smaller car).
This example contains problems of language and style. This sentence comes after one of the chil
dren asked why the mother did not buy a Ford Maverick. Her answer, in the original, is in the pre
sent tense to note that her decision is still firm. The Iberian translation uses the past tense instead,
which may make the audience think that she could have changed her mind. The change between
chico and pequeño is related to meaning. While in Mexico chico is more widely used, people in
Spain use pequeño, though both words are easily understood in Spain. The definition of both terms
in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española is almost identical. The omission of “y además”
in the Iberian translation creates a problem of cohesion: The removal of the link words renders the
speech less fluid, and the character’s words come across as being blunt and direct.
• Example 4 (minute 30:17)
Original: Gansito (chocolate snack).

Iberian Translation: ganchito (cheese puff).
The case of Gansito is classified as a problem of content, as the translation does not match the
same reality as the original. While in Mexico Gansito refers to a chocolate snack, ganchito refers
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to a cheese puff in Spain. Moreover, the grandmother told Paco, one of the children, that she put
them in the freezer for everyone. It is evident that a cheese puff does not belong in the freezer.
Original: “si está bien suave ”. (Literal translation: but it’s really calm).
Iberian translation: “está tranquila”. (Literal translation: it’s calm/quiet).
This example can be categorized as a problem of meaning transfer. In this case, the problem is
related to accuracy. When the mother asks the children to stay close to shore, one of the children
answers that the sea is calm, so they can swim further out. In the Iberian translation there is the
omission of si and bien. Si can be translated as “but” in this case, and bien is an adverb of empha
sis (adverbio ponderativo), equivalent to muy, that can be translated as “really”. Besides these
omissions, there is also a change of linguistic register in the word mar. Even though this term,
translated as “sea”, can be used in both masculine and feminine forms, the general rule is to use it
in masculine (Real Academia Española, 2019) and leave the feminine for literary register or idi
omatic expressions, such as alta mar (high seas). In the context of a child articulating the sentence,
the use of the feminine seems artificial.
Original: “Se va a enojar tu mamá ”. (Literal translation: *is going to be angry, your mom).
Iberian translation: “tu madre se va a enfadar”. (Literal translation: your mother is going to
be angry).
The first change to note is a compensation, or change of the place of some elements, in this case the
subject. While in the original the subject is at the end of the sentence, in the Iberian translation the
subject is at the beginning. Even though the verb tense is the same, the change from mamá (mom)
to madre (mother) denotes a problem of language and style. Cleo, the domestic worker, is the one
who pronounced this sentence, referring to Paco, one of the children. This creates a problem of
coherence, because in an informal setting, it would be more likely that Cleo referred to the mother
as mom, as in the original, not “mother”. The italicized change refers to a change of vocabulary to
demonstrate the differences between Mexican and Iberian Spanish, even though in both geograph
ical variants enojar and enfadar are interchangeable. According to the Real Academia Española,
enojar causes anger while enfadar causes annoyance, but the difference between the meaning of
the two words is very small.
The subtitles have multiple examples of geographical variations, such as the use of babosa
for tonta (fool) (10:01), where the second definition of baboso in the Real Academia Española is
the word tonto. Other examples include using vosotros in the Iberian subtitles instead of ustedes
(2:05:35), including some conjugations such as subtitling the spoken word vengan (come, in the
form of ustedes) as venid (come, in the form of vosotros) (1:50:05), which does not interfere in
any way with the communication. One other change in linguistic register is the replacement of the
spoken word correr (to be fired) with despedir (to dismiss) in the subtitles (45:50). The words are
spoken by Cleo, the domestic worker, who was pregnant but was scared to tell her mistress. Even
though correr also means to run, in this case it is obvious that she is referring to her fear of being
dismissed. In the Iberian Spanish translation, the word used is despedir, which can be translated
as “to dismiss”. There is obviously a change of register here, and in this context it seems more
plausible to use the word correr than despedir.
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Reception of the controversy in academic circles in Spain

The controversial subtitling provoked reactions from well-known people from various institu
tions. For example, philologist Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, from the reference institution in the
study of the Spanish language, Real Academia Española, agreed with Cuarón’s judgment but also
recognized, “it is intended to make it easier for the viewer, but it is an indication of their lack of
confidence in the ability of the Spanish speaker to understand” (Morales et al., 2019). From all
the examples presented previously, it can be concluded that the linguistic changes are not made in
response to a possible lack of understanding by the receiver of the message from Spain. In fact,
with examples such as the change from ustedes to vosotros or from mamá to madre, it is clear that
the changes are rather arbitrary and nonsensical. I agree with Juan Cruz, co-founder and editor
of the newspaper El País, who, in conversation with Álex Grijelmo, a writer who is in charge of
the newspaper’s manual of style, stated that subtitles should be present when a dialect is difficult
to understand, as, for example, in the case of Chilean Spanish (Figueroa & Morales, 2019, 9:02–
9:08). However, in the case of the subtitles in Roma, Cruz defined the Iberian version as “false
subtitles” since some of the changes were not in line with the aim of the filmmaker (14:33–14:40).
Moreover, Grijelmo added that “at most 3%” of the words of the movie could be difficult to under
stand for a person from Spain (5:39–5:42).
For all that, Cruz agreed with Soler, stating that Netflix’s action was the “result of the colonisa
tion of the language” (Figueroa & Morales, 2019, 14:50–14:54). Even though at first glance this
seems a very strong assertation, according to Bassnett and Trivedi, “colonialism and translation
[go] hand in hand” (1999, p. 3). After more than 200 years of independence of Mexico, it seems
incredible that we still speak about colonialism, but its impact continues. While Belgium recently
apologized for the colonization of the Congo (Adamolekun, 2022), King Felipe of Spain, on 7
August 2022 at Gustavo Petro’s inauguration as president of Colombia, was the only head of state
that refused to stand in front of the sword of Simón de Bolivar, the liberator of Spanish rule in
Latin America (Gutiérrez, 2022). This lack of respect for Latin American symbols can be related
to the decision to translate the film Roma into Iberian Spanish or Castilian in Spain, ignoring “the
colour and texture of other accents” (Cuarón in Morales et al., 2019). For Agulló, Netflix’s deci
sion was a problem of culturalization, because they had not measured the impact of the translation
on the audience (Agulló, 2020). However, after analyzing the subtitles, it seems reasonable to sug
gest that the decision was not that innocent.
Reasons for the intralingual subtitles of Roma and economic success in Spain
A spokesperson for Cines Verdi in Barcelona explained to the newspaper Libertad Digital that a
test was carried out to see if Spanish viewers could understand the film, and most of them could
not (Cultura/Agencias, 2019). He defended the addition of Iberian Spanish subtitles as a way to
reach a broader audience since they would guarantee that idioms and vocabulary from the 1970s
could be well understood. Before my analysis of the movie, I hypothesized that the intralingual
translation of its subtitles came from the results of AI forecasts derived from similar shows. How
ever, after the analysis, it seems more likely that it was more than a linguistic decision. Rather,
it seems Cines Verdi aimed to better fit the needs of “an individual, group, or culture” (ideology,
as defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary) that, in their mind, probably would not accept the
original in Mexican Spanish. The arbitrary examples provided earlier that do not interfere in com
munication, such as replacing ustedes with vosotros, illustrate this point. The reality, though, is
that many Spaniards were offended by the subtitles, as the linguistic choices implied that they were
not capable of understanding Mexican Spanish.
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Unfortunately, I was unable to identify the person who subtitled the Iberian Spanish version. Nei
ther Netflix, Cuarón, nor Cines Verdi wanted to make a statement on the matter. However, I was able
to speak with José Luis Saturno, the subtitler of the Latin American version of the film for Netflix (J.
L. Saturno, personal communication, 4 November 2020), though he had no knowledge of the real
reasons behind the Iberian Spanish subtitling or who oversaw the decisions about those subtitles.
Regarding the economic success of the movie in Spain, Netflix does not provide data on audi
ence or box office numbers, as they contend that such information should not be used to measure
the success of a film (Griggs, 2019). The only data available from Spanish theatres was leaked
from the catalogue of Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales and published by
the newspaper El Español on 3 February 2019: “[T]he data of box office and spectators of Alfonso
Cuarón’s drama revealed: 327,727 euros and 45,735 spectators” (Fdez, 2019). In order to put the
data in perspective, the same organization indicated that The Marriage Story, a film released and
distributed by Netflix that premiered in Spain on 22 November 2019, had 75,266.41 euros and
11,318 spectators (Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales, 2023) after a four-
week theatre run (Thompson, 2022).
As the data of the number of views in the service are not available, it is difficult to ascer
tain whether they compensated for Roma’s marketing campaign, the budget of which cost mil
lions (Barnes, 2019). Likewise, the real losses that the adaptation into Iberian Spanish may have
caused are also unknown, as Netflix declined to comment on the matter (Koch et al., 2019). What
is certain is that with Roma Netflix introduced a different way of watching cinema and also of
distributing films, giving space to independent theatres (Jarvey, 2019); in addition, the publicity
surrounding the controversy over the subtitles probably brought them some extra revenue. In the
following section, I analyze the immediate reception of the controversial tweet.
Results and reception analysis

The analysis is based on 172 tweets and retweets found in the original thread created by Jordi Soler
on 16 December 2018 (4:04 AM).2 Even though the thread has a total of 1,065 retweets, I aim to
assess the reception on 16 December, from 4:04 AM to 11:59 PM, as the bulk of the controversy
took place during those hours. I analyze the reaction of Twitter users according to Stuart Hall’s
three categories, mentioned earlier in the section on reception: Dominant or hegemonic (1973,
p. 16), negotiated (1973, p. 17), and oppositional (1973, p. 18). In this case, those messages that
fall into the dominant-hegemonic category are the ones that totally agree with Soler’s tweet; nego
tiated messages are those written by users who, while they understand the message, interpret it
slightly differently or modify part of the message to be able to share their own experience. Finally,
oppositional readers are those who decode the message with its connotations and understand the
tweet in a contrary way.
Nearly half (45.93%) of the messages analyzed fall into the category of negotiated, with exam
ples such as “I am surprised that it is not dubbed”. Those who fully agreed with Soler, that is,
those in the category of dominant-hegemonic, totalled 34.88%. Thus, around three-quarters of the
reactions to Soler’s tweet agreed with his point of view, as in the following responses: “Colonial
ism is the word [for that]” or “what a shame that they don’t respect the Mexican Spanish”. Only
19.19% of the tweets are oppositional – that is, they totally disagree with Soler’s reasoning and
agree with the decision of Netflix – as in the following: “What’s the problem?” or “in reality some
of the dialogues are difficult to understand. I recommend using the subtitles”. These early results
show that the controversy had a very strong impact on social media and that Soler’s opinion went
viral in a matter of seconds.
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Interestingly, only a very small percentage of tweets spoke about the movie itself. Most mes
sages dealt with the users’ personal experiences with Latin American Spanish versus Iberian
Spanish. Some offered generalizations and stereotypes, or discussed sensitive topics regarding
the relationship between Mexico and Spain. That supports my hypothesis that the changes made
went beyond a simple question of linguistic understanding and had ideological intentions. Those
responding to the tweet did not have to watch the movie to have an opinion about the matter,
because the subject of language, ideology, and colonialism is still present in both countries. As in
general the comments were not about the movie, I was unable to apply Gambier’s model of the
three Rs (response, reaction, and repercussion) to assess reactions at the cognitive level, to evalu
ate the commenters’ judgment of the movie, or to explore their understanding about that and the
repercussions of their experiences (Orrego-Carmona, 2019, p. 377). In a future study, I plan to
analyze the reactions in the medium term through the theories of Gambier.
As stated before, analyzing comments on social media opens new horizons in the study of
immediate reception and can be easily related to the theory of active audiences. However, while it
can provide valuable results in terms of content, it poses difficulties of identity and data processing.
Concluding remarks
At the outset, the study of intralingual subtitles was related to closed captioning for hearing
impaired people (Neves, 2019, p. 83). However, as time passed, subtitles became recognized as
being also useful for language learners or for ensuring that people understood the message, as in
the case of hard-to-understand geographical variants of the same language, for example in the
movie Trainspotting (1996). The reasoning behind the preference for subtitles can be twofold:
First, subtitles are cheaper than dubbing, and, second, they allow viewers to hear the original
voices of the actors while making the content more accessible.
After reviewing the linguistic and technical aspects of subtitles, I conclude that the characteris
tics of interlingual subtitling can be shared with intralingual subtitling. This includes simultaneous
subtitles that can be performed live with automatic speech recognition systems (ASR) and can
include, if needed, machine translation, with a strong quality assessment afterwards. The five
categories for classifying and assessing subtitles provided by Mossop et al. (2019) are helpful in
identifying problems and challenges, as well as in reducing the vulnerability of the job of subti
tlers, as pointed out by Díaz Cintas and Remael (2014, p. 55).
It seems plausible that previous post-production preferences, such as the preference for dub
bing in Spanish-speaking countries, are challenged nowadays with the advent of streaming ser
vices and social media (Patel, 2016). Instead of relying on tendencies based on socio-political
reasons, streaming platforms use artificial intelligence to leverage users’ preferences. In some
cases, they make the movie fully accessible, providing the audio description for visually impaired
individuals, along with closed captioning and a version without subtitles. This trend has quickly
led more traditional media corporations to change their practices as well.
As stated in the introduction, since 1991 Disney has offered two different dubbed versions of
Spanish for their movies, one for Spain and the other for Latin America. However, the 2017 movie
Coco, produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures, was screened
in Spain in its original version, Mexican Spanish, without Iberian Spanish subtitles. The same hap
pened with Encanto (2021).
Even though at the beginning my hypothesis was that the reasoning behind the decision to add
Iberian Spanish subtitles in the original Mexican Spanish dialogues in Roma could follow modern
trends related to AI, after analyzing the examples in which the subtitles did not match the spoken
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language, I am inclined to believe there was an ideological reasoning behind it. Jordi Soler started
the controversy on Twitter on 16 December 2018, and Netflix waited to respond until hearing the
opinion of the filmmaker, pronounced on 9 January 2019. One day later, Netflix dropped the sub
titles and removed the Iberian version. The only version of Spanish-language subtitles currently
available is “Spanish CC” (in closed captions) – that is, the original subtitles in Mexican Spanish.
This chapter proves that the advent of the internet resulted in the empowerment of audiences.
Unarguably, it is a more inclusive way to beat the “top-down logic”, where there is a huge gap
between filmmaker and spectators. In the case of the immediate reception of Roma on Twitter
(16 December 2018), many users that commented on Jordi Soler’s thread did not even watch the
movie but already had an opinion, most of them favourable to Soler’s point of view. This feedback
would not exist without the internet. This also indicates that the decision to intralingually translate
the movie was not simply a question of language; the movie became a pretext for understanding
the ideological issues that still exist between Spain and Latin America. Netflix invested money on
something (the translation of the subtitles) that was not necessary but helped to give visibility to
the task of subtitlers, translators, and intralingual translation.
Notes
1 All translations from Spanish sources are mine.
2 The results have been classified according to their nature. Those that did not provide any information
or were not related to the controversy, e.g., those that did not understand the original tweet, etc., were
discarded.
Further reading
Hastings, R., & Meyer, E. (2020). No rules rules: Netflix and the culture of reinvention. Penguin Press.
Nikolić, K. (2018). Reception studies in audiovisual translation – interlingual subtitling. In E. Di Giovanni &
Y. Gambier (Eds.), Reception studies and audiovisual translation (pp. 180–197). John Benjamins. https://
doi.org/10.1075/btl.141
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201811301923_noticia.html
Adamolekun, D. (2022, June 17). Once the blood on our hands dries: Royal apologies for the Belgian
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hands-dries-royal-apologies-for-the-belgian-colonization-of-congo/
Agulló, B. (2020, April 27). Subtitulación: cambios en la distribución de contenido, nuevos hábitos de con-
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179
PART III
Easy and Plain Language
11
“ISSUES OF THE SAME ORDER”?
THE MICROSTRATEGIES OF AN
EXPERT-LAY TRANSLATION
COMPARED TO THOSE OF
INTERLINGUAL TRANSLATION
Introduction
For quite some years now there has been a debate within Translation Studies concerning the place
of intralingual translation. With a few exceptions, there seems to be growing consensus that intra
lingual translation is a translational activity which belongs under the Translation Studies umbrella
(Berk Albachten, 2018, p. 168; Hill-Madsen, 2021, p. 3; Pillière, 2021, pp. 4–5). An increasing
number of scholars now work with intralingual translation, and we are steadily gaining more
insight, although the work carried out is still only a fraction of that within interlingual translation.
For theoretical as well as practical reasons it is important to find out more about the similarities and
differences of the two types of translation. I have argued elsewhere (Zethsen, 2018) that transla
tors are well-equipped to carry out intralingual translation, though it still seems that the norm at
translation training institutions is to teach interlingual translation almost exclusively. Interlingual
translation is a natural starting point, but if translators are to improve their intralingual translation
skills (and indeed be able to market these skills) it may be of practical value if we know more
about the characteristics of intralingual translation compared to default interlingual translation.
Theoretically, similarities and differences are also important. Similarities support the approach
that intra- and interlingual translation are part of the same family of translational activity, and dif
ferences show us why it may be valuable, at least from a pedagogical point of view, to distinguish
between the two kinds of translation. In fact, the entire discussion of similarities and differences
lead to another relevant theoretical question, namely whether Jakobson’s seminal tripartite divi
sion of translation is still useful. In this chapter I will therefore discuss the theoretical and practical
value of Jakobson’s model. Furthermore, I will review what we already know about the similarities
and differences of inter- and intralingual translation, and finally I will provide illustrative exam
ples from the intralingual translation of an expert medicinal product summary in English expert
language into English lay language in the form of the patient information leaflet. The focus of my
analysis will be similarities and differences in the translational microstrategies applied, compared
to those traditionally used within interlingual translation, and the main purpose will be to shed
183 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-15

more empirical light on my 2009 claim that the same range of microstrategies are used in the two
types of translation, but that it is rather a question of a difference in degree than in kind.
Defining intralingual translation – a discussion of Jakobson’s model

Jakobson builds on Peirce’s theory of signs and meaning and postulates, “the meaning of any
linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign” (Jakobson, 1959/2000, p. 114).
The implication is that translation is a component in all language transactions, and Jakobson
divides these transactions into three kinds of translation or “ways of interpreting a verbal sign”
(1959/2000, p. 114):

Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means
of some other language.
Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
signs of nonverbal sign systems.
(Jakobson, 1959/2000, p. 114, original emphasis)
Pillière (2021, p. 4) points out that Jakobson’s tripartite division has encouraged scholars to inter
pret the three categories as separate/fragmented entities and not as phenomena sharing common
features. Jakobson’s model has rarely been questioned, but perhaps it is because of the role it has
attained where it is normally cited in introductions to translation studies to serve as some kind of
definition of translation, and then authors normally move on to focus on interlingual translation.
However, there is nothing in Jakobson’s original presentation of his model that claims it to be a
definition of translation as a discipline or to represent three watertight categories. In fact, it seems
that Jakobson’s original purpose with the model is that everything is translatable in some way (in
the extreme case of poetry by means of creative transposition involving interlingual, intralingual or
intersemiotic transposition), and the model therefore serves as an illustration of the tools we have
when we interpret a sign and create meaning. He simply wants to show that “All cognitive experi
ence and its classification is conveyable in any existing language” (Jakobson, 1959/2000, p. 115).
Incidentally, this quotation contains the only instance in Jakobson’s essay when “language” could
be said to be used in a broader sense than “national language”. Otherwise, Jakobson is not at all
concerned with a definition of “language”, though in modern-day research such a definition is
at the crux of the discussion of what constitutes a translational activity (see, e.g., Pillière, 2021,
p. 21; Pym, 2010, p. 24; Zethsen, 2007, p. 293ff). But then again, Jakobson’s purpose was not to
define translation as such. Thus, Jakobson’s seminal text is not so much a systematic and rigorous
scientific article but rather a philosophical, meandering essay and commentary on translatability.
The strength of Jakobson’s model seems to be its explanatory merits, namely that it points
out that various kinds of translation exist and thus illustrates which tools we have when we inter
pret and communicate cognitive content. What it does not necessarily show (or deny) is the fact
that these kinds of translation often co-exist, and even though it is sometimes easy to distinguish
between the types it is often impossible. For practical purposes, and as pointed out by Pillière
(2021, p. 298), Jakobson’s tripartite division of translation into three categories “artificially frag
ments three translation practices that share common features. All three are interpretations of a text,
all three necessitate rewriting, all three are forms of mediated writing. None of the three is a clear-
cut monolithic category”. Within medical translation, for instance, it is also frequently the case that
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“Issues of the same order”?
an interlingual translation of an expert text must at the same time be adapted to a lay audience, that
is, be translated intralingually as well.
Jakobson terms interlingual translation “translation proper” and no doubt sees this type as the
prototype (although there is nothing explicitly hierarchical in the sequence, it seems that Jakobson
has intuitively ranked the different kinds of translation according to their proximity to the proto
type), which makes sense as it is the type most readily recognized by the general public as transla
tion (Hermans, 1997, p. 5). However, we must not forget that “the general public” also readily uses
“translation” metaphorically and does in fact, as a norm, use the concept to describe the process
of intralingual translation, that is, of rendering something incomprehensible to a comprehensible
format within the same language, be it dialect, expert language or archaic expressions that have
to be translated. For instance, when hearing or reading expert language, it is quite common to
say “somebody will have to translate this for me”. Notwithstanding whether the general public
recognizes intralingual translation as translation or not, Hill-Madsen and Zethsen (2016) argue
for a scholarly definition of translation to be used for academic purposes to define the discipline
of Translation Studies. This quite naturally leads to the crux of the matter, namely how we define
language. Even though Jakobson (1959/2000) mentions language in his definitions of both intra-
and interlingual translation, he does not define “language”. It is of course notoriously difficult to
determine what constitutes a language and by default it seems to be nationality that determines the
question. However, to make sense in connection with translation we need a broader working defi
nition of language which accepts that within one national country there may be many sociolects
and dialects which require translation. With such an understanding of language in mind, transla
tion can be defined in an equally broad way to encompass all translational activities. A definition
must of course not be so broad as to be meaningless, so the following definition of translation
(Zethsen, 2007, modified in Hill-Madsen & Zethsen, 2016, p. 705) focuses on the existence of
some kind of source text and a derivational relationship between the source text and the target text
with resulting relevant similarity:1
• A source text (verbal or non-verbal) exists or has existed at some point in time.
• The target text has been derived from the source text (resulting in a new product in another
language, genre, medium or semiotic system).
• The resulting relationship is one of relevant similarity, which may take many forms depending
on the skopos.
The translational activities which fall under this definition arguably share so many similarities that
they may benefit from the same pool of translation studies insights. Jakobson’s tripartite division
serves explanatory purposes well, but it is an abstract, decontextualized model that leaves aside
the social, economic and cultural context in which translation takes place (Pillière, 2021, p. 20).
As mentioned earlier, intra- and interlingual translation often go hand in hand. In a recent internal
newsletter from Aarhus University (September 2021) the following translations could be seen:
Danish: “Se feriematrice for 2021–2022”. [See holiday matrix for 2021–2022.]
English: “See rules for registration of holidays in 2021–2022”.
As can be seen from this simple example, a direct word-for-word translation as provided in the
brackets is easy and results in idiomatically correct target language. So, no need for the translator
to use other microstrategies. However, the translator has then further translated intralingually with
the target group in mind and added the explanation that the holiday matrix concerns the registration
185
of holidays and that the rules for such a registration are also to be found at the site. These additions
seem to be intralingually motivated (and they do in fact provide information which many Danish
employees would have liked as well).
Another typical example of interlingual and intralingual translation taking place at the same
time is when we have a lay target group. Even in situations where the source text is lay-friendly, the
translator may deem something to be too difficult for the target group (perhaps a remnant of expert
language) and choose a more lay-friendly solution at the same time as translating interlingually. In
an English medical text for laypersons, it may say “appendicitis”. In Danish the word “appendici
tis” exists but is used only by medical professionals. Consequently, very few Danes would under
stand this word, as the everyday term is “blindtarmsbetændelse” [a lay term of non-Latinate origin
meaning “inflammation of the blind intestine”]. A professional translator will of course choose the
term which is most likely to be understood by the target group, that is, a term which belongs to the
discourse community of the target group, but is this an interlingual or an intralingual activity? In
many real-life translational situations, it seems that distinguishing between the two kinds of trans
lation does not necessarily serve a purpose. For scholarly purposes, however, it may be relevant to
isolate the intralingual elements (as argued by Hill-Madsen, 2021, p. 5).
It is not only within the medical field, but also in many other expert-to-lay contexts that we
find interlingual and intralingual translation being carried out simultaneously. For instance, in
the context of interlingual financial news translation, that is, journalistic texts, Davier (2015)
argues that intralingual translation is a fundamental part of the translational activity as journal
ists work to popularize specialized knowledge for lay audiences. Gagnon et al. (2018, p. 236)
follow Davier (2015) and argue that in financial news translation interlingual and intralingual
processes coexist to such a degree that they should be studied together. García-Izquierdo and
Montalt (2013, pp. 45–46) argue for the acknowledgement of the fact that within medical trans
lation both types of translation are often needed at the same time, and also Whyatt (2017, p. 188)
argues for, and provides a brief discussion of, the interplay between interlingual and intralingual
translation.
Similarities and differences of intralingual and interlingual translation

Jakobson himself briefly compares inter- and intralingual translation and mentions that normally
there is no such thing as full equivalence in any case, but “adequate interpretations” in the form of
more or less synonymous words or rewordings, and most frequently it is not separate code units
which are transferred but messages (Jakobson, 1959/2000, p. 114). In other words, he does not at
all dwell on the differences between the two kinds of translation, but on the contrary on the fact
that everything is translatable, indeed must be translated (see later), one way or another. Conse
quently, all cognitive experience is conveyable in any existing language: “Whenever there is defi
ciency, terminology may be qualified and amplified by loanwords or loan-translations, neologisms
or semantic shifts, and finally, by circumlocutions” (Jakobson, 1959/2000, p. 115). In other words,
Jakobson indicates that the very same microstrategies are used within inter- and intralingual trans
lation, and he is generally much more concerned with the fundamental need for translation in its
broadest sense than with distinguishing between the three types he proposes. In fact, Jakobson
(1959/2000, pp. 116–117) argues that the cognitive level of language directly requires translation
because the definition of our experience stands in complementary relation (in Bohr’s sense, Bohr,
1948) to the metalinguistic level. Translation, in all its facets, is thus fundamental to communica
tion and “Any assumption of ineffable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a contradiction in
terms” (Jakobson, 1959/2000, p. 117).
186
Also Whyatt (2017, p. 189), on the basis of the empirical Polish ParaTrans project, concludes
that intralingual translation and interlingual translation “rely on the same faculty of the human
mind: its ability to interpret meaning from linguistic expressions and reformulate it depending on
the cognitive profile of the assumed reader”. Whyatt et al. (2016, p. 35) argue that professional
translators transfer their processing patterns and expertise from interlingual translation practice to
intralingual translation, thus “drawing from the same pool of generic skills”. As regards micro-
strategies, the ParaTrans project has reached the tentative conclusion that interlingual translation
competence (which would of course include a set of available microstrategies) seems to be trans
ferable to intralingual translation (Whyatt et al., 2016).
Hill-Madsen (2019) analyses a diachronic, a dialectal and a diaphasic intralingual translation.
The shifts (microstrategies)2 identified in these diverse types of translations are all well known
from interlingual translation, such as direct translation, paraphrase, explicitation, condensation
and so on. In fact, none of the microstrategies identified in the analyses are unknown within inter-
lingual microstrategy taxonomies (see for instance Schjoldager, 2008, introduced later) though
the terminology may sometimes differ. Hill-Madsen (2019, see also 2021) provides analyses at a
deeper level than the microstrategy, investigating the many ways in which a microstrategy can be
realized. That is, he further sophisticates what constitutes for instance an explicitation by show
ing that a grammatical shift such as passive into active constitutes an explicitation of the subject.
Zethsen (2009, p. 809) found that in addition to being motivated by one or more of the four key
parameters time, culture, knowledge3 and space,4 intralingual translation seems to be characterized
by two overall tendencies:
• A tendency to involve a form of simplification – a strategy which is not so often applied as the
overall skopos of a translation proper, but rather as the occasional microstrategy.
• A tendency to apply certain strategies in a much more radical way than what is seen in the
majority of interlingual translations. Because of the frequent purpose of simplification, the
microstrategies applied in intralingual translation (the additions, omissions, restructuring, etc.)
are taken more to the extreme than is often the case within interlingual translation. If, for exam
ple, a text is translated intralingually for children, the explanations added may be much more
comprehensive than what is normally seen within interlingual translation. In other words, the
differences in microstrategies are more a question of degree and frequency than of kind.
The fact that certain strategies seem to be used more frequently, and perhaps also more to the
extreme, in intralingual and interlingual translation, respectively, is as such not an argument
against their fundamental similarity (Pillière, 2021, p. 295). It would indeed be possible to find
similar differences between various kinds of interlingual translation as witnessed by the variety
of translation from Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) texts to poetry. Furthermore, each of
the classic interlingual microstrategies (see Vinay & Darbelnet, 1958/2000, and the following list
from Schjoldager, 2008) are certainly not used to the same degree. Also, the ParaTrans project
mentioned before has reached the tentative conclusion that interlingual translation competence,
which would include a set of available microstrategies, seems to be transferable to intralingual
translation (Whyatt et al., 2016). Finally, Pillière, in her recent work (2021, p. 294), compares the
intralingual translation of British English books to American English on a large scale and confirms
what other scholars (e.g., Hill-Madsen, 2019; Zethsen, 2009) have suggested, namely “that intra
lingual translation is not different to interlingual translation in terms of procedures or universals”.
In the following I shall take a closer look at the microstrategies employed in an intralingual expert-
lay translation5 to see if they are indeed from the same pool as those applied in interlingual translation.
187
Analysis of microstrategies in expert-lay intralingual translation

To gain a deeper empirically based understanding of the microstrategies used in inter- and intra
lingual translation, respectively, the aim of the following analysis is to find out whether the
microstrategies traditionally employed in interlingual translation can also be found in intralingual
translation. The data of the analysis consist of an English expert medicinal product summary for
Panadol (Electronic Medicines Compendium, 2022b) and its intralingual translation into English
lay language in the form of the patient information leaflet (Electronic Medicines Compendium,
2022a). A product summary (PS) is an expert text produced by health professionals and submit
ted when applying for marketing authorization of a medicinal product. In the EU the governing
body is the European Medicines Agency, and a product summary is produced and submitted in
English and subsequently, when authorization has been granted, translated into the other European
languages. On the basis of the product summary, a patient information leaflet (PIL) is produced;
in fact there is an EU legal requirement that the PIL must be derived from the PS and the reword
ing of the English PS into the English PIL thus constitutes an intralingual translation (for more on
medical intralingual expert-lay translation see Montalt & Zethsen, 2022).
According to the work of Hill-Madsen (2019), it is typically within diaphasic intralingual trans
lation that we find most shifts, so it can be hypothesized that this is where the widest possible range
of microstrategies can be identified. Since Vinay and Darbelnet introduced their well-known trans
lation procedures (microstrategies in the terminology of this chapter) in 1958, many scholars have
provided their own taxonomies. In the context of the present analysis, the aim is to test as many
microstrategies as possible so therefore Schjoldager’s comprehensive 2008 taxonomy of the micro-
strategies employed in interlingual translation has been applied. Schjoldager’s taxonomy is inspired
by the works of many scholars, but mainly by the seven translation procedures from Vinay and
Darbelnet (1958/2000) and the five transformation categories of Delabastita (1989, 1993). Schjold
ager (2008, pp. 89–112) lists 12 possible microstrategies for interlingual translation, namely direct
transfer, calque, direct translation, oblique translation, explicitation, paraphrase, condensation,
adaptation, addition, substitution, deletion and permutation. Although the place of each strategy on
the list does not seem to be completely arbitrary, the list is not a reflection of the frequency of each
strategy. However, it goes without saying that a strategy like direct translation is far more frequent
than, say, permutation, where the translator compensates for a stylistic effect in the source text, typi
cally word play or alliteration. So, frequency aside, the list aims to cover microstrategies available
to the interlingual translator. The purpose of the analysis is not to assess the quality, or usefulness,
of this particular taxonomy, but merely whether the strategies can also be found in expert-lay intra
lingual translation. As with most taxonomies, it can sometimes be difficult to decide which category
a phenomenon belongs to. It has not been a major problem in the analysis, but in a few instances,
it may be argued that an example could also belong to another category. In the following I shall
go through the 12 strategies in order to assess their relevance to expert-lay (diaphasic) intralingual
translation, and in particular see if I can find examples in the data. In many cases more than one
strategy is at play, but focus will be on the strategy illustrated. Graphic emphasis from the originals
has been removed so that it is possible to underline the relevant phenomena.
Direct transfer
The target text borrows a word from the source text and transfers it directly:
PS: “Panadol Original Tablets is a mild analgesic and antipyretic”.

PIL: “Panadol Original Tablets are used for the relief of headache”.
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This is a well-known strategy from interlingual translation, where it is in fact often used just as in
this example in connection with (trade) names. Though it may not be the most frequent strategy
in some types of expert-lay intralingual translation (as for instance the PS to PIL) because almost
the entire text is reworded, it must be much more frequent in many kinds of intralingual transla
tion where it is possible to transfer rather large chunks of a source text directly than in interlingual
translation.
Calque
The target text borrows the structure of the source text, often resulting in an understandable, but
unidiomatic translation:
PS: “Each tablet contains Paracetamol Ph Eur 500.0 mg”.

PIL: “Each tablet contains Paracetamol 500 mg”.
In everyday English the 500 mg would come before Paracetamol. In interlingual translation calque
may be used as last resort, but in connection with expert-lay intralingual translation it is best
avoided as it mimics the structure of the expert language and makes the translation sound too
formal at best. In this example calque should not really be the last resort as a more standard word
order would have served the target group better:
Direct translation
This strategy consists of word for word translation:
PS: “Pregnancy and lactation”.

PIL: “Pregnancy and breast feeding”.
This example illustrates how an everyday synonym in expert-lay intralingual translation plays
exactly the same role as an equivalent in interlingual translation. The only difference between
“lactation” and “breast feeding” is the level of formality, and they are otherwise absolute syno
nyms. In expert-lay translation making difficult words or expressions accessible to laypersons is
evidently a much-used strategy, and when a lay doublet exists it is simply done by replacing expert
terminology.
Oblique translation
In contrast to direct translation, this strategy aims to transfer contextual meaning sense for sense:
PS: “Contraindications. Hypersensitivity to paracetamol or any of the other constituents”.

PIL: “Do not take Panadol Original Tablets if you have ever had an allergic reaction to par
acetamol or to any of the other ingredients”.
In this example we see how an expert term “contraindications” cannot be replaced with a lay
synonym as in the previous direct translation example, as no such alternative exists. Instead, the
sense of the paragraph is translated taking the target group into consideration. The expert text is
not merely paraphrased, but a direct warning is introduced using the imperative “Do not take”. The
189
headline and the following sentence are merged to make it more readable, and other strategies such
as direct translation of “hypersensitivity” and “constituents” and explicitation are made use of in
the form of “if you have ever had”.
The example illustrates well why oblique translation must be a frequent strategy in intralingual
translation as it is fundamental to the activity of rewording in cases where no information is superfluous.
Explicitation
Implicit information from the source text is made explicit in the target text:
PS: “The speed of absorption of paracetamol may be increased by metoclopramide or domperi

done and absorption reduced by colestyramine”.
PIL: “Talk to your doctor or pharmacists before taking these tablets if you are taking any
prescribed medicines; particularly metoclopramide or domperidone (for nausea [feeling
sick] or vomiting [being sick]) or colestyramine (to lower blood cholesterol)”.
The translation makes it explicit what the consequences of the information are to the patient and
explains in detail what the medication mentioned is taken for. Again, it is a natural strategy for
intralingual, in particular expert-lay, translation when a lay target group has to be accommodated.
Paraphrase
The translator relays the meaning of the source text rather freely so that the meaning is conveyed:
PS: “Posology and method of administration”.

PIL: “How to take Panadol Original Tablets”.
Like the oblique translation strategy, paraphrase is fundamental to intralingual translation and is
a synonym to the Jakobsonian concept of rewording. This example resembles the earlier oblique,
sense-for-sense example, but in this case the two “senses” of “posology” and “method of admin
istration” are merged into a hypernymous sentence. It may be difficult to distinguish between
oblique translation and paraphrase, and for practical purposes it can be argued that in most cases
it does not serve a purpose to distinguish between the two categories.
Condensation
The translation is shorter than the source text but renders the same contextual meaning:
PS: “Paracetamol is excreted in breast milk but not in a clinically significant amount in
recommended dosages. Available published data do not contraindicate breastfeeding”.
PIL: “You can take this product whilst breast feeding”.
The main strategy is condensation, and the message relevant to the target group is clearly trans
ferred using significantly less space. In this case the strategy of deletion can also be said to be
present as the background details of the first sentence have not been translated. The translation is
directly aimed at the target group, and the condensed message can also be said to have been para
phrased, especially by changing into the active voice.
190
Adaptation
The microstrategy adaptation is one of the hardest to define and according to Schjoldager (2008,
p. 103) it is similar to oblique translation and paraphrase. Adaptation aims to recreate the effect of
a source text item and is often quite creative. It is much used in literature and promotional texts to
replace a cultural reference. This example may not be creative in a traditional sense, but neverthe
less shows how the shift in target group has required an adaptation in the perspective:
PS: “Reporting suspected adverse reactions after authorisation of the medicinal product
is important. It allows continued monitoring of the benefit/risk balance of the medicinal
product. Healthcare professionals are asked to report any suspected adverse reactions via
the Yellow Card Scheme at: www.mhra.gov.uk/yellowcard or search MHRA Yellow Card
in the Google Play or Apple App store”.
PIL: “If you get any side effects, talk to your doctor, pharmacist or nurse. This includes
any possible side effects not listed in this leaflet. You can also report side effects directly
via the Yellow Card Scheme at www.mhra.gov.uk/yellowcard or search for MHRA Yellow
Card in the Google Play or Apple App store. By reporting side effects you can help provide
more information on the safety of this medicine”.
Apart from the use of direct translation, deletion, addition, explicitation and paraphrase, the text
has first and foremost been adapted to the new target group by replacing “healthcare profession
als” with “you”.
Addition
The translator has added information which cannot be directly inferred from the source text:
PS: [nothing].
PIL: “Please read right through this leaflet before you start using this medicine. This medicine
is available without prescription, but you still need to use Panadol Original Tablets carefully to
get the best results from them”.
This example shows the addition of information that meta-communicates with the target group by
reminding them to read the information provided carefully before they start taking the medication.
It can be argued that an element of adaptation is also involved as in the previous example.
Substitution
The translator changes the semantic meaning of the source text:
PS: “oral administration only”.

PIL: “swallow 1–2 tablets every 4 to 6 hours as needed”.
This may be a somewhat subtle example of substitution, but a readily available direct translation
does exist, namely “by mouth only”, and the translation seems too specific to be categorized under
paraphrase. Apart from the explicitation of the dosage, the translator has opted for a combination
with a strategy which is not purely explicitation, but which involves a different semantic content
by substituting the passive noun phrase “oral administration” with “swallow” (in the imperative
191
form), presumably motivated by the shift in target group. Thus, “swallow” is more specific than
“oral administration”, as the latter may also include for instance “chew” or “suck”.
Deletion
Units of meaning from the source text are missing from the target text:
PS: “Treatment with activated charcoal should be considered if the overdose has been taken
within 1 hour. Plasma paracetamol concentration should be measured at 4 hours or later after
ingestion (earlier concentrations are unreliable). Treatment with N-acetylcysteine may be
used up to 24 hours after ingestion of paracetamol, however, the maximum protective effect is
obtained up to 8 hours post-ingestion”.
PIL: [nothing].
In this example, information on how to treat a patient who has overdosed has been deleted. The
information is only relevant to health professionals and not to the new patient target group.
Permutation
Recreating an effect in a different place in the target text for linguistic or stylistic reasons. The
strategy is mostly applied in the translation of literary prose and especially when translating poetry
to recreate the effect of, for instance, word play or alliteration.
I have not been able to find any instances of permutation in the intralingual translation of the
two medical texts I am examining. This seems quite natural as the obvious macrostrategy of an
expert-lay translation is not recreating an effect but relaying concrete information. However, there
is no doubt that the strategy is applicable within intralingual literary translation if, for instance, an
archaic text is to be translated for a modern readership.
Discussion and conclusion

The previous analysis of the microstrategies applied in the intralingual translation of an English
PS to an English PIL clearly shows that the translator has made use of the same pool of micro-
strategies that is acknowledged within interlingual Translation Studies. It is not an exact science
to assign a particular translation to a specific microstrategy as there is an element of overlap
between some of the categories, but this is no different from interlingual translation analysis, and
the important point is that exactly the same set of possibilities is relevant to both interlingual and
intralingual translation.
More specifically, the analysis has demonstrated that 11 of Schjoldager’s 12 microstrategies
can be found in this particular instance of expert-lay intralingual translation.6 The 12th strategy
of permutation has not been found but would no doubt be easy to identify in intralingual dia
chronic literary translation. Due to limitation of space only one example of each category has
been provided, but for the ten strategies of direct transfer, direct translation, oblique translation,
explicitation, paraphrase, condensation, adaptation, addition, deletion and substitution numer
ous examples were easily identified in the translation. Not surprisingly, since the strategy pro
duces unidiomatic translations, calque seems to be rarer. In the case of substitution, it seems to
be used quite frequently when for instance a translation with more specific semantic content than
192
the original is chosen to make something more understandable to the lay reader, but in expert-lay
translation it may be difficult to distinguish between the strategy of substitution and the very domi
nant strategies of, for instance, paraphrase and explicitation in all cases.
The analyses support my earlier empirical studies (Zethsen, 2009, p. 809, see also Hill-Madsen,
2019; Pillière, 2021) and the overall conclusion that the differences in microstrategies are more a
question of degree and frequency than of kind. In fact, as appears from the analyses, the available
microstrategies are often used in a much more radical way than in interlingual translation, and
since direct translation is generally not used as much as in interlingual translation, there seems to
be a more varied and frequent use of most of the strategies. In connection with expert-lay transla
tion it is certainly the case, often with some form of simplification in mind.
According to Hill-Madsen (2019), one cardinal aspect of intralingual translation that has
hitherto received virtually no attention is the diversity of the phenomenon. This chapter has
focused solely on expert-lay translation, but going through the various microstrategies it is easy
to think of intralingual translations where some strategies would be used much more frequently
than others. This is for instance the case with permutation, which was the only strategy that
could not be found in the prior analysis, but which would probably be very easy to identify in
diachronic literary intralingual translation. I fully support the assumption that intralingual trans
lation is just as varied as interlingual translation, and it may well be the case that some kinds
of intralingual translation have more in common with some kinds of interlingual translation
than with other kinds of intralingual translation, and vice versa. Pillière (2021, p. 298) writes
that underlying the debate of what belongs to the field of Translation Studies is the question of
defining translation itself, and “the fear that by including different kinds of translation within
the definition, the discipline itself becomes diluted”. This, it seems to me, is very much to
the point, so it would be very useful if future research would provide more detailed empirical
analyses showing the great diversity of intralingual translation and its affinity with interlingual
translation. Based on the previous analysis and discussion of Jakobson’s tripartite division, I
argue that a division in three separate categories may serve an explanatory purpose but is not an
accurate reflection of reality. In real life, translational activities seem often to contain aspects of
more than one category, and especially intra- and interlingual translation seem to be entwined
to a degree that strongly supports the argument that they both belong to the field of Translation
Studies, in fact sometimes to a degree where it is difficult to distinguish them from each other!
According to Jakobson, translation, in all its facets, is fundamental to communication and, as
cited earlier, “Any assumption of ineffable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a contra
diction in terms” (Jakobson, 1959/2000, p. 117). This is a convincing argument that all kinds of
translation belong to the same family.
The phenomenon of intralingual translation has existed since time immemorial so if there were
categories of microstrategies relevant only for intralingual translation, a specific set of such strate
gies would presumably have been established long ago. So, it seems that Steiner’s words are still
very much to the point: “What Jakobson calls ‘rewording’ – an interpretation of verbal signs by
means of other signs in the same language – in fact raises issues of the same order as translation
proper” (1975, p. 414). However, as indicated earlier, it may be a good idea for future research
to investigate in more detail which strategies are mostly relevant, in which forms and to which
degree, within various kinds of intralingual translation. This would especially be of interest to
practice and could support a more direct marketing by trained translators of their intralingual
skills and the need for intralingual translations, perhaps most pointedly within the expert-lay field
(Zethsen, 2018).
193
Notes
1 The definition is inspired by Toury’s very influential, broad and highly pragmatic definition of transla
tion (1985, 1995), by Chesterman’s subsequent discussions of this definition, especially of the central
concept of “similarity” (1996, 1997, 1998) and by the work of first Wittgenstein on family resemblances
(1953/1958) and then Tymoczko (1998, 2005) on translation as a cluster concept.
2 “Shift” and “microstrategy” are used interchangeably in the literature, but there seems to be a preference
for “shift” when the focus is on linguistic change and “microstrategy” when focus is on the available tools
of the translator.
3 Incidentally, Pillière (2021, p. 25) mentions that Zethsen (2009) does not include omission (or deletion
in the terminology of Schjoldager, 2008, used in this chapter) as a typical strategy under the parameter of
“knowledge”. However, the strategies mentioned under each parameter were for illustrative purposes only
and were not meant as exhaustive lists, and she is quite right in pointing out that omission is a much-used
strategy under the parameter of knowledge, as can also be seen from the following analyses.
4 Pillière (2021, p. 26) mentions that the list of four parameters is not exhaustive; “other socio-economic
factors, for example, might be involved”. Pillière does not provide examples of these other factors, but
I doubt that they are not covered by the very broad categories of time, culture, knowledge and space.
Though she agrees with the four parameters, Pillière (2021, p. 26) sees the fact that they “easily overlap
and prevent the list from being a clear taxonomy” as minor drawbacks. I fully agree with Pillière that they
easily overlap, and I certainly do not provide a clear taxonomy, for the very reason that I do not believe a
clear taxonomy is possible (see also note 3). The purpose of the four parameters is (merely) to show what
may motivate an intralingual translation and to create awareness about these motives as they should guide
the translation strategies.
5 Diaphasic translation in the terminology of Hill-Madsen (2019), and for the sake of convenience I have
used this term in the theoretical discussion. However, for my purposes I prefer the more specific term
expert-lay translation which I will use in the rest of the chapter. Instead of following a detailed typology
of various kinds of intralingual translation, as can be found in Hill-Madsen (2019), I rely on Zethsen’s
(2009) four governing parameters of knowledge, culture, space and time as motivation for instigating an
intralingual translation. These parameters readily overlap with each other and with the skopos(poi) of the
translation. For purely research purposes it may be beneficial with a more fine-tuned typology such as that
of Hill-Madsen (while acknowledging that such a typology can never be finite, as overlaps and thus new
combinations are bound to occur), but for a practice-oriented, skopos-based conceptualization of intralin
gual translation it seems to me that the four parameters suffice.
6 I would like to thank Anne Schjoldager for kindly taking the time to discuss the analysis with me.
Further reading
Brøgger, M. N., & Zethsen, K. K. (2021). Inter- and intralingual translation of medical information: The
importance of comprehensibility. In Ş. Susam-Saraeva & E. Spišiaková (Eds.), Routledge handbook of
translation and health (pp. 96–107). Routledge.
References
Berk Albachten, Ö. (2018). Challenging the boundaries of translation and filling the gaps in translation his
tory. Two cases of intralingual translation from the 19th-century Ottoman literary scene. In H. V. Dam, M.
N. Brøgger, & K. K. Zethsen (Eds.), Moving boundaries in translation studies (pp. 168–180). Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315121871
Bohr, N. (1948). On the notions of causality and complementarity. Dialectica, 2(3–4), 312–319. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1746-8361.1948.tb00703.x
Chesterman, A. (1996). On similarity. Target, 8(1), 159–164.
Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of translation. John Benjamins.
Chesterman, A. (1998). Contrastive functional analysis. John Benjamins.
Davier, L. (2015). “Cultural translation” in news agencies? A plea to broaden the definition of translation.
Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 23(4), 536−551. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907
676X.2015.1040036
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Electronic Medicines Compendium. (2022a, August 17). Patient Information Leaflet (PIL) for Panadol. Pan
adol Original Tablets – Patient Information Leaflet (PIL) – (emc). medicines.org.uk
Electronic Medicines Compendium. (2022b, August 17). Summary of Product Characteristics (PS) for Pan
adol. Panadol Original Tablets – Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC) – (emc). medicines.org.uk
Gagnon, C., Boulanger, P. P., & Kalantari, E. (2018). How to approach translation in a financial news corpus?
Across Languages and Cultures, 19(2), 221–240. https://doi.org/10.1556/084.2018.19.2.5
García-Izquierdo, I., & Montalt, V. (2013). Equigeneric and intergeneric translation in patientcentred care.
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Hermans, T. (1997). Translation as institution. In M. Snell-Hornby, Z. Jettmarová, & K. Kaindl (Eds.), Trans
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spectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 30(4), 643–661. http://doi.org/10.1080/09076
76X.2021.1953085
Hill-Madsen, A., & Zethsen, K. K. (2016). Intralingual translation and its place within translation studies – A
Jakobson, R. (2000). On linguistic aspects of translation. In L. Venuti (Ed.), The translation studies reader
Montalt, V., & Zethsen, K. K. (2022). Translating medical texts. In K. Malmkjær (Ed.), The Cambridge trans
lation handbook (pp. 363–378). Cambridge University Press.
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vised ed.). Intercultural Studies Group. https://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/publications/TTT_2010.pdf
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Toury, G. (1985). A rationale for descriptive translation studies. In T. Hermans (Ed.), The manipulation of
literature. Studies in literary translation (pp. 16–41). Croom Helm.
Tymoczko, M. (1998). Computerized corpora and the future of translation studies. Meta, 43(4), 1–9.
Tymoczko, M. (2005). Trajectories of research in translation studies. Meta, 50(4), 1082–1097.
Vinay, J.-P., & Darbelnet, J. (2000). A methodology for translation (J. C. Sager & M. J. Hamel, Trans.). In
L. Venuti (Ed.), The translation studies reader (pp. 84–93). Routledge (Original work published 1958).
Whyatt, B. (2017). Intralingual translation. In J. Schwieter & A. Ferreira (Eds.), The handbook of translation
and cognition (pp. 176–192). Wiley-Blackwell.
Whyatt, B., Stachowiak, K., & Kajzer-Wietrzny, M. (2016). Similar and different: Cognitive rhythm and
effort in translation and paraphrasing. PSiCL, 52(2), 175–208. https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2016-0007
Wittgenstein, L. (1953/1958). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Blackwell.
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tion, Terminologie, Redaction, 20(1), 281–308. https://doi.org/10.7202/018506ar
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12
A TYPOLOGY OF THE VARIOUS
ASPECTS OF DIAPHASIC
INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION –
A SYSTEMIC-FUNCTIONAL
APPROACH
Aage Hill-Madsen
Introduction
Diaphasic intralingual translation (henceforth Diaph-intra) is translation between functional or
registerial varieties, often (but far from only) manifested in the rewriting of scientific or expert
sources into target texts aimed at an audience of non-specialists. Diaph-intra may thus play a cen
tral role in mediating scientific knowledge to a general public that is becoming increasingly used
to accessing information and educating themselves on subjects that used to be the sole province
of scientists and experts. In the field of health care, for example, “[i]nterest in health issues has
greatly increased over the years with patients becoming ever more health conscious and wanting to
be informed about existing medicines that are available” (European Commission, n.d.). However,
as noted by Zethsen (2018), a significant problem for information-hungry members of the public
is that the information which they are increasingly able to obtain tends to be contained in texts that
are in no way intended for them as readers. As a case in point, also from the field of health care,
Zethsen (2018) cites the fact that patients nowadays are typically able to access their own medical
records, only to be confronted with the largely incomprehensible “medicalese” of the physician’s
entries. To mediate understanding, therefore, intralingual translation is needed.
The aim of this chapter is to provide a description of Diaph-intra, partly theoretical and partly
empirical. The descriptive approach will be two-pronged, focusing on two different “levels” of
source-to-target changes, viz. shifts at the level of function and contextual setting on the one hand,
and shifts at the level of wordings and meanings on the other. The chapter will be divided into three
further sections: The first is concerned with theorizing Diaph-intra as such from the perspective
of both translation theory and linguistic theory. The second proposes a subclassification of Diaph-
intra from the perspective of contextual changes, and the third introduces a few of the central types
of micro-level linguistic strategies on which (the most prominent type of) Diaph-intra is based.
Theoretical framework
In the first of the two following subsections, the very concept of diaphasia will be traced back
to its origins in the Romanian linguist Coseriu’s thinking and identified with key concepts in
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-16 196

A typology of the various aspects of diaphasic translation
systemic-functional linguistics (SFL). Diaphasic intralingual translation will be conceptualized as a

case of recontextualization combined with the crossing of a registerial divide. In the second subsec
tion, a closer definition of the notion of situational context, as defined within SFL, will be provided.
Conceptual archaeology and definition of diaphasic intralingual translation

In terms of origins, the very notion of diaphasia can be traced back to the Romanian linguist
Coseriu’s concept of diaphasic variation within a language system. In Coseriu’s own words (in
Spanish) (1981, p. 12), this type of variation concerns “diferencias entre los tipos de modalidad
expresiva, según las circunstancias constantes, del hablar (hablante, oyente, situación u ocasión
del hablar y asunto del que se habla)” [“differences between the types of expressive modality of the
language, (differentiated) according to the constituent circumstances (speaker, listener, situation
or occasion of the speech event and subject matter)” (translated by AH-M)]. The definition reso
nates with certain central tenets within M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan’s systemic-functional lin
guistics regarding the concept of register, and so diaphasia will here be identified with registerial
or functional variation (cf. Hill-Madsen, 2019; Petrilli, 2003). In Halliday’s definition (e.g., 1978),
a register is defined as a class of texts (or discourse) with shared semantic characteristics, deter
mined by the type of situational context in which the discourse is embedded. Diaphasic intralin
gual translation is thus a special case of recontextualization, which is defined by Linell (1998) as:
the dynamic transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse/text-in-context

. . . to another. Recontextualization involves the extrication of some part or aspect from a
text or discourse, or from a genre of texts or discourses, and the fitting of this part or aspect
into another context, i.e., another text or discourse (or discourse genre) and its use and
environment.
(Linell, 1998, pp. 144–145)
However, in accordance with the broad translational definition offered by Zethsen and Hill-Mad
sen (2016), further criteria apply for an instance of recontextualization to qualify as (intralingual)
translation. These are: (a) The presence of a source text, (b) the existence of some kind of semi
otic boundary or difference between ST and TT which may constitute a communication barrier
and which the target text serves to neutralize, and (c) some kind of relevant similarity between
source and target, defined by the particular “skopos” of the individual translation task (Zethsen &
Hill-Madsen, 2016, p. 705). In other words, for a text to be considered a product of intralingual
translation, the target text must be derived from a source text1 with which it exhibits some kind
of semantic similarity,2 while at the same time it must involve some kind of semiotic transforma
tion. This means that while there may (or may not) be invariance of signified content, some kind
of variance at the level of form or expression is a necessary condition. This is why Diaph-intra is
here identified with, and restricted to, recontextualization across a registerial ST-TT divide (entail
ing differences in wordings), which is a restriction that does not appear to be necessarily inherent
in Linell’s aforementioned definition, since simple quoting or “direct transfer” of source material
may also come under the heading of recontextualization. In practice, the registerial ST-TT differ
ence will consist in the contrast between specialized and general-language registers.
The SFL concept of context

Inspired by the anthropology of B. Malinowski (e.g., 1935), SFL is a linguistic theory emphasiz
ing function in social context as the key to understanding the nature of language. As a functional
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Figure 12.1 The “architecture” of language according to SFL
linguistics, SFL represents a post-Saussurian view of language as a stratified system of verbal

signs comprising the three strata (or levels) of semantics (meanings), lexicogrammar (wordings),
and phonology/graphology (language sounds/letters) (Halliday, 2003). The connection between
the strata consists in realization, i.e., expression: Phonemes or graphs serve to realize, or express,
wordings, and wordings serve to realize meanings.
As Figure 12.1 (adapted from O'Donnell, 2011) illustrates, “on top of” the three strata, context is
posited as a fourth, language-external stratum in which language use is embedded (Halliday & Mat
thiessen, 2014, p. 25). As conceptualized in SFL, this fourth stratum should be understood as “rel
evant context” in a language-exchange event, i.e., “that part of the extralinguistic situation which is
illuminated [emphasis added] by language-in-use, by the language component of the speech event,
the other name for which is text” (Hasan, 1995, p. 219). In other words, the language-external
circumstances constituting context are those reflected in (cf. Hasan, 2009, p. 177), or indexed by,
the choice of worded meanings exchanged. Thus, the context will determine the types of worded
meanings exchanged, and, conversely, those worded meanings will in themselves signal what kinds
of external circumstances surround the exchange. As for the individual “elements” of “relevant
context”, these are Field, Tenor, and Mode, each defined by Halliday (1989) as follows:
1) The Field of Discourse refers to the nature of the social action that is taking place. . . .
2) The Tenor of Discourse refers to . . . what kinds of role relationship obtain among the
participants, including permanent and temporary relationships of one kind or another. . . .
3) The Mode of Discourse refers to what part language is playing, what it is that the partici
pants are expecting the language to do for them in that situation.
(Halliday, 1989, p. 12)
Elsewhere, Halliday himself offers more elaborate definitions. Thus, in a previous work, Hal
liday (1978, pp. 142–144) introduced the important Field-related distinction that the “activity”
illuminated by the text can be either language-external, in the form of some co-occurring, physi
cal activity that somehow impinges on the language use (playing a game of cards, building a
house etc.), or it may be purely verbal, featuring as the “subject matter” of the text. One further
variable related to Field, highlighted by two other SFL scholars (Leckie-Tarry, 1995; Martin,
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1992) and highly important to present purposes, is degree of specialization, reflecting the fact
that an “activity” or a subject matter may be verbalized more or less technically, either in “com
mon-sense” or “uncommon-sense” terms (Martin, 1992, p. 543), i.e., with the use of scientific
or non-scientific terms. A problem with Martin’s terms, however, is that they must be taken to
primarily apply to the nature of the worded meanings exchanged, rather than to extralinguistic
context. Hence, a variable concerned with the extent to which specialized knowledge is presup
posed in the verbalization of the “activity” (and thus concerned with characteristics belonging
to the communicants, the “knowers”) is preferred here.3 Such a variable may be termed presup
posed expertise.
As for Tenor, the question of “role relationship” centrally pertains to the nature of the agent
roles adopted by the participants (e.g., Hasan, 1989, p. 56), i.e., the sets of complementary roles
recognized in the social system such as teacher-student, doctor-patient, attorney-client, vendor-
customer, parent-child, friend-friend etc. Two other variables, partly a function of the agent roles
adopted, are the power relationship (hierarchic or non-hierarchic), and the social distance (degrees
of familiarity and involvement) between the participants (Hasan, 1989, p. 57). For present pur
poses, it is assumed that a hierarchical power relationship may be related to differences in exper
tise (termed epistemic asymmetries by Maranta et al., 2003).
Mode, which is arguably the opaquest of the three parameters, concerns the role of language in
the situation. One aspect is defined by Halliday (1978, p. 144) as rhetorical function, correspond
ing to pragmatic function or purpose, for example, telling a story (narrative function), reporting
on facts (reportive function), providing instructions in how to perform an action (instructional
function), laying down rules and regulations, as in legal texts (regulatory function), and so on. Two
other important Mode dimensions relate to (a) the degree of “process sharing”, with monologue
and dialogue as the opposed options, and (b) channel, i.e., the distinction between speech and writ
ing (Hasan, 1989, p. 58).
A subclassification of diaphasic intralingual translation

In Figure 12.2, systemic-functional notation has been used to render a (preliminary) typology of
different aspects of Diaph-intra. As the figure shows, six different aspects have been identified as
relevant. It should be emphasized that the model is not to be read as a subclassification consisting
of six different types of Diaph-intra. As noted earlier, what the model identifies (via the capitalized
“headings” to the right of the curly bracket) is six different aspects of Diaph-intra altogether, the
point being that all six aspects are relevant to any individual diaphasic target text. Each of the six
headings/aspects (CHANNEL etc.) covers a set of different options that are not represented in Fig
ure 12.2 but only preliminarily indicated by the branching to the right of the headings. The logic of
the model is that a given instance of Diaph-intra combines options or features selected from each
of the six aspects.4 In the following subsections, the six aspects and their associated features will
be elaborated on one by one.
CHANNEL
As Figure 12.3 shows, Diaph-intra may either be invariant in channel, with both source and target
belonging to speech or writing, or involve a change from writing to speech, or vice versa. Written
genres are likely to constitute the bulk of Diaph-intra, whereas oral instances can be expected to
occur mostly in brief face-to-face encounters between professionals/experts and citizens/clients/
non-experts, for example, the type of situation where a mechanic, in reporting to the customer how
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Figure 12.2 A typology of aspects of Diaph-intra
his/her car has been serviced, is forced to explain certain technical automobile terms. Longer, oral
diaphasic target texts occur in educational settings, e.g., as part of university lectures. As for shifts
in channel, instances of oral target texts derived from written sources occur, e.g., in courtrooms,
when the judge decides to explain points of law (written source) to the jury.
Figure 12.3 Options in CHANNEL in Diaph-intra
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LOCATION OF SOURCE TEXT

Though often the case, Diaph-intra does not always involve two different texts, but sometimes
occurs as a text-internal phenomenon, i.e., with source and target merged in one and the same
text. This is why the two options under LOCATION OF SOURCE TEXT (see Figure 12.4) are
“separate” and “integrated with TT”, respectively. Thus, a distinction can be drawn between
inter-textual and intra-textual Diaph-intra. A good example of the latter is educational dis
course, where teachers tend to intralingually translate themselves “on the fly” in the classroom
through strategies such as exemplification, definition, and paraphrase of technical/academic
concepts.
Figure 12.4 Diaph-intra distinguished according to source text location
FIELD: DOMAIN
In terms of field, subtypes may be distinguished according to discipline (see Figure 12.5), with
domains such as health care and law being likely the most prominent ones to feature Diaph
intra, since in both domains the professional-lay interaction is constitutive. Diaph-intra also
occurs within a number of other academic disciplines in the form of “science popularization”,
with diaphasic target texts appearing in popular science magazines and the science sections of
newspapers. In the field of engineering, a specific instance of Diaph-intra is non-technical sum
maries of the so-called Environmental Impact Assessment Report, a genre mandated by EU law
(see, e.g., European Commission, 2017) and published by construction contractors in connection
with large building projects. Conceivably, within every single discipline (law, engineering etc.) a
subclassification of Diaph-intra target text types would be possible, but will only be pursued here
in the field of health care.
Figure 12.5 Diaph-intra distinguished according to domain
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In the health care sector, lay-oriented texts (which are not necessarily all products of Diaph
intra, it should be noted) can be grouped according to the following four main types of rhetorical
function or communicative purpose (cf. Hill-Madsen, 2022): (a) Instruction, e.g., in how to take
and handle a drug, (b) preparatory information, i.e., information to patients about a future operation
or a medical experiment they have volunteered for, (c) education, in the form of mediation of con
ceptual knowledge about, e.g., a medical disorder or a class of drugs, and (d) reporting of research
from clinical trials and other types of medical research, e.g., for members of patient organizations.
Examples of diaphasic target text types (all derived from separate, specialized source texts) from
each of the four categories are:
a Patient Information Leaflets (PIL): These are the small brochures that accompany the packag
ing of medicinal products and whose primary purpose is to guide the patient in how to handle
the drug, though the texts also feature educational elements (see Example 2 later). The source
texts behind the PILs are the Summaries of Product Characteristics (SmPC), which provide
health care practitioners with a clinical and pharmacological profile of the drug.
b Informed Consent Documents (ICDs): ICDs are produced in connection with clinical trials
or experiments in which patients are asked to participate. As diaphasic target texts, ICDs are
drawn up on the basis of the specialized research protocol, which sets out the research aims and
methodology of the trial or experiment. While the ICDs contain the (gist of) the same informa
tion, they also contain educational elements and specifically prepare the patient for what to
expect from participation in the trial/experiment.
c Merck Sharpe and Dohme (MSD) Manuals: Published by the pharmaceutical company Merck
& Co, Inc., these are a large repository of encyclopaedia-style articles providing information
about hundreds of medical disorders. The entries come in both a “professional” and a “con
sumer” version, with the latter derived from the former.5 Due to the generalized, conceptual
nature of the knowledge mediated in the articles, the texts (both the “professional” and “con
sumer” versions) must be regarded as educational in character.
d European Public Assessment Reports (EPAR) – Summaries for the Public: In connection with the
authorization process to which medicinal products are subject, the EU’s drug regulator, the Euro
pean Medicines Agency (EMA), publishes a specialized document, the EPAR, detailing the out
come of the clinical trials preceding authorization.6 As a diaphasic intralingual translation of the
EPAR, a lay-oriented Summary for the Public of the main findings of the trials is also published.
CHANGE IN TENOR and PRESUPPOSED EXPERTISE

Changes in tenor and presupposed expertise are closely connected in Diaph-intra, and will be
jointly illustrated. The options in each parameter (see Figures 12.6 and 12.7) are:
Figure 12.6 Options in PRESUPPOSED EXPERTISE in Diaph-intra
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Figure 12.7 Possibilities of tenor changes in Diaph-intra
Expert-to-expert ST → expert-to-lay TT
In tenor, the predominant “direction” of translation in Diaph-intra is from a source in which an
expert addresses other experts to a target text in which an expert addresses a lay readership, as in
Example 1.
Example 1
ST: Summary of Product Characteristics

Levodopa may cause a false-positive reaction for urinary ketone bodies when a test tape is used
for determination of ketonuria. . . . False-negative tests may result with the use of glucose-
oxidase methods of testing for glucosuria. . . . Caution should be exercised when interpreting
the plasma and urine levels of catecholamines and their metabolites in patients on levodopa or
levodopa/dopadecarboxylase inhibitor therapy.
(EMA, 2020, p. 5)
TT: Patient Information Leaflet

If you need to have tests on your blood or urine, tell your doctor or nurse that you are taking
Inbrija. This is because the medicine may affect the results of some tests.
(EMA, 2020, p. 26)
The shift in tenor from expert to lay orientation is reflected in the concomitant shift (here:
“decrease”) in the extent to which field-specific expertise is presupposed in the reader: The
source text represents (something close to) a maximum in this regard, as manifested in the high
frequency of specialized medical terminology, whereas only phenomena that form part of the
patient’s “lifeworld experience” (cf. Mishler, 1984), e.g., blood, urine, doctor, and medicine, are
referred to in the target. The move from shared, expert knowledge presuppositions (ST) to an
epistemic asymmetry (TT) constitutive of the expert-lay relationship is accentuated in an extract
like the following:
Example 2
ST: SmPC
Contraindications:
• A previous history of neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) and/or non-traumatic

rhabdomyolysis.
(EMA, 2020, p. 3)
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TT: PIL
Do not take Inbrija
• if you have previously suffered from neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a life-threatening

reaction to certain medicines used to treat severe mental disorders or if you have suffered
from non-traumatic rhabdomyolysis, a rare muscle disorder in which damaged muscle
breaks down rapidly. [emphases original].
(EMA, 2020, p. 25)
Example 2 is a core illustration of the process of recontextualization in Diaph-intra, reflecting the

overt mediation of specialized medical knowledge to the non-expert addressee: Interestingly, the
TT excerpt is not simply “lay discourse”, but in fact a mixture of specialized and register-neutral
elements. Thus, two specialized terms, neuroleptic malignant syndrome and non-traumatic rhab
domyolysis, are featured in the TT as “direct transfers” (see Schjoldager et al., 2008/2010, p. 93)
from the ST, but each is followed by what may be termed semantic explicitation in the TT, i.e.,
explanations based on wordings much closer to a non-expert English vocabulary, viz. a life-threat
ening reaction to certain medicines used to treat severe mental disorders and a rare muscle disor
der in which damaged muscle breaks down rapidly. These explanations index the very knowledge
that the expert sender does not presuppose in the non-expert reader.
In connection with the “move” from ST expert orientation to TT lay orientation, a concomitant
shift in the tenor dimension of social distance is sometimes seen, viz. from the impersonal tenor of
the sources to the direct address of the reader in the targets:
Example 3
ST: SmPC
Patients may experience new or worsening mental status and behavioural changes, which may
be severe, including psychotic-like and suicidal behaviour during levodopa treatment or after
starting or increasing the dose of levodopa.
(EMA, 2020, p. 4)
TT: PIL
Talk to your doctor or pharmacist if you develop any of the symptoms below whilst using
Inbrija:
• changes in or worsening of your mental state, which may be severe such as psychotic and
suicidal behaviour.
(EMA, 2020, p. 26)
It should be noted that while, obviously, PILs are generic texts, addressed by anonymous senders to
an anonymous, mass audience of patients, the target text semiotically diminishes the social distance
by signifying higher involvement with the reader than the STs on this point, by virtue of the direct
address. This effect was confirmed in an interventionist study reported in Muñoz-Miquel (2019),
where fact sheets for cancer patients (leaflets providing information to the patients about their dis
ease) were registerially modified, among other things, through consistent replacement of the third
person with direct second-person address. The effect was reported by patients as being “more reas
suring and comforting, and also more empathic” (García-Izquierdo & Montalt, 2017, p. 606).
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Lay-to-expert ST → expert-to-expert TT
When the direction of translation is from lay to expert discourse, the diaphasic “move” obviously
correlates with an increase in presupposed expertise and manifests itself in the recontextualization
of lay speakers’ utterances into the specialized registers of academic disciplines, for example, in
the encounter between patients/clients and experts such as lawyers or health care professionals.
In such cases, the translation is a matter of an expert “making sense of” a client or patient’s utter
ances in terms of the scientific or technical concepts of the field in question. In the domain of law,
concrete examples are lawyers drawing up legal documents, such as wills, from clients’ directions,
or civil servants drafting legislation on the basis of politicians’ wishes. Presumably, such examples
may sometimes be accompanied by a change in CHANNEL, from speech to writing. In the field
of health care, an example can be found in connection with doctor-patient consultations, more
specifically in the physician’s post-consultation entry in the patient’s medical record, where the
patient’s description of his/her ailments and symptoms will be translated into a diagnosis (see also
Hill-Madsen, 2015a). An example (from a psychiatric/psychotherapeutic consultation) is given by
Berkenkotter and Ravotas (1997):
Example 4
On a day-day [sic] basis, client finds she is preoccupied with her relationship problems. She
worries she has “screwed up yet another relationship with (her) neediness” and berates her
self for not being able to control this. As a result she is having trouble concentrating on aca
demic tasks, has a predominantly dysphoric mood, has w/drawn from socializing w/friends,
experiences initial insomnia, and complains of “crying jags.” She reports occasional, passing
thoughts of suicide, but adds: “I would never do that” [emphases original].
(Quoted in Berkenkotter & Ravotas, 1997, p. 267)
Example 4 reflects the intertwining of Diaph-intra with the hermeneutic endeavours of professional
practice: The practitioner in the prior extract is interpreting a client’s descriptions of symptoms
as a step on the road towards a diagnosis of an underlying mental disorder or disturbance (Berk
enkotter & Ravotas, 1997). While in the extract some of the client’s descriptions of her situation
and behaviour are still present in the form of italicized quotes, others have been displaced and are
only indirectly present as the inferable ST cues behind the bolded TT terms. These terms refer to
categories from the DSM-IV7 classification of psychiatric symptoms, indicative of carefully defined
psychopathologies (Berkenkotter & Ravotas, 1997). The use of these terms in the extract thus illus
trates how Diaph-intra intervenes in the very process of diagnostic categorization. Discursively,
such classification amounts to a “medicalization of life narratives” (Sarangi, 1998, p. 311), i.e., a
reduction of individuals and their complex life experience to impersonal medical categories. These
discursive implications, however, are an avenue that will not be further explored here.
Expert-to-expert ST → teacher-to-learner TT
A third category with respect to changes in tenor is closely related to, but not identical with, the
shift from expert-to-expert ST to expert-to-lay TT. This third type is the shift from expert source
text to the didactic TT discourse of educational settings, where recipients are discursively posi
tioned as learners rather than simply as “lay receivers of expert information”. At least two differ
ent functions (possibly even more) of Diaph-intra within educational contexts may be identified:
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(a) Textual explication (presumably most prevalent in the humanities) and (b) taxonomizing, i.e.,
the building of domain-specific, conceptual taxonomies (a hallmark of educational discourse in
the natural sciences). Example 5 below illustrates textual explication, deriving from notes pro
vided to students in the subject of Religious Studies in upper-secondary schooling. The source text
(brought here in English translation) is an extract from the philosopher F. Nietzsche’s famous work
The Genealogy of Morality (1887), in which the Judaeo-Christian concepts of “good” and “evil”
are traced back to, and denounced as, a “slave morality”:
Example 5
ST:
The slave revolt in morality begins when the ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives
birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who are prevented from a genuine reac
tion, that is, something active, and who compensate for that with a merely imaginary
vengeance.
(Nietzsche, 1887/2009, section 10)
TT:
[Only the bolded wording from the ST is commented on next.]
By “those beings” Nietzsche is referring to the slaves of antiquity (the Roman Empire). The cen
tral concept in the text is the ressentiment of these slaves, i.e., the enormous pent-up anger and
hostility that slaves must necessarily be harbouring. If you live a life of total humiliation, as slaves
do, it should be obvious that you will be filled with enormous anger. At the same time, the slaves
are “prevented from a genuine reaction, that is, something active”, which means that they have
no possibility of getting revenge and thus release their pent-up anger. They have no other option
than to fantasize about revenge. That is how, for the slaves, revenge can only be “imaginary”8
(Hill-Madsen, 2004).
In the target-text notes in Example 5, the textual explication takes the form of overt, sequential
paraphrasing, signalled by items such as referring to, i.e., which means, and that is, all of which
serve to connect quoted source wordings with their semantic content (as interpreted by the author
of the notes). In terms of LOCATION OF SOURCE TEXT, the explicatory notes are thus a case
where a separate source text exists, but where the ST objects of explication are integrated with the
target text as well.
An example of Diaph-intra in the service of taxonomizing in the natural sciences is given next
(an extract from an online lecture on cell biology for fifth graders):
Example 6
There are two main types of cells. Those with a control center, and those without. . . . [Cells
with a control center] are called eukaryotes, and they’re broken down into two more catego
ries: plant cells and animal cells. Plant cells and animal cells have a lot in common. Both have
a nucleus or a control center. This is where the organism’s DNA is stored, and where the
blueprints for that organism are kept. A nucleus is usually sphere-shaped and looks a lot
like a dark spot when viewed through a microscope. Both plant and animal cells also have
cytoplasm. Cytoplasm is a thick, jelly-like fluid that fills the cell. It’s made up of water, salt
and protein. The cytoplasm is held together by a membrane. The cell membrane is a barrier
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that holds the cell together and acts like a door to allow things to enter or leave the cell. If
you look at the plant cell, you’ll notice that it has another layer outside of the cell membrane.
Plant cells have a cell wall. A cell wall is a rigid layer on the very outside of a plant cell,
made of a really strong sugar called cellulose.
(Education Galaxy, 2020)
Example 6 illustrates the role of Diaph-intra in the construction of classificatory and compositional
taxonomies: A subclassification of cells (into plant and animal cells) is provided, and the compo
sition of cells, primarily the nucleus, is detailed. The extract is a case of source and target items
integrated in the same text, with no separate source text being identifiable. The target text in itself,
however, bears witness to an ongoing process of translation: Most of the text oscillates between
introducing scientific terms and translating them through definition in non-technical terms, for
example, the term cytoplasm translated as a thick, jelly-like fluid that fills the cell. It’s made up of
water, salt and protein. The usual direction of translation is the “movement” from a scientific term
to a non-scientific definition, i.e., via a decrease in presupposed expertise. However, the opposite
direction is also present in Example 6 through the strategy termed “naming/equating” in Maton
and Doran (2017), which is when a definition or a paraphrase is provided first and only then suc
ceeded by the technical label, as in a really strong sugar called cellulose. Despite the difference
in didactic purpose in Examples 5 and 6 (explication vs. the building of taxonomies), Diaph-intra
is seen to operate in much the same way in both, viz. by explicitly linking forms/wordings with
semantic content.
Rhetorical function
Figure 12.8 Options in RHETORICAL FUNCTION
The rhetorical or pragmatic function of target texts (reportive, didactic, narrative etc.) may,
in part or in toto, remain invariant in comparison with that of the source, or variation may
occur, as illustrated in Figure 12.8. A good illustration of invariance is found in MSD manu
als, where the “professional” and “consumer” versions are generally identical in rhetorical
function, as in Example 7, which sets out some of the main characteristics of the skin disease
psoriasis:
Example 7
ST: MSD manual, professional version
Psoriasis is an inflammatory disease that manifests most commonly as well-circumscribed, ery
thematous papules and plaques covered with silvery scales. . . . Psoriasis is hyperproliferation
of epidermal keratinocytes combined with inflammation of the epidermis and dermis.
(Das, 2020a)
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TT: MSD manual, consumer version

Psoriasis is a chronic, recurring disease that causes one or more raised, red patches that have
silvery scales and a distinct border between the patch and normal skin. . . . The patches of pso
riasis occur because of an abnormally high rate of growth of skin cells.
(Das, 2020b)
The target text is a relatively close translation of corresponding wordings in the expert-oriented source
(though not all ST elements are rendered), based to a large extent on the replacement of specialized
medical terms such as erythematous, papules, hyperproliferation etc. by non-technical equivalents
from a register-neutral vocabulary (red, patches, abnormally high rate of growth etc.). The rhetorical
function, however, remains invariant, being informative/educational in both source and target.
When the other feature in RHETORICAL FUNCTION is selected, i.e., “variant”, more specific
options open up, as reflected in Figure 12.9.
Figure 12.9 Types of variation in rhetorical function in Diaph-intra
Figure 12.9 is a continuation of the option “variant” in RHETORICAL FUNCTION, indicating

specific types of rhetorical variation. The first of these has already been encountered in Example 5
(the Nietzsche example), which, owing to the shift in genre from “philosophical treatise” to “didac
tic notes”, involved a change from the expository function of the source to explication in the target.
Another type of variance is found earlier in Example 4 (the psychiatric example), where elements
from the patient’s description of her life experience were translated and embedded in the therapist’s
diagnostic report. In that case, the rhetorical shift was from description/narration to categorization.
Yet another type, also from the field of health care, occurs in PILs, which, like the SmPC source
genre, are replete with “directive” messages, but nonetheless with a slight rhetorical difference:
Example 8
ST: SmPC
A complete dose is 2 capsules taken one right after the other.
• The patient should load 1 capsule into the Inbrija inhaler, breathe in and hold their breath for
5 seconds. The patient should hear the capsule “whirl”.
• The used capsule should be removed from the Inbrija inhaler and the second capsule loaded
into the inhaler.
(EMA, 2020, p. 3)
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TT: PIL
• A complete dose is 2 capsules used one after the other.
• Load 1 capsule into the Inbrija inhaler, close your lips firmly around the mouthpiece, then
breathe in (inhale) and hold that breath for 5 seconds. You should hear the capsule “whirl”.
Then, remove the used capsule and load a second capsule into the inhaler.
(EMA, 2020, p. 31)
Messages like those in the source text of Example 8 must be categorized as being “regula
tory” in mode, given that sentences such as these rhetorically serve to stipulate the “rules” to
be observed by third parties in the handling of the drug, realized through declarative clauses
with deontic modality (should) and the patient in subject position. In the target, on the other
hand, while the “directive” sense is retained, the message shifts into the “instructional”,
rather, featuring imperatives (Load, close, breathe etc.) directly addressed to the user of the
product.
Finally, rhetorical elements are sometimes added to a target text that are absent from the source
in the corresponding segment of the text (hence the option “didactic elements added” in Figure
12.9). The phenomenon was seen in Example 2 (from a PIL, listing circumstances where the drug
should not be taken), where certain medical terms were diaphasically translated (e.g., ST non-
traumatic rhabdomyolysis → TT a rare muscle disorder in which damaged muscle breaks down
rapidly). As explanations/definitions of abstract scientific concepts, completely parallel with those
featured in Example 6 (the lecture on cell biology), the translations in effect introduce a didactic
element in the PILs which is not to be found in the specialized source documents, where only the
technical terms are listed.
As also indicated in Figure 12.9, the list of imaginable types of variation in rhetorical function
in Diaph-intra is likely incomplete. Completion of the list is a concern for future research.
A complete overview of options in Diaph-intra

A complete overview of all Diaph-intra aspects and their associated options is provided in
Figure 12.10:
It should be noted that the model is unable to reflect a number of inevitable constraints on possi
ble combinations of options: As previously indicated, some features necessarily co-occur, such as
“decrease” in PRESUPPOSED EXPERTISE and “expert-to-expert → expert-to-lay” in CHANGE
IN TENOR, while others are mutually exclusive. It is, however, beyond the scope of the present
chapter to chart and incorporate all such restrictions in the model.
Central linguistic strategies in expert-to-lay Diaph-intra

In the preceding section, Diaph-intra was characterized mainly from the perspective of con
textual shifts, with occasional attendance to the micro-level linguistic changes underlying
the contextual transformations. In the present section, the most central types of linguistic
shifts in expert-to-lay Diaph-intra, identified in previous studies such as Piorno (2012)
and Hill-Madsen (2015a, 2015b, 2022), will be commented on. These are familiarization,
lexicogrammatical decompression, and rarefaction (see Hill-Madsen, 2022, especially), the
former two of which belong to the lexicogrammatical stratum and the latter to the semantic
stratum.
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Aage Hill-Madsen
Figure 12.10 A complete overview of parallel sets of options in Diaph-intra
Familiarization and lexicogrammatical decompression

Familiarization is identical with the replacement of specialized terms by non-technical word
ings (NTWs) that lay readers/learners are more likely to be familiar with (already illustrated in
Example 7). A small number of further examples have been selected to illustrate in closer detail
the lexicogrammatical mechanisms associated with familiarization as a Diaph-intra strategy. The
examples derive from a collection of medical terms relating to the side effects of a particular
drug:9
9 syncope → fainting.
10 trismus → lockjaw.
11 glossodynia → burning sensation in the mouth.
12 dyskinesia → abnormal body movements.
13 oculogyric crisis → prolonged rolling eyes upwards.
14 blepharospasm → involuntary tight closure of the eyelids.
210
15 atrial, nodal or ventricular arrhythmias → heart beat problems.

16 melanoma → a type of skin cancer.
17 upper respiratory tract infection → infections of nose, sinuses, throat or lungs.
The medical source terms are all of Greek/Latin origin and likely to be either completely unknown,
or at least little known, to lay readers as labels. In Examples (9) and (10), the source items (syn
cope and trismus) are instances of medical terms for which a one-word popular equivalent exists
(fainting and lockjaw), whereas the other examples all involve lexicogrammatical decompression
in the shape of multi-word solutions on the target side. In some cases (glossodynia, dyskinesia,
oculogyric (crisis), blepharospasm), the decompression derives from a translation of the indi
vidual morphemes of the source items (see also Hill-Madsen, 2015a; Hill-Madsen & Pilegaard,
2019): (11) gloss- (from Greek: “tongue”) → mouth; (11) -odynia (literally “pain”) → burning
sensation; (12) dys- (“dysfunction”/”difficulty”) → abnormal; (12) -kines(ia) (“movement”) →
movements; (13) ocul- (from Latin: “eye”) → eyes; (13) (o)gyr(ic) (“spinning motion”) → pro
longed rolling . . . upwards; (14) blephar- (“eyelid”) → the eyelids; (14) -(o)spasm → involuntary
tight closure. As several of the examples illustrate, although the individual source morphemes are
in all cases somehow recognizable in the target versions, the translation is far from always literal.
The translation of gloss- (literally “tongue”), e.g., involves holonomy (with TT mouth as the
holonym of “tongue”). In some of the other cases (those not based on morpheme-by-morpheme
translations), the translation is similarly far from “literal” but involves a less specific term on the
target side. This is the case with (15), where atrial, nodal or ventricular arrhythmias (literally:
“disturbances in the rhythms of the upper and lower heart chambers and nodes”) is rendered by
the much more generalized target wording heart beat problems. Similarly, in (16), melanoma is
rendered by the superordinate term (type of) skin cancer. In (17), the reverse is the case, with
the source term upper respiratory tract specified through the meronyms nose, sinuses, throat or
lungs on the target side.
Cases where the element of familiarization in the Diaph-intra of specialized terms is less pro
nounced can also be found. Examples are:
18 muscular rigidity → your muscles get very rigid.

19 impulse control disorders.
→ urges or cravings to behave in ways that are unusual for you or you cannot resist the impulse,
drive or temptation to carry out certain activities that could harm yourself or others.
While both Examples (18) and (19) are cases of translation (because they involve a change in form,
i.e., lexicogrammar), the individual words of the source items are more likely to be known to lay
readers than those in Examples 9–17, and, in the case of (18), likely to be perfectly understandable
to most adult readers. What unites the two cases is the decompression, resulting, however, from
two very different rewording strategies. In (19), the strategy is definition, in line with Example (6),
despite the absence of an equating be. The definition is composed along the classic Aristotelian lines
of a “genus”, i.e., a superordinate class (urges or cravings) combined with “differentiae”, i.e., dis
tinctive features (in ways that are unusual for you or you cannot resist the impulse, drive or tempta
tion to carry out certain activities that could harm yourself or others). In (18), the change consists
in the conversion of a nominalized source structure into a TT clausal structure, a strategy that may
be termed de-nominalization and which is frequent in lay-oriented Diaph-intra (see Hill-Madsen,
2015b, 2019).
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Aage Hill-Madsen
Rarefaction
While expert-to-lay Diaph-intra and the popularization of science is commonly associated with
“simplification” (see, e.g., Hilgartner, 1990), the source-to-target shifts illustrated in the previous
subsection show that at the lexicogrammatical stratum, the opposite is often the case, with ST
semantic content being often “spread out” across TT wordings that are longer and syntactically
more complex. “Simplification” occurs at the semantic stratum, rather, as what appear to be the
inevitable repercussions of the aforementioned lexicogrammatical strategies (familiarization and
decompression). These semantic repercussions will here be termed rarefaction, a term borrowed
from the educational philosophy of K. Maton (2014, p. 130), referring to a “dilution” of semantic
content or “density”.
The reason why rarefaction frequently accompanies lay- and learner-oriented Diaph-intra is
that NTWs are rarely able to match the semantic density or “compactness” of specialized terms.
This “compactness” derives from the fact that such terms, unlike general-language terms, tend
to be organized in complex classificatory and compositional taxonomies from which the indi
vidual terms derive their specific meaning, depending on their taxonomic “address” in the sys
tem (cf. Maton & Doran, 2017). The medical term psoriasis (see Example 7) may illustrate the
mechanism:
Figure 12.11 The taxonomic “ecology” of the medical term psoriasis
Figure 12.11 is a diagram of a small part of the ICD-11, the World Health Organization’s (WHO)
international classification of diseases (WHO, 2021a). The diagram shows the taxonomic pathway
from the most superordinate concept via a number of subclassifications down to psoriasis as a spe
cific term, i.e., Diseases → Dermatoses [= “diseases of the skin”] → inflammatory dermatoses →
papulosquamous dermatoses → psoriasis. In accordance with the lexical principle that hyponyms
“inherit” the meanings of superordinate terms, the point here is that the semantic components “dis
ease”, “of the skin”, “inflammatory”, and “papulosquamous” [= “papular and scaly”] all inhere in
the term psoriasis. At each “node” in the taxonomic pathway, moreover, the semantic feature in
question contrasts with a number of other options at the same taxonomic level, and even psoriasis
in itself turns out to be a superordinate term, classified into a number of specific subcategories
(not reflected in Figure 12.11). Moreover, according to the ICD-11’s definition (WHO, 2021b), the
disease is characterized by further semantic components such as “epidermal” and “keratinization”,
whereby psoriasis intersects with a number of other taxonomies, such as the compositional tax
onomy of skin, of which epidermis is one part, and the classification of proteins, of which keratin
is one among many.
212
The point of the prior semantic analysis of the term psoriasis is to illustrate the way that
specialized terms tend to “compact” a large number of semantic components deriving from the
term’s taxonomic “ecology”. The relevance of this point for lay- and learner-oriented Diaph-
intra is that although NTWs may go some way towards “unpacking” such semantic components
(see, e.g., examples 11–17), they (i.e., NTWs) do not carry the “deep” taxonomic resonance of
specialized terms and are thus inevitably “shallower” in semantics. Hence the rarefaction, and
hence a major reason why “equivalence” in Diaph-intra can rarely be anything but “relevant
similarity”.
Concluding remarks
Based on certain central concepts from systemic-functional linguistics, this chapter has theorized
the contextual aspects of Diaph-intra and identified a small handful of central rewriting strategies
at the levels of lexicogrammar and semantics. In rounding off the chapter, what remains is to point
to future research avenues.
First and foremost, the typology of (contextual aspects of) Diaph-intra proposed in the theoreti
cal section is far from complete, insofar as not all sets of options are exhaustive, and since certain
aspects may be even further subcategorized. Thus, an initial attempt was made to subcategorize
Diaph-intra genres within the field of health care, and similar efforts are awaiting the other fields
where Diaph-intra occurs. Indeed, future research needs to be taken beyond the field of health
care, to which investigations of Diaph-intra have so far been more or less confined. Much more
knowledge is needed about the role of Diaph-intra in law, engineering, and so on and about the
kind of semantic and lexicogrammatical translation strategies at work when Diaph-intra occurs
in these other fields. Also, translation strategies have only been explored in connection with the
rewriting of expert-to-expert sources into expert-to-lay target texts, whereas the opposite direction
has received virtually no attention. Similarly, the investigation of strategies in teacher-to-learner
Diaph-intra within educational settings is more or less completely uncharted territory. Indeed, as
several examples may have reflected, the view taken here is that Diaph-intra is, if far from identi
cal with, then certainly central to pedagogic efforts in many school subjects. Given that, according
to Maton (2014), much educational research fails to address the more concrete questions of how
best to pedagogize specific types of knowledge in school subjects, some degree of integration
between Intralingual Translation Studies and educational research would appear to be a desirable
project for the future.
Notes
1 As later discussions will show, a source text is not necessarily a separate text, but may occur as separate
and identifiable textual elements merged with a target text.
2 It should be noted that in positing “relevant similarity” as the required ST-TT relationship, Zeth
sen and Hill-Madsen (2016) reject the traditional notion of equivalence as a necessary condition of
translation.
3 This knowledge-related variable might be argued to equally belong under Tenor, having clear implications
for the role relationship of the participants, but this is a consideration that will not be taken any further
here. Only it may be noted that, as pointed out by Hasan (1995, p. 233), contextual parameters are perme
able, meaning that choices in one parameter tend to influence those made in the others.
4 Explanation of notational conventions: Square brackets (“[“) mean “or”, indicating different options
in relation to some kind of common denominator, such as “CHANNEL” (capitalized in accordance
with systemic-functional conventions). Curly brackets (“{“) mean “and”, indicating simultaneous sets of
options.
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Aage Hill-Madsen
5 Link to the MSD website: www.msdmanuals.com/.

6 The two related document types are published on the EMA’s website: www.ema.europa.eu/en/
medicines.
7 DSM-IV is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th edition) of the American
Psychiatric Association.
8 The target-text notes are the work of the present author, produced during employment in the upper-sec
ondary school sector in Denmark in the 2000s, long before the phenomenon of intralingual translation
became known to the author. Aimed at students aged around 18, the notes were provided in Danish, as
was Nietzche’s source text. An English translation of the source text was found for present purposes, and
a documentary English translation of the target text notes was produced.
9 The source terms all feature in EMA (2020, pp. 7–9), the SmPC for the medicinal product Inbrija, and the
target wordings in EMA (2020, pp. 26–29), the PIL section.
Further reading
Eggins, S. (2004). An introduction to systemic functional linguistics. Continuum.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (1999). Construing experience through meaning: A language-
based approach to cognition. Cassell.
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
Vermeer, H. J. (1996). A skopos theory of translation (some arguments for and against). TexTconText.
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13
EASY LANGUAGE TRANSLATION
AND COMPREHENSIBILITY
AS A SOCIAL PROCESS
Benjamin Schmid
Introduction
This chapter is based on empirical data from a case study looking at the professional translation of
texts into Easy Language (Schmid, 2017). It aims to contribute to intralingual translation research
in three ways: First, it looks at Easy Language translation from the translators’ perspective, focus
ing on one of the rare areas in the “huge unexplored market for intralingual translation” (Zethsen,
2018, p. 79) where intralingual translation has actually established itself as a professional practice
that is explicitly recognized as a form of translation. Second, it investigates Easy Language trans
lation from a social perspective, combining qualitative data from paratextual analysis and expert
interviews with constructivist theories of understanding. The chapter shows how Easy Language
translators use a collaborative translation process to co-create comprehensibility together with
their clients and target group representatives. Third, it highlights the key role that multimodal
elements play in Easy Language translation and argues that Easy Language translation is more
adequately described as a multimodal accessibility service (Bernabé & Orero, 2019) rather than
just intralingual translation. On this basis, the paper addresses some of the problems inherent in the
concept of intralinguality: It may be too narrow, failing to account for the multimodal dimensions
of many fields of translation practice, and it is still predicated on the criterion of “linguality”, the
relevance of which has been called into question by intralingual translation research.
Easy Language
Easy Language refers to a simplified form of language that is optimized to be easier to understand
for specific target groups. Vanhatalo et al. (2021, p. 1) offer the following definition:
The term Easy Language (Germ. Leichte Sprache, Swe. lätt språk, Finn. selkokieli; ear
lier easy-to-read language) refers to a modified variety of a natural language that has been
adjusted so that it is easier to read and understand in terms of content, vocabulary and
structure. Easy Language has been primarily targeted at people who have various difficul
ties in understanding standard forms of language, for example, due to learning disabilities
or neurocognitive disorders.
217 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-17

Benjamin Schmid
Easy Language can be seen as part of a broader spectrum of efforts aimed at making texts easier to
understand, for example, Plain Language initiatives. The evolution of Easy Language as it is used
today started in Sweden in the late 1960s with the “Lättläst” concept (Bohman, 2017), which aimed
to make information and literature accessible to people with cognitive or learning disabilities. The
first European “easy-to-read” guidelines in 11 languages were published in 1998 by the Interna
tional League of Societies for the Mentally Handicapped (ILSMH) – European Association (which
changed its name to Inclusion Europe in 2000). It is important to note that these early guidelines
not only included purely linguistic recommendations (e.g., short sentences, avoiding jargon, active
verbs, etc.), they also highlighted the importance of looking at the specific needs of the target group
and the communicative goals to be achieved, by using visual elements and layout for enhanced
legibility and having the documents evaluated by people with learning disabilities. From a transla
tion studies perspective, it is also important to point out that the 1998 ILSMH guidelines (ILSMH
European Association, 1998) already used the term “translation” to describe the process of rewrit
ing texts in easy-to-read language. Since these beginnings, many more Easy Language guidelines
have been created. The 2008 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
includes the right to accessible communication (e.g., Plain Language) and has provided additional
momentum to Easy Language in many countries by creating demand for Easy Language translation.
In the German context, a distinction is usually made between “Leichte Sprache” (“Easy Lan
guage”), a highly simplified form of language originally aimed at people with cognitive disabili
ties, and “Einfache Sprache” (“Plain Language”), which is closer to standard language and shows
a lower degree of simplification (for more on this terminology, see Maaß, 2020, pp. 50–53).
The body of research on Easy Language and Easy Language translation has grown rapidly over
the last few years, especially in the German-speaking context (for an overview, see, e.g., Bock, 2018;
Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020; Maaß, 2020). Some researchers argue that Easy Language should
be based on sets of standardized rules, while others see it more as a set of flexible, situation-specific
principles. The researchers associated with the Forschungsstelle Leichte Sprache at the University of
Hildesheim tend to advocate a standardized, rule-based approach (e.g., Bredel & Maaß, 2016), while
the scholars affiliated with the Leipzig-based LeiSA project (e.g., Bock, 2018) adopt a more flexible,
communication-oriented approach (for a critical discussion, see Schmid, 2017, pp. 41–58).
Easy Reading translation in practice

This chapter outlines and further develops selected findings from a case study (Schmid, 2017)
focusing on a franchise network of accessibility service providers who operate in the German-
speaking region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Among other services related to accessibility
and the social participation of people with disabilities, these service providers offer intralingual
translations into what they refer to as Easy Reading (Leicht Lesen), the network’s own version
of Easy and Plain German. This primarily includes translations of informational texts for target
groups such as people with cognitive disabilities or people who speak German as a second lan
guage. Typical examples include legal texts, instructions, information leaflets, posters, and official
notifications from public authorities that are translated to different levels of Easy Reading.
The network uses different sets of guidelines tailored to the communicative needs of various
target groups, for example regarding sentence and text length, word choice, typeface, font size, the
types of illustrations and visual elements used, and paper thickness. It produces texts at three levels
of simplification, corresponding to the lowest levels of foreign language proficiency specified by
the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: A1 (highest degree of simplifica
tion), A2 (medium level of simplification), and B1 (least degree of simplification). By combining
218
Easy Language translation and comprehensibility
Figure 13.1 The safe use of electrical devices (excerpt from a fire prevention brochure)
these three language levels with target-group-specific sets of language and text design rules, the
network aims to produce texts that offer enhanced comprehensibility in a wide range of different
communicative contexts, with varying degrees of complexity of the information presented and
varying levels of prior knowledge required on the part of the target audience.
Figures 13.1 and 13.2 present a typical example: The source text in Figure 13.1 is an excerpt
from a fire prevention brochure (section on the safe use of electrical devices), and Figure 13.2
shows the corresponding page from the brochure translated into Easy Reading, level A2.
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Benjamin Schmid
Figure 13.2 Translation of Figure 13.1 into Easy Reading, level A2
The target text in Figure 13.2 shows some typical characteristics of Easy Language transla
tions: Shortened sentences and simplified lexicon; a clear layout with short lines and bullet points;
examples and explanations that make the target text longer than the source text; compound nouns
are hyphenated and not written as a single word; where possible, only one piece of information
is given per sentence/line; a photo is shown to explain a hard word; a colour-coded line indicates
the topic addressed on the page; a word is underlined to indicate that it is explained in a glossary
at the end of the brochure.
Multimodality and definitional questions

Apart from the linguistic characteristics of Easy Language, it is also important to highlight the
multimodal elements that are an integral part of Easy Language texts (cf. Bernabé & Orero, 2019;
Castro Robaina & Amigo Extremera, 2021): Almost all translations analysed for this study use
visual elements to make the target texts easier to understand on both the verbal level and the
visual and material (e.g., paper thickness) levels. Bernabé and Orero (2019) rightfully define Easy
Language not as a purely verbal medium but rather as a multimodal accessibility service. It is not
only intralingual but also fundamentally multimodal. This has implications for how we should
conceptualize intralingual translation (cf. Pillière, 2021).
Easy Language translations include visual transformations such as larger font sizes, changes
from serif to sans-serif fonts, pictograms, enhanced contrast, colour-coded frames for chapters and
topics, underlined words that are explained in special glossaries, and photos that illustrate or explain
the information presented (for a comprehensive discussion of the multimodal elements used in Easy
Language see Bredel & Maaß, 2016, pp. 221–226; see also Bock, 2018, pp. 69–83, 89–91).
220
The source text and target text samples in Figures 13.1 and 13.2 show elements of visual
translation typical of Easy Language: Different formatting for better legibility (shorter lines,
bullet points, one statement per line, where possible), colour-coded lines to mark sections on
specific topics (e.g., green is used for information on electrical devices), a word is underlined
to indicate that it is explained in the glossary at the end of the brochure, and – perhaps most
interestingly from a translational perspective – a different photo is used: While the source text
shows a steam iron with a broken power cord, the target text features a picture of a power strip,
which serves as a visual explanation: The German word for “power strip” (“Mehrfachver
teiler”) used in the text is a long technical term, so the photo has an explanatory function in the
target text. This exemplifies that Easy Language texts often include a layer of translation that
takes place exclusively on the visual level (translating one picture into another – in this case, a
picture that illustrates the general topic of the section is translated into a picture that explains
a hard word).
Considering the key multimodal elements of Easy Language translation, it would be an over
simplification to describe this type of translation only as intralingual. Easy Language translation
shows that focusing only on the interlingual-intralingual dichotomy can pose the risk of creating
blind spots and overlooking other key dimensions of translation. Pillière highlights the important
role multimodal elements play for “creating meaning” (Pillière, 2021, pp. 11, 60–61) in liter
ary intralingual translation, emphasizing that texts should be seen as “both linguistic and mate
rial” (Pillière, 2021, p. 21). The case of Easy Language translation confirms Pillière’s findings
and shows that multimodality also plays a key role in other fields of (non-literary) intralingual
translation.
As Pillière (2021, p. 21 et passim) notes, multimodality is one of the factors that make
it necessary to reevaluate Jakobson’s (1959) famous classification of translation into three
types – interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation (Jakobson, 1959, pp. 231–232).
This tripartite classification may not have been intended as a definition of translation (Her
mans, 2013, p. 76), but it has often been read as such: This reading is based on the assumption
that the semiotic dimension tells us something so fundamental about how translation works
that it can be used as the basis of a general, overall definition of what translation is and what
forms it can take.
The strong visual and material dimension that we see in Easy Language translation confirms
Pillière’s arguments and calls into question the reading of Jakobson’s three semantic categories as
a general definition of translation in all its possible incarnations. The case presented here serves as
a reminder that intralingual translation is not a neat-and-tidy category. The adjective “intralingual”
should be seen as one of the many qualifiers available to describe different types of translation,
located on the same conceptual level as, for example, audiovisual, legal, and literary translation.
This chapter presents Easy Language translation as diaphasic, intralingual, intersemiotic, and mul
timodal at the same time.
Intralingual translation research has called into question the criterion of “linguality” altogether
by showing that the boundaries between languages sometimes have more to do with historical
and socio-cultural factors than with the structure of the linguistic systems per se. There are many
examples where varieties of the same language are less mutually intelligible than different lan
guages. If we abandon “interlinguality” as a criterion for translation in the “proper” sense of the
word, we should also be careful not to overstate the scope and relevance of the concept of intra
linguality. The case of Easy Language translation highlights the richness of translation as an activ
ity and a concept that transcends one-dimensional categories such as the interlingual/intralingual
dichotomy.
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Approach and methods
A social perspective on Easy Language translation

This chapter looks at Easy Language translation from a process-oriented perspective, using a qual
itative, social-sciences-based approach. So far, process-oriented studies on intralingual translation
have focused primarily on the mental aspects of intralingual translation (e.g., Kajzer-Wietrzny
et al., 2016; Whyatt et al., 2016). This chapter seeks to contribute to intralingual translation pro
cess research by looking at the social dimension (cf. Schmid, 2017). It follows an approach similar
to that proposed by Risku (2014), who argues that translation process research needs to take both
the mental and the socio-cognitive dimensions into account to provide a fuller understanding of
how translators translate and interact with other actors and with their environment (for a compre
hensive theoretical research framework, see Risku et al., 2013). This perspective reveals that the
Easy Reading translations discussed in this article are produced through a highly collaborative
process that actively involves the clients and target group representatives. The insights presented
here were obtained using semi-structured interviews and paratextual analyses (for details on the
full case study, see Schmid, 2017).
Paratextual analysis
Paratextual analysis was originally developed by French literary theorist Gerard Genette for the
study of literary texts. Genette defines paratexts as verbal or other productions that “surround and
extend” (Genette, 1987/1997, p. 1) a text to present it to the readers and guide their interpretation
of the text. Paratextual analysis has been used by scholars working on intralingual translation
(e.g., Berk Albachten, 2016; Pillière, 2021) because it allows researchers to investigate the status
that authors, translators, publishers, editors, and so on ascribe to a text, that is, whether a text is
presented as a translation, an adaptation, or some other type of (re)writing.
Genette distinguishes two types of paratexts – peritexts and epitexts – based on where they are
located: Peritexts accompany the text as an integral part of the book or document that contains it,
for example, the title of a book, a preface, specific notes, and an indication of the genre of a book.
Epitexts are located outside of the book or document that contains the text, for example, interviews
with the author, letters, and diaries (Genette, 1987/1997, pp. 4–5, 11).
Genette’s approach has been adapted and refined for research in translation studies and the
analysis of contemporary textual practices (see Batchelor, 2018, for an in-depth discussion
and an updated research framework), in particular to revise Genette’s view of translations as
secondary texts that are subordinate to the original and the intentions of the author. In these
adapted approaches, translations are now recognized as independent texts in their own right
that can be accompanied by their own paratexts. Scholars have also expanded Genette’s narrow
view of authorship and modified some of his categories for the study of digital and multimodal
texts.
This chapter looks at selected peritextual elements found in the translations to gain insights into
the status ascribed to the target texts. The peritext corpus includes 192 documents, from brochures
on legal, political, and medical topics to accessible websites, sports rule books, exhibition cata
logues, and terms of use for a library. For the purposes of this study, the most relevant peritextual
information is found in prefaces and forewords, notes and comments, and, most importantly, the
required legal and copyright information boxes at the beginning or the end of the texts (“Impres
sum” in German). These types of peritexts were selected because they often include explicit infor
mation about whether the texts are presented as translations (e.g., “translated by . . .”) or as other
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forms of (re)writing (e.g., “written by . . .”, “designed by . . .”). In addition, epitextual material
from the network’s website, business reports, communications, marketing materials, and so forth
was analysed to find out more about how the network structures the translation process and how it
presents its work to clients and the public.1
Expert interviews
To complement the paratextual analysis, semi-structured interviews were carried out with nine
network representatives at five branch offices in Austria and Germany (seven translators, one
administrative assistant, and one of the network’s senior executives), based on an interview
guideline prepared in advance. The purpose of the interviews was twofold: First, to find out if
and in what sense the members of the network see their work as a form of translation and, sec
ond, to reconstruct the translation process to gain an accurate picture of the various steps, people,
and interactions involved. The interviews were held in early 2014, but the insights they offer
remain relevant because the collaborative translation procedures described are still in use today
(see capito, n.d., 2020).
The interviews were processed using the method of extractive qualitative content analysis
(EQCA) developed by Gläser and Laudel (2010, 2019) and their MIA2 software plugin. EQCA is
designed to investigate social processes based on information extracted from interviews or other
qualitative data. The interviewees are referred to as experts because they can provide first-hand
knowledge about the social processes in which they participate.
The status ascribed to the Easy Reading versions

The study of intralingual translation is closely linked to the question of what translation is and
what counts as a translation – a debate that forms part of what Tymoczko (2007, pp. 50–53) has
called the “definitional strand” or “definitional impulse” within translation studies.
These questions can be approached from various perspectives: Some researchers (e.g., Berk
Albachten, 2014; Schmid, 2008; Zethsen, 2007; Zethsen & Hill-Madsen, 2016) have used concep
tual reasoning to make the case for recognizing intralingual translation as an integral part of the
discipline’s research framework, drawing from existing theoretical knowledge on translation, lan
guage, transcultural communication, and so on. Another approach is to take the descriptive route
and look at how the practitioners themselves perceive and describe their work (see, e.g., Dam &
Zethsen, 2018). This is the path taken in this chapter: One of the main purposes of the interview
and paratextual analyses was to find out if and in what sense the network and its translators see
their work as translation.
The peritext corpus offers important clues about the status that the network assigns to its tar
get texts: Out of the 192 documents included in the corpus, 39 feature peritextual elements that
describe the intertextual relationship between the target text and the source material. Twenty-
eight of these peritexts label the intertextual relationship as one of translation (e.g., “übersetzt und
geprüft” or “Übersetzung in Leicht Lesen”). The remaining 11 peritexts describe the intertextual
relationship as one of “rendering” the text into Easy Language (“Übertragung”), as an Easy Lan
guage “version” or “summary”, or as an adaptation (“bearbeitet”). It is worth pointing out that not
all of the network’s target texts are produced from a single source text. Some are also prepared
using a mix of different source materials. In the documents that are not explicitly presented as
translations, it was usually not possible to tell whether the work had been carried out from a single
source text or from a mix of source materials.
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The epitext corpus comprises 25 documents: Product specifications for the network’s services,
the network’s website texts, certificates confirming compliance with the network’s process and
quality standards for Easy Reading translations, marketing texts, guidelines, the network’s activity
and business reports, and articles written by network representatives. The analysis of these epitexts
confirms that “translation” is the most common term the network uses to describe its Easy Reading
services. The product specifications, for example, list the service as “translation” and specify the
rates charged for these translations. In some cases, however, the epitexts also use other terms, most
frequently “rendering” (“Übertragung”) and “design” (“Gestaltung”).
In the interviews, all network representatives used the term “translation” to refer to their ser
vices. However, they also expressed doubts about whether their view of intralingual adaptation as
a form of translation was actually a “correct” use of the term. The interviews reflect an intuitive
understanding of translation as a very broad concept.
So we translate, yes, I think that’s true, if we see translation as something broader, in the
sense of, “I make something comprehensible by translating it for you.”
(Interview I-B1M, my translation)3
The statements also show, however, that this broad understanding clashes with the narrow notion
of “translation proper” that is still highly influential and perceived as the norm, both among the
general public and in many academic disciplines (cf. van Doorslaer, 2018): This view sees transla
tion as an interlingual transfer that reproduces a (purely verbal) text in a different language without
introducing any changes or adaptations. The following statement sums up the conceptual conflict
between the translators’ broad intuitive concept of translation and what they perceive as the “tech
nically correct” meaning of the term – and it illustrates the resulting insecurity in their use of the
term “translation”:
So everyone knows what a carpenter is, what a butcher is, what a doctor is. When I tell
people that I translate, they ask me, “Into what language?” That’s the first thing they ask, so
I try to bypass the issue and come up with a different word, one that is readily understood.
Because in the literal sense, translation does of course mean moving from one language to
another. I’d say that’s what it means to the average citizen, or to everyone, for that matter.
So if I say, “I translate this text”, and someone asks me, I tell them that I break it down to
make it less difficult.
(Interview I-E4, my translation)4
The interviews show that the network representatives are unfamiliar with more open concepts of
translation that have been developed in translation studies, specifically translation as mediation,
rewriting, and adaptation relative to the target group, target situation, and target culture. These
broad concepts of translation are, however, very much in line with the translators’ descriptions of
their actual work, even though most of them believed that translation in the “technically correct”
(interview I-A1) sense actually means a more limited, word-for-word transfer between different
languages.
It is worth pointing out that the interviews were held in 2014 and that use of the term “trans
lation” in the field of Easy Language has become more widespread since then: By and large,
“translation” has become the accepted term for the conversion of texts into Easy Language, both
in academic discourse (see, e.g., Bock, 2018; Bredel & Maaß, 2016; Hansen-Schirra & Maaß,
2020; Maaß, 2020) and in the terminology used by professional associations, for example the
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Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer (BDÜ), the German translators’ and interpreters’
association. BDÜ is increasingly exploring Easy Language as a new field of work for professional
translators, for example, by offering workshops and publishing practice-oriented Easy Language
handbooks written specifically for translators (e.g., Helmle, 2017). These changes may well have
destabilized the dominant role of “translation proper” and changed the way translation is concep
tualized in the field of Easy Language, but further research is needed to confirm if and to what
extent such a shift has taken place.
Apart from this conceptual tension, the interview and epitext data show that the use of the term
“translation” performs three key functions for the network:
First, the term “translation” is itself easier to understand for clients and other stakeholders than
alternative terms, for example, “rendering” into Easy Language (“Übertragung”). It conveys a
clearer picture of the network’s service to people who are unfamiliar with this type of intralingual
work.
Second, the network deliberately takes advantage of some of the meanings associated with the
notion of “translation proper” or the “non-change” view of translation (van Doorslaer, 2018) that
is still prevalent among the general public: From this perspective, “translation” implies “faithful
ness”. Deliberate use of the term “translation” therefore allows the network to activate these con
notations in order to reassure its clients that the source text content will not be misrepresented in
the target texts.
Third, in the context of advocacy for the rights of people with cognitive disabilities, use of the
term “translation” conveys the message that some people are excluded from information because
the source texts are written in a type of language they cannot understand. This implies that it is
not the readers’ fault if they cannot understand such texts. Instead, the problem lies with the texts
because they were not written with the target group’s communicative needs in mind. This use of
“translation” emphasizes that some people are excluded from certain types of communication and
stresses their right to accessible information.
The Easy Reading translation process
Process design
The translation process used by the network is highly collaborative. The translators work closely
with the different stakeholders of the translation projects at various stages during the process.
Their collaboration with the clients and with target group representatives is systematic and
institutionalized.
The translators prepare draft translations, which are then refined and developed further based
on several revision and feedback loops with the clients, and the drafts are then tested for com
prehensibility by target group representatives (in most cases people with cognitive disabilities)
in moderated group sessions. These formats of client and target group interaction are defined
and structured by a set of internal process and quality guidelines that are applied across the
network.
The translators incorporate feedback from the clients’ and target groups’ perspectives into their
translations to bring the different expectations of these stakeholders into alignment as closely
as possible. This process design gives agency to the members of the target group and visibility
to their rights and interests (as compared to other contexts where public authorities simply give
people access to information without taking any steps to ensure that the information is actually
understood, cf. Zethsen, 2018, pp. 93–94).
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Collaboration and interaction

The interviews were held with the network’s translators, and the data therefore prioritizes the
translators’ point of view. For this reason, my account of the translation process focuses on the
translators, who are here presented as the central node within the social network in which the Easy
Reading translations are carried out. The interviews and paratexts show three key levels of col
laboration during the process: The translators’ collaboration within the network, with the clients,
and with target group representatives.
According to Cordingley and Frigau Manning (2014), “collaboration” and “collaborative trans
lation” are context-specific concepts that defy a one-size-fits-all definition because their meaning
varies across historical periods and cultural environments. These authors argue, however, that
it is possible to identify different degrees of collaboration and distinguish genuinely collabora
tive translation from other, less far-reaching types of stakeholder involvement in the translation
process – on a case-by-case basis – for example by looking at how closely the collaborators are
involved in the creation of the text and how integral their contributions are to the translation pro
cess (p. 24). This chapter shows that the Easy Reading translation process involves systematic,
institutionalized collaboration between translators, clients, and target group representatives. This
collaboration has a direct impact on how the translations are worded and structured, and it is seen
as an essential element of the Easy Reading approach.
Collaboration within the accessibility services network

The translators work at various branch offices of the franchise network. The network plays an
important role because it provides consistent quality and process standards and defines the target-
group-specific criteria that the Easy Reading translations have to meet. These standards and criteria
are laid down in key documents that are shared across the network. The translators are required to
participate in centralized training courses offered by the network, and they attend regularly sched
uled network meetings. In this sense, the network defines the basic parameters of how the Easy
Reading translations are carried out and provides a common frame of reference for all translators.
Collaboration within the teams at the different branch offices also plays an important role:
Translation problems are discussed with fellow team members, team members with special sub
ject area expertise help their colleagues by preparing draft translations, and sometimes translators
supervise the assessment group sessions for testing the comprehensibility of their colleagues’ texts
with members of the target group.
Collaboration with clients

The translators interact and collaborate closely with their clients at various stages in the transla
tion process. Before starting a translation project, they consult with the clients to define the target
group, the medium of publication, and the communicative goals for the project in question.
The translators then proceed to analyse the source material and negotiate the details of the
project with the clients: Budget, time frame, and contacts for content-related and administrative
questions. On this basis, the translators prepare a quote and send it to the client. Next, the translator
in charge of the project creates a draft translation and consults with the clients and/or subject area
experts in the client’s organization to discuss content-related questions. When the draft is com
plete, it is sent to the client, who then checks the accuracy of the content, discusses any perceived
problems with the translator, and approves the draft once all open questions have been resolved.
After the comprehensibility of the text has been validated by the target-group assessors (see later)
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and their feedback has been incorporated, the revised target text is again sent to the client for final
approval. An interviewee pointed out that some clients are actually surprised about how much
active collaboration is required from them during the translation process: “And sometimes we
hear things like, ‘What? I’m supposed to do part of the work myself?’ But the purpose of all this
is to make sure that we don’t end up with something that’s no longer what the client had in mind”
(Interview I-C1, my translation).5
The translators also pointed out that collaboration with the clients not only happens at specific,
pre-defined stages in the translation process but also is often an ongoing process of consultations
and discussions throughout an entire project. Some interviewees also mentioned that an important
part of their collaboration with the clients was to raise awareness of the specific characteristics and
requirements of Easy Language texts and to help the clients understand that far-reaching transfor
mations and restructuring are necessary in Easy Language translations.
Collaboration with the target group

One of the distinctive features of Easy Language translation is that members of the target group are
often directly involved in the translation process and act as comprehensibility assessors or valida
tors (cf. Maaß, 2020, pp. 183–185, 136–137). This is also standard practice for the network’s Easy
Reading translations: For every translation project, at least three (potential or actual) members of
the defined target group review the target text to ensure that it is comprehensible for the intended
audience.
These reviews take place in the form of moderated group sessions where the target group
members work through the text together with a translator segment by segment. The group assesses
the comprehensibility of the text, for example by answering questions about the content, rephras
ing the information in their own words, or providing spontaneous feedback and suggestions. The
target-group assessors act as experts because they can evaluate the texts based on their own unique
perspectives, prior knowledge, and biographical backgrounds, complementing the translators’
expertise with feedback from the point of view of the intended target audience. This gives the
target group an active and significant role in the creation of the target texts (for an overview of
critiques and arguments for and against this method, see Maaß, 2020, pp. 183–185, 136–137).
Comprehensibility
Evaluating comprehensibility
The members of the network present this collaborative process as a means of making sure that the
target texts are optimally comprehensible for the intended target group: In broad terms, the close
collaboration with the clients is seen as a way of ensuring the accuracy of the content, and the col
laboration with target group representatives is seen as a way of ensuring the comprehensibility of
the target texts for the intended audience.
The concept of comprehensibility plays a key role in intralingual translation in general, and
it is even more central in diaphasic intralingual translation, where the goal is to make complex
information accessible to target groups that do not have the communicative skills or background
to understand the source texts adequately (cf. Zethsen, 2018). Comprehensibility is a complex con
cept with many different dimensions, including aspects such as legibility, readability, and commu
nicative effectiveness, which are often conceptualized and defined differently by different authors
(cf. Cadwell, 2008, p. 35).
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Comprehensibility can therefore be approached from a variety of research perspectives. Based

on Schriver’s (1989) overview of methods for evaluating text quality, Göpferich (2009) classi
fies the research methods available to assess comprehensibility into three broad categories: Text-
focused methods (e.g., readability formulas based on criteria like sentence length, word choice
etc.), expert-judgement-focused methods (e.g., reviews based on pre-defined comprehensibility
criteria), and reader-focused methods (e.g., paraphrasing tasks, recall tests, cloze tests, surveys,
focus groups, etc.).
The social dimension of understanding

Based on these various approaches, researchers have identified a number of criteria for optimiz
ing the comprehensibility of texts. For drafting their target texts, the network translators use a
catalogue of target-group-specific criteria that are partly based on this type of research. However,
the data shows that the network’s translation process also addresses a social dimension of com
prehensibility, which is particularly emphasized by the network and its translators in the epitexts
and interviews. The process is presented as a collaborative co-creation of comprehensibility: The
translators prepare draft translations and then work on the target texts together with experts (i.e.,
the clients as subject-matter experts and the target group representatives as experts for the target
audience’s communicative needs), adding changes and improvements until everyone involved is
satisfied with the level of comprehensibility and accuracy that has been achieved.
Wittgenstein (1953/1986) laid important groundwork for a theoretical account of the social
dimension of comprehensibility. He argued that reading (1953/1986, pp. 61–66) and under
standing (1953/1986, pp. 56–60) can mean so many different things in different contexts that it
is not possible to formulate general criteria for assessing whether someone has read or under
stood something correctly. Such assessments only make sense within the situation: To determine
whether and how someone has understood something, the communication partners apply criteria
that are specific to the situation and the “language-game” in which they participate – by look
ing at what the other person says or does in response to an utterance or a task given to them
(1953/1986).
Some of the authors associated with constructivism (cf. e.g., Maturana, 1978; Rusch, 2007;
Schmidt, 2011) later explored these ideas from their own perspective and developed them into a
theory of understanding that distinguishes between the cognitive and social dimensions of under
standing, which are seen as mutually dependent. These authors argue that communication partners
do not assess comprehension like an outside observer would (e.g., like a researcher who applies
scientific criteria to measure the degree of comprehension). As they are directly involved in shap
ing the communication situation, they assess it as observers from within. To gauge if and to what
degree their communications have been understood, they must interpret clues from each other’s
behaviour.
This means that within a communication situation, whether someone has understood someone
else’s message is negotiated based on social feedback (e.g., direct or indirect verbal confirma
tion or validation, direct or indirect rewards or recognition for responding or acting as expected,
favourable behaviour, etc.). These clues confirm that the message has indeed been understood
“correctly” – i.e., as intended by the speaker or writer (Rusch, 2007, pp. 124–125) – and thus rein
force “correct” ways of understanding. According to Rusch (2007, p. 124), understanding means
meeting the expectations of a communicator. In the words of Schmidt (2011, p. 2), “understanding
is attributed to communication partners in social interaction if the speaker deems the partner’s
reaction to be correct or at least sufficient” (cf. also Maturana, 1978, p. 59).
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According to these theories, people are able to interact with each other in communica
tive domains where, through processes of enculturation and socialization, they have built up
closely intertwined networks of mutual expectations and assumptions. These frames of refer
ence allow them to make sense of what other people communicate to them. Schmidt (2011)
emphasizes that we are able to understand messages because we have built and tested expec
tations about how others will communicate with us in different situations. According to con
structivist theories of understanding, we also build up expectations about how other people
expect us to communicate in different situations and assumptions about how they assume we
will behave (“expected expectations” and “imputed imputations”, see Schmidt, 2011, p. 2),
adding a reflexive, recursive layer to communication: “[I]f actors assume that (the) other com
munication partners refer to similar orientations, understanding becomes possible, despite
the cognitive autonomy of the individuals . . . that constructivists have always emphasized”
(Schmidt, 2011, p. 2).
Depending on the theoretical approach taken, these networks of mutual expectations and
assumptions can be described as cultures (Schmidt, 2011; see also Schmid, 2008, pp. 41–54),
consensual domains (Maturana, 1978), or “language-games”, a term Wittgenstein used “to bring
into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life”
(Wittgenstein, 1953/1986, p. 11). In essence, these concepts all describe shared frames of refer
ence for meaning-making that are required for communication to be successful.
In Easy Language translation (as in all types of transcultural mediation), the frames of refer
ence the clients use as a basis for writing texts are different from the frames of reference that the
members of the target group use when trying to make sense of the texts they read, which makes it
difficult or impossible for the two sides to communicate successfully without mediation.
Co-creating comprehensibility
The social dimension of comprehensibility means that an agreement needs to be reached between
the source text authors and the readers of Easy Language translations to assure both sides that the
text in question has indeed been understood, and that it has been understood as intended. In the
case presented in this chapter, the clients have expectations about how they want the content of
their texts to be understood by the target group. The members of the target group, in turn, have
expectations about how texts should be designed to meet their communicative needs and about
what information is useful in the contexts of their lives.
In many other communicative contexts, communication partners are able to negotiate their
expectations through direct interaction. In the case of Easy Language translations, however, media
tion is needed because there is not enough overlap between the systems of “expected expectations”
and “imputed imputations” (i.e., cultures/consensual domains/language-games) of the two sides
involved. The clients write their source texts based on the expectations, “expected expectations”,
and “imputed imputations” they have about “average readers”, but this frame of reference is not
suitable for communicating with target groups like people with cognitive disabilities, people with
insufficient language skills, or elderly people. Vice versa, “average readers” know what to expect
from “average” informational texts and have certain “expected expectations” about the intentions
of their authors. However, the expectations of target groups that need Easy Language texts may
be so different from those of “average” audiences that comprehension problems occur, creating a
need for translation. The mismatches between the frames of reference of the communication part
ners can be due to differences in cognitive processing, biographical factors such as education and
socialization, different language biographies, or differences in age.
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In a fundamental way, the workflow used by the Easy Reading translators is designed to man
age the social dimension of comprehensibility. The feedback loops with the clients and target
group representatives at different stages of the translation process allow the translators to negoti
ate an agreement between authors and readers to ensure that the translations adequately reflect the
authors’ intentions while at the same time providing good comprehensibility from the perspective
of the target group. By involving the clients and the target audience in the translation process, the
translators are able to coordinate the different stakeholders’ expectations for the specific goals of
the project at hand: What needs to be understood? How does the information need to be presented
in order to be comprehensible? The translators mediate between the different perspectives, and
with their assistance, the partners are able to negotiate an agreement on the specific type of com
prehensibility to be achieved in each individual project.
This process design acknowledges that comprehensibility is situational (cf. Bock, 2018,
pp. 21–22) – it does not presuppose any generalized, situation-independent criteria for evaluating
whether the target readers have understood a text correctly, fully, partially, well enough, or insuf
ficiently or for how the information should be presented to be comprehensible.
In the interviews, some of the translators mentioned an example from their work that illustrates
what this approach means in practice (interviews I-E2, I-E3, and I-E4; see Schmid, 2017, pp. 113,
139–141): A project where they were asked to translate training materials into Easy Language. The
materials were needed for the training of nursing assistants who assist people with various impair
ments in their activities of daily living. The target group of the translations were people training to
become a nursing assistant who need Easy Language versions to understand the training materials.
The source materials contained chapters about nutrition, including technical information about
nutrients such as carbohydrates and other relevant chemical substances (e.g., sulphites and oxalic
acids). The translators were unsure about how to deal with this information, especially the techni
cal terms. In general, Easy Language guidelines call for technical terms to be avoided and replaced
with descriptive explanations or examples. The translators considered this option, but then they
consulted with the clients to find out more about the purpose and intended use of the training mate
rials. This interaction with the clients revealed that some of the terms in question were required
knowledge in the exams that aspiring nursing assistants would have to pass to qualify for the job.
This meant that dropping the terms altogether was no longer an option, even though they were hard
to understand for the target group. The technical terms required for the exam had to be preserved
in the translation and explained as comprehensibly as possible (e.g., dropping details about the
biochemical properties of carbohydrates and focusing more on the types of food that are rich in
carbohydrates).
The translators had to define a situation-specific type of comprehensibility that balanced the
requirements of the communication situation, the intentions of the clients, and the communicative
needs of the target readers, while at the same time enabling the target group to earn the qualifi
cations required for the job. This balancing act between different factors of comprehensibility
depends on the specifics of each project and is achieved through the collaborative process outlined
earlier.
In this sense, the study of Easy Reading translation can contribute to the “shift in perspective
from the individual to the network level, suggesting a need to revise the individualistic concept of
‘the translator’” (Risku, 2014, pp. 340–341). The findings presented in this chapter illustrate one
of the forms that collaborative translation can take. In the context of Easy Reading translation,
collaboration serves as a way of co-creating comprehensibility together with the clients and target
group representatives. According to Cordingley and Frigau Manning, the study of collaborative
translation can shed light on “the motivations and social forces that animate collaborative projects
230
and the cultural and political statements they embody” (p. 24). The Easy Reading translation pro
cess makes a strong cultural and political statement by giving agency to otherwise marginalized
target groups, such as people with disabilities, and by emphasizing that translation is capable of
enabling comprehension between disparate spheres of communication even “within a language”.
Notes
1 See Schmid (2017) for a more comprehensive discussion of a broader range of Easy Reading paratexts
and further insights they offer into questions that are beyond the scope of this chapter.
2 www.laudel.info/downloads/mia/ (accessed 8 January 2022).
3 Also wir übersetzen, das stimmt schon aus meiner Sicht, weil wir ja quasi, wenn man dieses Thema‚
Übersetzen breiter sieht, im Sinne von‚ ich mach etwas verständlich, indem ich es dir übersetze, ja.
4 . . . also man weiß, dass es einen Schreiner gibt, und dass es einen Metzger gibt, oder wie auch immer,
oder einen Arzt oder sowas. Wenn ich jetzt sag, [ich] übersetze, dann kommt . . . ‚Ja, in welche Sprache?‘
Ja, also das ist einfach das nächste, insofern versuche ich da dem ein bisschen auszuweichen und einfach
auch eine andere Formulierung zu finden, also für mich, dass es einfach verständlich ist, weil übersetzen
bedeutet jetzt erstmal im wortwörtlichen Sinne natürlich schon eine Sprache in die andere. Also würd ich
mal sagen, das versteht der Allgemeinbürger da drunter, oder jeder Bürger erst mal da drunter. Und dann
sag ich halt, also wenn ich gesagt habe: ‚Ich übersetze diesen Text‘, ja, also wenn die Nachfrage kommt,
ja, also ich brech den quasi runter was den Schwierigkeitsgrad jetzt einfach angeht.
5 Und oft einmal ist da einfach so das Ding da: ‚Ja, was muss ich jetzt da selber mitarbeiten?‘ Aber es soll
halt einfach verhindern, dass da irgendwas dabei rauskommt, was nicht mehr im Sinne vom Auftraggeber
steht.
Further reading
Lindholm, C., & Vanhatalo, U. (Eds.). (2021). Handbook of Easy Languages in Europe. Frank & Timme. A
detailed overview of Easy Language developments and approaches in a wide range of European countries.
Vanhatalo, U., Lindholm, C., & Onikki-Rantajääskö, T. (Eds.). (2022). Easy Language research [Special
issue]. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 45(2). https://doi.org/10.1017/S033258652200018X A special is
sue focusing on Easy Language research from a linguistics perspective, covering a number of different
languages and national contexts.
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14
IN EASY LANGUAGE AND
IN PLAIN LANGUAGE
Christiane Maaß
Introduction
In the past decade, Easy Language and Plain Language (for the term “Easy Language”, see Lind
holm & Vanhatalo, 2021a, pp. 11ff; Maaß, 2020a, pp. 50 ff) have had a significant impact: Firstly,
they are now part of both international and national legislation (for an overview of the European
situation on Easy Language, see Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021b; for a more elaborate overview on
the German situation, see Lang, 2019, 2021) and international standardization processes (see ISO
24495–1 currently being developed). Secondly, a myriad of texts has been produced (see, Becker,
2020; Estévez Grossi, 2020 for the situation in the Hispanic world, or Hernández Garrido & Yepes
Villegas in print for the specific situation of Colombia). Thirdly, there are numerous attempts at
standardization from both a practical and a theoretical background (for the situation in more than
30 different countries, see Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021b).
The available texts range from political, legal and medical communication to cultural offers
and literature as well as offers in different medial realizations (Ahrens, 2020 and in print;
Maaß & Hernández Garrido, 2020; Maaß & Rink, 2018; Rink, 2020a; Schulz et al., 2020).
The main goal of Easy Language has been to make content more perceptible and comprehen
sible (Bredel & Maaß, 2016a; Maaß, 2015). But maximal optimization of comprehensibility
comes at a price: Reduced acceptability and even the risk of stigmatizing the target groups
with texts that are visibly different from the standard (Bredel & Maaß, 2016a, 2020; Maaß,
2020a). One solution is to opt for Plain Language, which is less perceptibility and comprehen
sibility enhanced and addresses average non-expert users in technical contexts (Asprey, 2010;
Maaß, 2020a). The use of Plain Language has certainly increased in recent years with the
development of an ISO norm (24495-1) and a rise in international co-operation and research.
In Germany, Plain Language has become the preferred choice in health communication, with
the Action Plan Health Literacy (Schaeffer et al., 2018) adopting Plain Language, to name
just one example.
The present chapter shows the main characteristics of Easy and Plain Language, their similari
ties and their differences. It investigates the main ways in which Easy and Plain Language texts are
produced: Through direct text production or through translation (Maaß, 2020a, 2020b). Producing
Easy or Plain Language texts on the basis of source texts is intralingual, and partly intersemiotic,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-18 234

Intralingual translation in Easy Language and Plain Language
translation on both a diaphasic and/or diastratic level. Texts are usually translated into Easy and
Plain Language when the source text represents a barrier for the target audience. This barrier may
be an expert language barrier, an expert knowledge barrier, a cognitive barrier, a sensory barrier
(Rink, 2020a, 2020b), a motivational barrier or an emotional barrier (Lang, 2021). To translate is
to remove those barriers for the target audience. The barrier approach is a new way of conceptual
izing translation in general (Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2019; Maaß & Hansen-Schirra, 2021; Maaß,
2020b; Rink, 2020a) and will be expounded on in this chapter.
Easier-to-understand varieties of a natural language:

Easy and Plain Language
Barriers in communication
According to Hansen-Schirra and Maaß (2019, p. 3):
[c]ommunication products or rather oral and written texts may potentially pose barriers for
the users. Thus, the function of translation is to overcome these barriers in order to achieve
appropriate and useful communication products.
Barriers in communication (cf. Schubert, 2016; Rink, 2020a, 2020b; Maaß, 2020a; Lang, 2021)
may arise when the textual features are incompatible with the target audience’s prior knowledge,
reading abilities and/or communicative needs. This is especially the case in expert-lay communi
cation, where subject-related content is communicated to an audience that is often a non-expert in
the concrete situation and may have different needs and preferences. In such cases, the knowledge
on the subject is asymmetrically distributed (Hansen-Schirra et al., 2020, p. 200; Maaß & Rink,
2020a). Not only expert texts, but also standard language texts, may exhibit communication bar
riers for target groups with special communicative needs. If those needs are not met, such target
groups cannot access the content.
If texts are not easily retrievable, if they are not perceptible or comprehensible enough, if
they contain too much new information that has no connection to the prior knowledge of the
target groups or if they are inacceptable to them, then they are not suitable for enabling the target
groups to act on their basis (Maaß, 2020a; Maaß & Rink, 2020a, p. 24). To act on the basis of a
text requires that the given information can be successfully processed. This is not the case if the
comprehension resource is overstrained on one of the described steps. For example, a person with
low reading skills may well understand the content of each sentence but may be unable to enact
what he or she has learnt from the text if it contains too much new information. Or a person who
would have successfully mastered a certain text in a normal situation might not be able to do so if
emotionally under stress.
Figure 14.1 represents this process in the form of a flight of steps (“Hildesheimer Treppe”, the
Hildesheim school’s accessible communication model): All steps have to be mastered in order to
act on the basis of a text:
According to this approach, text comprehension is a complex process that can be looked at
from two different but interconnected angles: The text perspective and the user perspective (Maaß,
2020a, p. 28, for an overview, also Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020). Communicative accessibility
is not a question of user deficits, but rather of the textual qualities that are required in order
to grant access: If users cannot perceive and understand a text offer, it is the text that does
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Christiane Maaß
Emotional barrier
Motivational barrier
Expert knowledge barrier
Cultural barrier
Expert language barrier
Language barrier
Cognitive barrier
Sensory barrier
Media barrier
Motor barrier
action-oriented
act
acceptable
accept
linkable
recall
comprehensible
comprehend
perceptible
perceive
retrievable
retrieve
Figure 14.1 Hildesheimer Treppe (“Hildesheim Steps”, the Hildesheim school’s accessible communication
model)
not meet their requirements. So the question is what quality a text offer has to have in order
to allow people with special needs to access it.
(Maaß, 2020a, p. 22, emphasis added)
According to the Hildesheimer Steps, a text may pose a motor barrier if its design is not suitable
for the target audience; for example, if a menu does not support oral-command browsing and the
user cannot physically use mouse or keyboard controls.
A text can represent a media barrier “if its media qualities or means of distribution are not
accessible to or used by the target audience” (Maaß, 2020a, p. 23). This occurs for example when
information is only in black print, but the target audience needs it in Braille or as an audio file. In
both cases, the texts cannot be easily retrieved, which hinders the target audience from processing
the next higher stage in the message.
The perceptibility of a text as a communication product can be limited by a sensory or a cogni
tive barrier. Thus, a text may pose a sensory barrier for the target audience if, for example, a text
is presented in a visual format (as written text, images or film), but the target audience needs it as
audio or tactile information. A text may pose a cognitive barrier if it contains too much informa
tion and/or information that is too complex (Maaß, 2020a, p. 23).
A text may pose a language barrier if, for example, it is in a language the target audience
does not understand. It can also represent an expert language or expert knowledge barrier if the
target audience is not familiar with the specialized language used in the text or does not have the
knowledge required to understand it. If a text is hard to understand and/or not linkable to prior
knowledge, the target audience might not be able to move to the next processing stage, as his or
her cognitive capacities might have already been used up by then.
236
A text can represent a cultural barrier for a target audience if it relies on values and standards
that are culture-bound and therefore do not exist in the same manner or are unfamiliar in the target
audience’s culture. As a result, information in a given text cannot be linked to prior knowledge.
A text can represent a motivational barrier (Lang, 2021) if it “does not appear useful or interest
ing enough to the target groups or will require disproportionately large effort” (Hernández Garrido
& Maaß, in print). It may pose an emotional barrier (Lang, 2021) if the topic of the text causes
strong emotions that use up free cognitive capacities, for example, in case of a life-threatening
diagnosis or the notice of a relative’s death. In case of a motivational and/or emotional barrier,
the acceptability of a text offer may be hampered. Therefore, the last stage of processing, which is
action-orientation, may not be accessible anymore by the target audience, as all free capacities have
been used up. The result will then be that they are not able to act on the basis of given information.
Successful communication takes place when the textual characteristics of a text offer, either
oral or written, online or offline, meet the (special) communicative needs of the target audience.
One output of recent research on accessible communication is that experts equipped with special
competences such as expert knowledge can act as intermediaries. Such experts can strategically
remove the aforementioned barriers in a text to make it accessible for the target audience by adapt
ing it to their needs.
Easy and Plain Language: different degrees of comprehensibility

Easy Language and Plain Language are both used to make content more comprehensible and
hence more accessible to text users. They differ in their degree of comprehensibility and are thus
situated in different positions in the complexity-comprehensibility continuum (Hansen-Schirra &
Maaß, 2020, p. 17).
Not all users need Easy Language in order to understand a message. Easy Language texts pri
marily address users with communication impairments resulting in low comprehension levels and
weak reading skills. The texts often have reduced information, are redundant and explicit in their
information strategies and are striking in their layout. These qualities tend to have a stigmatizing
effect on potential target audiences (Bredel & Maaß, 2016a; Maaß, 2020a). Plain Language, on
the other hand, is closer to the standard or expert texts but may be too complex to be accessible for
Figure 14.2 Easy and Plain Language as pillars in the Easy Language/standard language continuum
(Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020, p. 18)
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Christiane Maaß
Easy Language users. Both varieties are thus needed in order to make adequate text offers for the
target audience and their diverse needs.
Easy Language
History and current state of Easy Language

Easy Language is a concept that covers a variety of a natural language that is maximally comprehen
sible on all linguistic levels (Maaß, 2015, 2020a). The aim is to facilitate comprehension for people
with reading and comprehension difficulties, for example those caused by cognitive impairment. It
was initially promoted under the term “easy-to-read” in European guidelines like those of Inclusion
Europe (2009) and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA, [1997]
2010). Easy Language is no longer limited to printed texts, but now also extends to spoken or audio
visual communication offers (Maaß & Hernández Garrido, 2020), making the term “easy-to-read” too
narrow to cover the concept. Thus, the term “Easy Language” has been gaining ground (Lindholm
& Vanhatalo, 2021a; Maaß, 2020a). The first text offers in Easy Language in Europe were proposed
by the Scandinavian countries as early as the 1980s (Leskelä, 2021, for Finland; Bovim Bugge et al.,
2021, for Norway), with Sweden ahead of its time (Bohman, 2021). At a later stage, Easy Language
was broadly promoted by two “Pathways” projects funded by the European Union (the first project
lasted from 2007 to 2009, the second from 2011 to 2013; Bredel & Maaß, 2016a, 2016b). These
projects collected cross-language principles that facilitate reading, resulting in the Inclusion Europe
guidelines (Inclusion Europe is an association of people with cognitive impairments and their families
founded in 1988) that are, in many European countries, still the leading principles for Easy Language
text production. Over the past 10 years, Easy Language has attracted the attention of scholars, starting
with the Hildesheim school and extending to various other universities (University of Leipzig, Univer
sity of Mainz/Germersheim, University of Cologne). The Hildesheim school has provided scientifi
cally based rule books (Bredel & Maaß, 2016a, 2016b; Maaß, 2015; Maaß, 2020a) that have shaped
the understanding of Easy Language in Germany (see Maaß et al., 2021; for the situation in other
European countries, see the contributions in Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021b).
Basic rules of Easy Language

Texts in Easy Language, either oral or written, online or offline, follow certain rules on word, sen
tence and text levels that also affect the semantic and pragmatic layers (cf. Maaß, 2015;
Bredel & Maaß, 2016a; Maaß, 2020a; Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020). The following bullet
points summarize the most important strategies used to simplify content.
At word level:
• Use of core vocabulary.

• Lexemes are short and familiar.
• Text-based abbreviations are avoided while well-known sigla are used.
• Foreign languages are avoided or only introduced into the text if necessary.
• Identical words are used for same concepts and designations, i.e., no synonyms.
At syntactic level:
• Sentences are kept short, allowing one proposition per sentence only.
238
• Verbal style is used (instead of nominal style).

• Tense forms are restricted, simple present and present perfect are used, restriction on past and
future tenses.
• Subjunctive, negation, passive and genitive constructions are avoided or resolved.
At textual level:
• Clear information structure.

• Headings/subheadings and clear section structure.
• Essential information first.
• Main information highlighted in bold.
• Use of images and colour coding.
• Explanations given in reading direction, i.e., from left to right and top to bottom.
• Clearly perceptible font with enlarged font size and line spacing.
• Strong contrasts and abundant white spaces.
Following these rules results in clearer perceptibility and enhances the local and global com
prehensibility of the given information. As different strategies are applied to create “a common
ground between the communication partners” (Hansen-Schirra et al., 2020, p. 200), the given
information is linkable to prior knowledge and the text as a whole is more acceptable for its recip
ients as it does not overstrain their ability to process the information. Such a text design leads to
more action-orientation as recipients’ processing costs are reduced (Hansen-Schirra et al., 2020,
pp. 198ff).
Based on the Hildesheim Steps, it can be assumed that optimized texts are a prerequisite for
action-orientation. Content or information design has to meet the needs of a diverse audience.
In the following section an example of Easy Language will illustrate the aforementioned textual
features that contribute to more communicative accessibility.
An example of Easy Language translation

The following example taken from Maaß (2020a, pp. 89ff) shows an excerpt of the Easy Language
news offer of the North German Broadcasting Association NDR (bit.ly/3xwCz7d):
The left-hand column contains the slightly modified original German text; the right-hand col
umn shows the English translation. First of all, it is apparent that the amount of white space on
this page is greater than for usual news texts and that the line spacing is enhanced (one-and-a-half
times). The sans serif font is clearly perceptible and the contrast is high. An audio-version of the
text is provided (below the heading) as an additional resource for weak readers (for Easy Language
in audiovisual contexts, see Maaß & Hernández Garrido, 2020).
The message begins with the actual new information, which is: “There was an accident
in Lower Saxony”. This is in line with the standard language text type conventions for news
articles. It is, however, remarkable for the Easy Language version that the sentences are kept
very short and simple following the theme-rheme structure. Infrequent vocabulary such as
“Motor∙segler” (“motor glider”, in English) is explained when first mentioned. The textual
features are adapted to the anticipated communicative needs, reading skills and abilities of the
Easy Language target groups (the NDR addresses people with poor reading skills, cognitive
impairments and German as a second language) and their presumed grammatical, global and
discourse knowledge.
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Christiane Maaß
Figure 14.3 NDR news in Easy Language (ndr.de [accessed 31 August 2022])
Table 14.1 Transcript and translation of the Easy Language news text
In Niedersachsen war ein Unfall. There was an accident in Lower Saxony.

Dieser Unfall war in Lübbrechtsen. This accident was in Lübbrechtsen.
Lübbrechtsen ist ein Ort in der Nähe von Hildesheim. Lübbrechtsen is a place near Hildesheim.
Und dieser Unfall war mit einem Motor·segler. And that accident was with a motor glider.
Ein Motor·segler ist ein besonderes Flugzeug. A motor glider is a special aircraft.
Mit diesem Flugzeug kann ein Pilot auf 2 Arten fliegen: With this aircraft a pilot can fly in 2 ways:
Mit dem Motor als Antrieb. With the motor as the drive.
Oder mit dem Wind als Antrieb. Or with the wind as a drive.
Bei dem Unfall ist der Motor·segler abgestürzt. The motor glider crashed during the accident.
Und der Motor·segler ist in 2 Wohn·häuser gestürzt. And the motor glider fell into 2 apartment
er Pilot von dem Motor·segler ist bei dem Unfall buildings.
gestorben. The pilot of the motor glider died in the accident.
Der Pilot war 79 Jahre alt. The pilot was 79 years old.
240
Plain Language
History and current state of Plain Language

Plain Language is another way of creating more comprehensible texts. The Plain Language
movement has been growing since the 1970s (Adler, 2012; Cornelius, 2015; for its use in legal
contexts, see for example Asprey, 2010), but first efforts date back to more than a hundred years
ago, such as Wharton’s (1917) work on Plain Language that is aimed at “the education of the
workers by the workers” for English Language teaching. Wharton “focuses students’ attention
on the mechanical aspects of producing clear and easily accessible texts” (Greer, s.a.). Since
the 1960s, the concept has been endorsed by the White House (Bredel & Maaß, 2016a, p. 63;
Maaß, 2020a, pp. 140f). The presidents Carter (1978, Executive Order 12044) and Clinton (1998,
Memorandum on Plain Language in Government Writing) were especially firm in their support
for Plain Language in the communication between experts and citizens in legal or administrative
communication (Maaß, 2020a, p. 140). Plain Language also plays a role in US courtrooms, as
Dyer (2017) reports:
[C]ourts have found that plain language forms enable non-specialists to do a better job in
completing the forms so that they are more acceptable to the courts and reduce costly delays.
Also, court orders written in plain language are better understood and lead to better compli
ance by the litigants.
(Dyer, 2017, p. 159)
Various US American government bodies have issued guidelines for Plain Language, such as
the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (Maaß, 2020a, p. 141). The Plain
Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN, plainlanguage.gov/), which is described
as “a group of federal employees from different agencies and specialties” (plainlanguage.gov/
about/), have promoted Plain English for administrative communication since the mid-1990s
(Maaß, 2020a, p. 141). Efforts stepped up with the Federal Plain Writing Act (H.R. 946) that was
signed in 2010. It requires federal agencies to use a language that the citizens they deal with can
understand.
Such offers are, however, not a domain of translation, as text offers are often directly cre
ated in Plain Language without the existence of a source text of any kind. This becomes clear in
the definition of Plain Language of the Plain Language Association International (abbreviated to
“PLAIN”, plainlanguagenetwork.org/; see Pedraza Pedraza, 2019, pp. 120ff) that claims to be “the
international association for plain language supporters and practitioners around the world”, with
members from 30 countries and communication in 15 or more languages.
They define “Plain Language” as follows:
A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that
the intended audience can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use
that information.
(plainlanguagenetwork.org/plain-language/what-is-plain-language/)
This definition does not cover the aspect of translation. Differently from Easy Language, Plain
Language text offers are often directly crafted as such and are not translations in the strict
sense.
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Christiane Maaß
Basic rules of Plain Language

The guidelines for Plain Language have very similar rules and advice as the typical Easy Language
guidelines. The rules presented in the following are taken from the influential German “Citizen-
oriented administrative language” Guidelines of the Federal Office of Administration (“Bürger
nahe Verwaltungssprache”, Bundesverwaltungsamt, 1984). They were first issued in 1984 and last
updated in 2002; they are accessible via the internet (Bundesverwaltungsamt, (4)2002; English
translation in Maaß, 2020a, pp. 147f):
Word level:
• Use common words.
• Use unambiguous words.
• Prefer short words.
• Do not endanger comprehensibility by using abbreviations or foreign words.
• Use the same terms for the same contents.
• Do not use noun chains.
• Do not replace verbs with nouns.
Sentence level:
• Prefer a clear sentence structure.
• Find the appropriate number of words per sentence.
• Do not nest too many sentences.
• Consider the relation between message and sentence structure.
Text level:
• Mind the internal structure.
• Reason consistently and coherently.
• The structure of your text should follow its function and content.
• Keep in mind the individual case even if you use preformulated text modules.
• Try to visualize abstract matters with the help of examples.
• Stick to the essentials.
• Is your text comprehensible without additional explanations?
The guidelines also give some more indications

on how to increase comprehensibility:
• Adapt explanations and justifications to the level of knowledge of the addressed persons.
• Cite important regulations literally.
• Explain regulations that are hard to understand – but be careful with “translations”
(Bundesverwaltungsamt, (4)/2002;
translation in Maaß, 2020a, pp. 147ff)
The rules are very similar to Easy Language rules but differ in the extent to which they are sup
posed to be applied. What are common words? This depends on the target audience and will differ
242
for a citizen with an average education on the one hand or a person with cognitive disability on
the other. The same is true for other criteria like “the appropriate number of words per sentence”
(ibid.). Easy Language means that all measures that we know enhance comprehensibility are used,
whereas Plain Language covers the field between Easy Language and standard/expert language
and can be adapted dynamically.
One more interesting aspect: The cited guidelines provide some more suggestions on how to
further increase comprehensibility, inter alia: “Explain regulations that are hard to understand –
but be careful with ‘translations’”. We are in a legal context here and the issuing authority tries to
avoid legal hazards: If you “translate” a regulation, you produce a legal text that can be taken as a
basis for legal claims. The manual is very explicit here:
Caution: Even if it is often recommended, it is dangerous to “translate” or transcribe

administrative expert language into everyday language. The greatest of caution is needed
here! The content of a difficult expert text with its fine-grained gradations and references
to the legal system is so highly delicate that it can be changed and even distorted by any
“simplification”.
(Bundesverwaltungsamt, (4)2002, p. 36, translation Maaß, 2020a, p. 149)
Plain Language texts are often actual legal texts, while Easy Language texts usually are not, but
instead are merely explanations of legal texts. Easy Language text can usually not be used to
legally enforce claims (Bredel & Maaß, 2016b, p. 26; Maaß, 2015, p. 141; Rink, 2020a).
An example of Plain Language translation

The example given in Figure 14.4 is taken from the plainlanguage.gov website, which is an official
website of the United States government that provides information on the legal requirements and
offers training to government bodies and institutions.
The Plain Language text is not easy to understand. It simply uses some of the Plain Lan
guage guidelines in order to make an expert legal text accessible to non-expert users. It is
If a deponent fails to answer a question You may move the administrative law
propounded, or a party upon whom a judge for an order compelling a response
request is made under § 4.70, or a party or inspection if:
on whom interrogatories are served A deponent fails to answer a question;
fails to adequately respond or objects to A party upon whom you made a
the request, or any part thereof, or fails request under § 4.70, or a party on
to permitinspection as requested, the whom you served interrogatories
discoveringparty may move the admin either does not adequately respond or
istrative law judge for an order compel objects to the request; or
ling a response or inspection in accor A party on whom you made a request
dance with the request. under § 4.70, or a party on whom inter
rogatories are served does not permit
inspection as requested.
Figure 14.4 Expert Language source text and Plain Language target text (www.plainlanguage.gov/exam
ples/before-and-after/wordiness/ [accessed 28 June 2022])
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Christiane Maaß
not aligned with the needs of people with communication impairments, which is the domain
of Easy Language. The main strategy of the Plain Language text is to optimize the visual
structure of the information. Not even legal concepts are explained in the example. The target
text, thus, remains legally binding but is not directed towards communicative accessibility
in a broad sense. There are also examples for Plain Language texts that are much closer
to Easy Language, that exploit the guidelines in a much more comprehensive way. Within
the Plain Language universe, a partial application of the guidelines is, however, a possible
option. Plain Language will therefore never be enough to achieve communicative inclusion.
Additional Easy Language offers are required.
Balancing comprehensibility and acceptability

Easy Language is clearly more comprehensible than Plain Language. But comprehensibility is not
the only value at stake. On the downside, Easy Language has low acceptability as the texts are
over-explicit and make it very obvious that they require very low cognitive skills from the target
audience. Many of the Easy Language texts, moreover, show a blatant discrepancy from the estab
lished typical text layouts: Very big font size and imagery that seems more appropriate for young
children. This is especially the case if the texts are produced in inclusive settings for people with
cognitive impairments. While such inclusive text production processes are a value in themselves,
the actual outcomes of such processes have a tendency to stigmatize the target audience as texts
look different from what is normally expected from established text type models (Bredel & Maaß,
2016a, 2020; Maaß, 2020a). Such texts have a symbolic function: They make the target groups
visible in public, they point to the inclusion efforts of institutions and signal the institutions’ com
pliance with legal accessibility requirements. This is valuable in contexts like general information
on the homepage of a federal ministry. However, such texts accentuate the power and knowledge
gap in expert-layperson interactions and are often refused by the target audience as well as by the
professionals.
Plain Language texts, on the other hand, are so close to the source texts that they usually do not
run the risk of stigmatizing the target audience. But as we have seen, they are often not accessible
enough to enable the target audience to overcome all communication barriers, that is, to access the
content of the message and act on its basis. Hansen-Schirra and Maaß (2020) conceptualize the
relation between those qualities as a balance; both Easy and Plain Language have complementary
profiles:
While Easy Language has high perceptibility and comprehensibility, it has reduced acceptabil
ity and a risk of stigmatization. Plain Language, on the other hand, is acceptable to most users and
has no obvious risk of stigmatization. However, its perceptibility and comprehensibility are not
enough to grant access to content for people with more pronounced communicative needs.
In order to mediate between those two poles, Maaß (2020) proposes a variety between Easy
and Plain Language. As Plain Language is a continuum, this concept is backed by the Plain Lan
guage concept. But many Plain Language texts are not easy enough, as experts depart from their
expert language texts and do not use enough facilitation strategies to make them really accessible.
Bredel and Maaß (2016a, 2016b) and Maaß (2020), on the other hand, propose to embark in the
opposite direction: Leaving the whole set of Easy Language rules behind and enriching the texts
especially with regard to qualities that are known to stigmatize the target audience (over-explicit
information strategies, divergent layout etc.). This concept is called Easy Language Plus (EL+;
see Maaß, 2020a; Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020; for the corresponding concept for Dutch, see
Moonen, 2018).
244
Figure 14.5 Trade-off between Easy Language and Plain Language (Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020, p. 24)
Translation into Easy and Plain Language
Intralingual, intersemiotic translation into Easy and Plain Language

Easy and Plain Language text creation has been situated in the realms of translation on the one
hand and text editing on the other, with Easy Language texts more often being considered trans
lations than Plain Language texts. An important factor is the question of an existing source text
(Bredel & Maaß, 2016a). Easy or Plain Language texts can be conceptualized as translations if
they are the results of a transfer from a pre-existing source text or set of source texts of any kind:
A source text exists or has existed at some point in time. A transfer has taken place and the
target text has been derived from the source text (resulting in a new product in another lan
guage, genre or medium), i.e. some kind of relevant similarity exists between the source and
the target texts. This relationship can take many forms and by no means rests on the concept
of equivalence, but rather on the skopos of the target text.
(Zethsen, 2009, pp. 799f)
Easy Language texts do not regularly replace the source text but are offered as an extra service
to readers with weak proficiency or cognitive impairments. Plain Language texts are, by contrast,
often the only text offer that is provided to meet the requirements of non-expert readers in an expert
context. It is then situated in the realm of text production rather than translation in the strict sense.
In the case of Easy and Plain Language, the source texts are usually in the same language,
which makes the creation of Easy and Plain Language texts a subject of intralingual translation
(Bredel & Maaß, 2016a, p. 181). Interlingual translation into Easy and Plain Language is also
possible but much less frequent. An example of interlingual Easy and Plain Language translation
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Christiane Maaß
is the translation between Easy and Plain Finnish and Swedish in Finland, where Swedish is a
minority language and Easy Language text offers are produced on the basis of Easy Finnish source
texts (Leskelä, 2021, p. 156 et passim). The most prominent example of an interlingual transla
tion in different natural Easy Languages are the Inclusion Europe guidelines that were drafted in
English and then translated into the other project languages (German, French, Finnish, Lithuanian,
Portuguese).
Easy and Plain Language translation is, in Jakobson’s (1959) broadly established terminol
ogy, intralingual insofar as content is transferred between varieties of the same language, and it
is intersemiotic, if other than verbal means are employed (for a transfer of Jakobson’s model to
Easy Language, see Bredel & Maaß, 2016a, pp. 182ff; Maaß, 2020a, pp. 173ff; Maaß, 2020b,
pp. 278ff). This is often the case for Easy Language, where pictorial resources are used in the Easy
Language target texts to convey parts of the content or help readers anticipate the content. Some
of the visual sources are closely related to inclusive settings. The imagery and layout of such texts
tend to deviate sharply from those of the source texts and the standard text expectations and, in
that scenario, carry a high risk of stigmatizing the target audience (Bredel & Maaß, 2016a, 2020).
The following example taken from a patient’s decree in Easy Language published by the Catholic
professional association SKM Freiburg is typical in this respect:
Intersemiotic translation also occurs in Plain Language, where other types of codes are also
used in order to make the content easier to perceive and process, in the present example, in
the form of a table (Source: www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/monthly-due
date/):
Figure 14.6 “Patient Decree in Easy Language” (https://freiburg.skmdivfreiburg.de/)
246
Table 14.2 Transcript and translation of “Patient Decree in Easy Language”
Patienten-Verfügung Ein Formular in Leichter Sprache Patient’s Decree A form in Easy Language
In diesem Text geht es um ein schweres Thema. Das This text is about a difficult topic.
Thema ist: The topic is:
• Was soll mit mir passieren, wenn ich unheilbar • What shall happen with me if I am terminally
krank bin? Oder wenn ich im Sterben liege? ill? Or if I am dying?
• Wie sollen die Ärzte mich behandeln, wenn ich • How shall doctors treat me it I can no longer
keine Entscheidungen mehr treffen kann? make decisions?
Source text:
We must receive your completed application form on or before the 15th day of the second
month following the month you are reporting if you do not submit your application elec
tronically or the 25th day of the second month following the month you are reporting if you
submit your application electronically.
Target text:
If you submit your form: We must receive it by:

Electronically 25th of the second month
Not electronically 15th of the second month
Moreover, there is a tendency to include Easy and especially Plain Language translation in
audiovisual formats, especially in the context of news broadcasting, teaching and organization
communication (Maaß & Hernández Garrido, 2020), with a focus on super- and subtitles (live and
scripted) as well as speech-to-text-interpretation (ibid.).
Intralingual diastratic/diaphasic translation into Easy and Plain Language

Translation from an expert variety to Easy or Plain Language may be seen as diastratic intralin
gual translation: A message is transferred from one group variety (the expert variety of a certain
domain, for example, in the legal or medical context) to address an outgroup without access to that
group variety. But in fact, it is not that simple. The expert variety of the source text is a typical
diastratic variable; it is characterized by low comprehensibility for those who are not members
of this group. Plain Language transfers the content to the broad majority of non-experts of that
domain. That is, Plain Language is devoid of group characteristics of any type and is neutral with
respect to the diastratic variable.
Easy Language, on the other hand, transfers the content from the expert group to another group:
People with communication impairments. Being a non-expert with communication impairment
carries a risk of being stigmatized; therefore, addressing people with Easy Language is risky in
that respect and users tend to distance themselves from Easy Language offers (Gutermuth, 2020;
Maaß, 2020a). This is even more the case if the Easy Language text offers are visibly different
from the standard language. Easy Language in itself is not a group variety; that is, people with cog
nitive impairments, for example, are not Easy Language “speakers”; Easy Language is rather used
to address this group. From its conception, it is therefore not a typical realization of the diastratic
variable, either. However, people with cognitive disabilities in Germany and their associations
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Christiane Maaß
tend to claim Easy Language as their means of communication; they postulate that Easy Language
texts always have to be created in inclusive settings. This is a strategy to claim Easy Language as
a group variety as part of a political strategy to make people with cognitive impairments more vis
ible in public through openly displayed Easy Language texts. Such texts are no longer optimized
with regard to their comprehensibility and function in the target text situation, but instead have a
predominantly symbolic function to make groups with disabilities visible in public (Maaß, 2020a,
pp. 132ff). Translation from expert language into Easy Language with the participation of people
with cognitive impairments in the role of text authors and text assessors can be defined as intralin
gual diastratic translation.
With regard to the diaphasic variable, it is Plain Language rather than Easy Language that plays
a role. People with cognitive impairments and other Easy Language target groups will need Easy
Language in all aspects of their everyday life, also in non-expert contexts, and not just in some
specifiable situations. Plain Language, on the other hand, is used predominantly in contexts where
expert communication is converted into expert-layperson communication to address non-expert
users. Plain Language translation is therefore mostly intralingual diaphasic translation.
Intralingual translation as overcoming barriers

The conceptualization of translation as overcoming communication barriers (cf. Hansen-Schirra
& Maaß, 2019; Maaß & Hansen-Schirra, 2021; Rink, 2020a, 2020b) is also applicable to intralin
gual translation into Easy and Plain Language. As mentioned above, an intermediary (language)
expert can strategically remove communication barriers by applying different strategies to the
translation process. The aim would be to make content accessible for target groups with special
communicative needs. Barriers in communication may occur when the textual features of a com
munication product do not correspond to the users’ needs, which is especially often the case in
expert-layperson communication where the common ground between the source text author and
the addressed users differs widely (Hansen-Schirra et al., 2020, p. 200; Maaß & Rink, 2021; Rink,
2020a, p. 177). But even standard language may entail communication barriers that impede or
deny access to the text content for certain groups. The result is inaccessibility, which may lead to
limited (communicative) participation.
One way to alleviate this situation is to use professional translators acting as intermediary lan
guage experts. As Hansen-Schirra et al. (2020, p. 202) point out: “Translators are trained to adapt
the text to the reader’s prior knowledge and, if necessary, to simplify it without risking too much
loss of information” (Hansen-Schirra et al., 2020, p. 202).
In doing so, translators need to have translation competence as their special expert knowledge.
Translation competence comprises a set of abilities and components such as linguistic and extra-
linguistic competences, knowledge about translation, instrumental competence, strategic compe
tence and psycho-physiological components (cf. PACTE, 2003, p. 5; Rink, 2023) that affect and
accompany the translation process and its result. Taking into account the translation order, the
so-called skopos of the translation (Reiß & Vermeer, 1984), the concrete target situation and the
users as well as the customer requirements, the professional translator applies different translation
strategies (Maaß & Rink, 2020b; Rink, 2020a) to overcome communication barriers. Following
Rink (2020a) and Maaß and Rink (2020a, p. 47), linguistic, conceptual and medial strategies have
to be applied in the translation process to produce retrievable, perceptible, comprehensible, link
able, acceptable and action-enabling texts (Maaß & Rink, 2020a, pp. 47ff) that serve as an orienta
tion basis for different target groups and are a prerequisite for further action (see the modelling of
this process in the Hildesheim Steps above).
248
Further reading
Lindholm, C., & Vanhatalo, U. (Eds.). (2021). Handbook of Easy languages in Europe. Frank & Timme.
https://doi.org/10.26530/20.500.12657/52628
Perego, E. (2020). Accessible communication. A cross-country journey. Frank & Timme. https://doi.org/
10.26530/20.500.12657/50590
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15
IN EXPERT-TO-LAY PUBLIC
COMMUNICATION
Strategies and recurrent features in informative
legal texts in the digital environment
Introduction
Based on Jakobson’s classification of different kinds of translation, “intralingual translation or
rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language”
(Jakobson, 1959/2000, p. 114). This is a loose definition which covers various forms of rewriting
and degrees of reformulation from one language variety to another. In the present chapter, a par
ticular form of rewording is considered, that is, the adaptation of legal texts for a non-specialized
audience.
When specialized knowledge is communicated to the general public, there is asymmetry
between the sender (i.e., the expert) and the receiver (the layperson) as a result of the different
degree of prior knowledge of the two parties (Engberg, 2016, p. 37). This gap can be filled by
means of a process of reformulation of the original text that employs strategies to make the target
text more intelligible for the receiver. In many cases of expert-to-lay public adaptations, however,
rewording is not the only process of transformation that is involved.
Specialized knowledge often also undergoes a process of recontextualization (Calsamiglia,
2003) from contexts where the lay public has limited access (e.g., academic papers) to contexts
which are more accessible to a wider audience (e.g., articles in the daily press, magazines, or the
web). In their seminal paper, Calsamiglia and Van Dijk (2004, p. 370) define the process of refor
mulation and recontextualization of specialized discourse for knowledge dissemination as “popu
larization”. While reformulation concerns the intelligibility of the target text, recontextualization
concerns its accessibility. Examples of popularized discourse include medical brochures and fact
sheets (Muñoz-Miquel et al., 2018), summaries for patients (Muñoz-Miquel, 2021), patient infor
mation leaflets (Ezpeleta-Piorno, 2021), newspaper articles reporting on medical research (Raffo,
2016), legal brochures (Rizzo, 2015; Seracini, 2021), publications popularizing scientific thought
(Stadnik, 2017), institutional web communication (Cacchiani, 2018; Preite, 2018; Silletti, 2018),
as well as face-to-face communication between doctors and patients (Gülich, 2003).
As a process implying rewording, popularization can be viewed as a form of intralingual trans
lation (Rizzo, 2015). There are, however, different views concerning the place of intralingual
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-19 252

Intralingual translation in expert-to-lay public communication
translation itself – and, in particular, expert-to-layperson rewordings – within Translation Studies.

This chapter will first explore these contrasting views from a general perspective; it will then focus
on the process of popularization and consider the interrelation between intralingual translation and
popularization in more detail by examining the case of British legislative texts rewritten in the
form of informative texts and recontextualized on the institutional website for the general public.
The aim is to highlight the strategies and recurrent features characterizing this form of intralingual
translation in legal discourse.
Expert-to-lay public communication as a form of intralingual translation

The view that intralingual translation should be fully included under the disciplinary heading of
Translation Studies is not unanimously shared among scholars in the field. The main argument
against this idea is ontological: Translation should be intended, by definition, as interlingual, that
is, an activity that involves two or more languages, so the same term cannot be fully applied to
the rewording of a text in the same language, despite the partial overlap between the two activities
(Newmark, 1991, p. 69; Schubert, 2005, p. 126).
Another argument is based on the view that intralingual translation also differs functionally
from interlingual translation (Mossop, 2016). This argument is based on the claim that rewording
and interlingual translation have a different focus. The focus of rewording is intelligibility, since it
aims to transform a text and adapt it to an audience that differs from the original audience based on
factors such as age or expertise. On the contrary, the focus of interlingual translation is on equiva
lence between source text and target text. New terms, for example, “cislation” or “plain-language
rewording” (Mossop, 2016, pp. 2, 7), are suggested to distinguish this form of adaptation from
translation proper.
Such a narrow interpretation of the concept of translation would greatly restrict the scope of
Translation Studies, also leaving out many new forms of rewording that are emerging in digi
tal communication (e.g., blogs, forums, websites, social networking sites, etc.). Other scholars
(Hill-Madsen, 2015; Zethsen, 2009) have advocated a broader approach and have focused on
the similarities between interlingual and intralingual translation rather than on their differences.
One example is synonymy: The search for a synonymous word that expresses the same meaning
in rewording can be assimilated to the search for an equivalent word in a different language in
interlingual translation (Dam-Jensen & Zethsen, 2008; Jakobson, 1959/2000 p. 114). Zethsen and
Hill-Madsen have put forward a new, more inclusive, definition of translation, based on the fol
lowing conditions that can be satisfied by translation both within the same language and between
different languages:
• A source text . . . exists or has existed at some point in time.

• The target text has been derived from the source text. . . .
• The resulting relationship is one of relevant similarity, which may take many forms
depending on the skopos.
(2016, p. 705)
The source text can be either verbal or non-verbal; the target text can be a translation into a
different language or semiotic system, or an adaptation to a new genre or medium (Zethsen &
Hill-Madsen, 2016, p. 705). This definition can be applied as follows to the specific case of expert-
to-lay public adaptations: A reworded text (i.e., the popularized text) is derived from a specialized
text (i.e., the source text), which either exists now or existed in the past, and there is a relation of
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similarity, based on factors influenced by the aim to adapt the reworded text for a non-specialized
audience (i.e., the skopos). In this chapter I adopt this broader approach to translation and base the
case study on the assumption that expert-to-layperson rewordings are, in fact, a form of intralin
gual translation.
Strategies in expert-to-lay public communication

As mentioned earlier, the process of popularization implies both reformulation and recontextual
ization of the original text. As part of the process of reformulation, words, sentences, and para
graphs are reworded to make them suitable for the new recipients. Chesterman’s (1997, p. 104)
definition of paraphrase is well suited to describe the resulting target text, that is, a text which is
“loose, free, in some contexts even undertranslated” and where “[s]emantic components at the
lexeme level tend to be disregarded, in favour of the pragmatic sense of some higher unit such as
a whole clause”. Depending on the intended communicative purpose of the popularized text and
the assumed knowledge of the target audience, reformulation takes place at different levels, such
as text organization, register, and language (Gotti, 2012, p. 150), and aims to simplify the original
text. The four parameters identified by Zethsen (2009, p. 808) as drivers of simplification in the
process of rewording are (1) knowledge (changes involving a simplification at the level of termi
nology and syntax), (2) time (substitution of obsolete language), (3) culture (adaptation to the tar
get culture), and (4) space (additions or omissions that make the text more easily understandable).
The first parameter is particularly important for expert-to-lay public adaptations since it addresses
one of the main elements that have been found to hinder the layperson’s comprehension of a spe
cialized text, that is, technical terms that pertain to a specific domain of expertise (Askehave &
Zethsen, 2000, 2008; Bromme et al., 2001; Bromme et al., 2005). “De-terminologisation” (Montalt-
Resurrecció & González Davies, 2007), that is, the process whereby technical terms are substituted
by non-technical terms in the target text, is very frequent in popularization. It includes strategies
such as providing explanations or definitions for a term, using examples, comparison, or substitu
tion (Montalt-Resurrecció & González Davies, 2007; Montalt-Resurrecció & Shuttleworth, 2021,
p. 16), using hypernyms in place of hyponyms (Hill-Madsen, 2015, p. 95), and using metaphors
and similes (Gotti, 2016, p. 17). As a result of these strategies, concepts in target texts are often
expressed with a higher number of words than in the source texts and a lower degree of formality
(Hill-Madsen, 2015), which results in changes at the level of register as well (Gotti, 2012, p. 150).
While the substitution of technical terms helps to make the text more intelligible for the target
reader, this strategy also raises questions about the possibility of equivalence. Hill-Madsen (2015,
p. 92) points out that it is “fiction” to assume that a non-technical term can be equivalent to a tech
nical term in a reworded text and suggests the expression “decrease-in-technicality” to refer to the
cases of near synonymy with a technical term. In some cases, an alternation between non-technical
and technical language is preferred in the popularized text since retaining a certain degree of tech
nicality both facilitates the experts’ communication and helps non-experts to gradually acquire
new knowledge that they can subsequently apply to other contexts (Gülich, 2003, p. 240).
Beside technical language, other factors affect intelligibility. A text that is complex at the
level of syntax, discourse structure, and coherence can require more time and cognitive effort
on the part of the recipient to be understood (Gibson, 1998; Lenzner et al., 2010; Pitler & Nen
kova, 2008; Telles & Salotti, 2021). In order to reduce this complexity, popularization strategies
often include changes at the level of syntax and text organization, such as shortening sentences
(Muñoz-Miquel et al., 2018, p. 185) and using verbal rather than noun phrases. Texts are also
simplified by means of a more direct, interpersonal style of communication that addresses the
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recipient directly (e.g., using first and second person pronouns) (Gotti, 2012; Muñoz-Miquel
et al., 2018; Seracini, 2020, 2021).
As regards content, in order to facilitate understanding, popularized texts often convey special
ized knowledge by referring to hypothetical real-life situations that the audience can easily relate
to (Gotti, 2012, p. 146; Seracini, 2020, p. 60). This strategy produces, therefore, a shift from the
conceptual to the ontic level in the target texts (Simonnæs, 2003, cited in Engberg, 2013, p. 20).
Case study: the popularization of legislative

texts in institutional communication
Effective communication helps to build a relationship of trust between institutions and citizens
(Cacchiani, 2018; Silletti, 2018). If, on the contrary, citizens find it difficult to access key basic
information, for example, through an institution’s website, this can reflect negatively on the insti
tution’s credibility and ultimately lead to a feeling of distrust (Cacchiani, 2018).
The efforts to communicate effectively to citizens include the popularization of legisla
tive texts in order to make rights and obligations easier to understand and more accessible
through the institutional websites. For example, institutions at the European Union and in the
UK make the legislative texts available on the institutional website both in their original form
and in popularized versions that can range from brochures to web pages, infographics, and
videos. The distinguishing element of this form of popularization is that recontextualization
takes place within the same institutional context that has produced the legal texts (Engberg
et al., 2018, p. XI).
Efforts to ensure a better understanding of legal texts on the part of institutions go hand in hand
with initiatives such as the Plain Language Movement in English-speaking countries and the Clear
Writing campaign at the European Union. While the aim of these initiatives is to encourage the
drafting of legal texts that are clear and easy to understand, the aim of popularization is to reformu
late the original legal texts and recontextualize them so that they become a means to disseminate
legal knowledge among the lay public.
As in the case of any form of rewording, the process can involve some degree of manipulation
and reinterpretation of the original text. This is the case, for example, of some popularized ver
sions of EU legislation concerning consumer rights: While conveying information about consumer
rights, these texts tend to highlight the protection and support provided by EU laws, thus shedding
a positive light on EU institutions. As a result, while the original legislative texts have a prescrip
tive function, the popularized texts acquire a promotional, as well as informative communicative
purpose (Seracini, 2020).
In the next section the analysis carried out on the texts popularizing British legislation concerning
Covid-19 prevention measures on the government institutional website will be presented and discussed.
Materials and method

The study was carried out on two corpora compiled by the author: A corpus of UK Coronavirus
legislation and a corpus of informative webpages from the institutional website of the UK govern
ment popularizing the same legislative texts. The Legislation Corpus comprises 32 legislative texts
(451,519 words) downloaded from the section dedicated to the Coronavirus legislation on the gov
ernment official website (legislation.gov.uk/coronavirus). This section contains all Coronavirus
legislation for the UK. The Guidance Corpus comprises 58 webpages (197,900 words) from the
dedicated government website (www.gov.uk/coronavirus) informing the lay public of the measures
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contained in the UK Coronavirus legislation. The texts included in both corpora were collected
in the two-year period between the beginning of the pandemic in the UK in 2020 and 2021. The
choice of UK Coronavirus legislation for the case study is due to the fact that, during that period,
it was crucial for citizens to be aware of the measures and restrictions in place and, consequently,
popularization of the legislation in this area was particularly important.
The difference between the original legislation and the guidance webpages is clearly illustrated
on the GOV.UK website (UK Government, n.d.) where it is specified that legislative texts are
“what you must do”, while guidance texts are “a mixture of what you must do and what you should
do”. Guidance texts are based on the legislative texts and they can additionally provide informa
tion concerning “the best or most appropriate way to adhere to the law” (UK Government, n.d.).
In a preliminary step of the analysis, the readability of the guidance webpages was compared
with the readability of the legislative texts. This analysis was carried out with the aid of an online
readability checker, freely available at ReadabilityFormulas.com (My Byline Media, n.d.), which
automatically calculates the complexity of a text based on seven different readability formulas.
Readability formulas estimate text difficulty based on the length of words and sentences; given that
the complexity of a text does not depend on these factors only, the limitations of these formulas
have been discussed widely (McClure, 1987; Pichert & Elam, 1985; Redish, 2020). However, as
Ruohonen (2021) points out, they can be useful in providing a comparative evaluation of the overall
different degree of complexity between different texts, which is the purpose of the present analysis.
In order to have a clearer indication, in comparative terms, of the readability of the guidance
webpages, the comparison was made not only with legislative texts, but also with other text types
addressed to a non-specialized readership, that is, online news articles from the BBC website. The
choice of these texts was based on the fact that, according to a survey carried out by Ofcom (n.d.),
a high number of people in the UK refer to the BBC to obtain updates about Coronavirus. Moreo
ver, in the UK, the BBC services are the main source of news both online and offline, and one of
the most trusted (Nielsen et al., 2020). This data suggests that the lay public finds the information
provided in the BBC online news articles accessible and not overly complex. The Online News
Corpus comprises 125 news articles (95,715 words) from the BBC website (www.bbc.com) pro
viding information concerning measures introduced by the government in response to the Covid
19 pandemic. The articles included in the corpus were published in the period 2020–2021.
The analysis was carried out with a Corpus-based Translation Studies approach. Corpus Lin
guistics tools and concepts were applied in order to identify the distinguishing elements that recur
rently characterize the corpus of informative materials compared to the corpus of legislation.
Quantitative data obtained with the aid of the concordance software Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff
et al., 2004) was used as a basis for further qualitative research investigating the shifts between the
original legislative texts and their popularized version.
Since this study intended to identify the elements that distinguish popularized texts from leg
islative ones, the first step of the analysis involved a comparison of the word frequency lists for
nouns in the two corpora. The key 2–3-grams (lemmas) were then calculated in the Guidance
Corpus, in order to obtain a list of the most unusually frequent 2–3-grams in the Guidance Corpus
compared to the Legislation Corpus (i.e., the reference corpus). The list of key 2–3-grams was then
examined with the aim of identifying elements that distinguish the guidance texts from the legisla
tive texts at a morphosyntactic level.
The results of the corpus analysis provided an indication of the linguistic elements that occur fre
quently in the two corpora and that – based on the principle of Corpus Linguistics that “repeated events
are significant” (Stubbs, 2007, p. 130) – were worthy of further investigation. In order to shed light
on the strategies implemented during the rewording process, the analysis proceeded to investigate
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these elements with a qualitative approach, so as to identify the shifts between the two corpora. Since
the popularization process involved the recontextualization of the legislative texts from written docu
ments to webpages, the multimodal elements characterizing the guidance texts were also considered,
with a focus on their function in terms of knowledge communication and text organization.
Analysis
Readability
As mentioned in the previous section, the analysis of the corpus based on readability formulas was
intended as a preliminary step in the analysis, in order to obtain a general comparison of the overall
complexity of the two corpora (cf. Ruohonen, 2021). The results of the analysis carried out with
the online calculator available on ReadabilityFormulas.com (My Byline Media, n.d.) revealed that
the average complexity of the guidance texts is much lower than the legislative texts. In particular,
the average grade level for the guidance is 12, while it is 21 for the legislation. Guidance texts are
suitable for 17–18-year-olds and they are evaluated as “fairly difficult to read”, while legislative
texts are suitable for college graduates and they are labelled as “very difficult to read”. The per
centage of “hard words” (i.e., words of three or more syllables) in the Guidance Corpus is 17%,
while it is 20% in the Legislation Corpus.
While these results clearly indicate that guidance texts are less complex than legislative texts,
they also demonstrate that the former are not overly simplified either. In order to have an indication
of how the readability of guidance texts compares with texts that are the main source of news for
millions of people, the readability scores for the Online News Corpus were also calculated. The
results of the analysis reveal that BBC online news articles are more readable, with a grade level
10, have a standard/average level of difficulty, and are suitable for 14–15-year-olds and older. The
percentage of “hard words” is also lower in the BBC online news articles (11%).
This preliminary analysis provided, therefore, a general indication of the fact that guidance
texts are simplified compared to the original source texts (i.e., the legislation), but they also retain
a certain degree of complexity. The next sections report on the features that characterize the guid
ance texts differently from the legislative texts and the changes introduced during the process of
Lexical choices
The word frequency lists for the two corpora (Guidance Corpus and Legislation Corpus) were
extracted with the aid of Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2004). The top 100 most frequent words
in each corpus were considered and classified into four main semantic fields: (1) Reference to
stakeholders, (2) reference to the object of the legislation, (3) reference to conditions, tools, and
measures, and (4) reference to documents/sections in documents. In the cases where the same noun
could be classified in two different categories, it was included in both lists. Each semantic field was
investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively; the findings are reported as follows.
1 REFERENCE TO STAKEHOLDERS
The category of stakeholders contains nouns that refer to interested parties, either people or enti
ties that are in some way affected by the legislation. Table 15.1 shows the nouns belonging to this
semantic field in the Legislation Corpus and the Guidance Corpus.
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Table 15.1 Nouns referring to stakeholders in the Legislation Corpus and the Guidance Corpus
Legislation Corpus Guidance Corpus
Nouns (stakeholders) Frequency (per million) Nouns (stakeholders) Frequency (per million)
person 7,994 home 4,530

authority 2,097 people 3,351
england 1,815 staff 2,715
officer 1,752 resident 2,318
court 1,239 child 2,251
education 1,228 student 2,013
ireland 1,178 household 1,973
wales 1,140 patient 1,757
state 942 provider 1,629
child 931 nhs 1,576
secretary 931 england 1,571
ministers 871 school 1,399
worker 857 person 1,386
member 772 individual 1,289
scotland 760 employer 1,231
department 753 bubble 1,024
school 703 group 1,020
council 653 uk 1,006
institution 623 visitor 975
business 613 member 914
body 599 family 812
constable 585 college 755
childcare 563 education 746
government 640
childcare 582
hospital 578
apprentice 565
worker 521
friend 512
parent 494
manager 485
authority 441
Nouns from the Legislation Corpus tend to refer to institutions and entities (e.g., court; state;
department; school; council; institution; business; body) and to the specific roles of people work
ing within the institutions (e.g., officer; secretary; ministers; constable). On the contrary, the refer
ence to the roles among the public (e.g., person; worker) is more generic.
In contrast to the Legislation Corpus, the references to institutions in the Guidance Corpus are
less frequent (e.g., NHS; school; college; government), and there are no references to roles within
the institutions among the top 100 nouns, while reference to roles among the public is on the
contrary more frequent and more specific (e.g., staff; resident; student; patient; employer; appren
tice; parent). The shift from a general to a more specific reference is exemplified in the following
258
extracts, where the noun person found in the law (example [1] from UK Statutory Instrument 2020
No. 568) is changed to traveller in the guidance text (example [2]).1
(1) The Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (England) Regulations 2020
This regulation applies where a person (“P”) –
(a) arrives in England from outside the common travel area, . . .
(2) P must remain in isolation from others (“self-isolate”). . . .
(2) Guidance for investigating and managing individuals with a possible or confirmed SARS-
CoV-2 Variant of Concern or Variant Under Investigation
Travellers who are permitted to enter the UK from countries listed within the travel ban . . .
are currently required to self-isolate . . .
The shift from a more specific reference to institutional roles found in the Legislation Corpus to a more
generic reference in the Guidance Corpus can be seen in example (3) from UK Statutory Instrument
2020 No. 1005, and examples (4) and (5) from the related guidance texts. In example (3) from the
legislative text, the role of officer is defined precisely, by means of premodification, and the term con
stable is used to designate a different role within the police. The frequency of the term officer is much
lower in the Guidance Corpus compared to the Legislation Corpus (see Table 15.1), which reflects the
use of a more generic reference to the role (police officers, police), as can be seen in examples (4) and
(5). Interestingly, in example (5), the police are defined as local partners, which conveys to the lay
public the more reassuring idea of a supporting – rather than controlling – role played by the police.
(3) The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Collection of Contact Details etc. and Related Require
ments) Regulations 2020
In this regulation – (a) “authorised person” means (i) a constable; (ii) a police community
support officer;
(4) Guidance: COVID-19: Guidance for first responders
Police officers, staff and volunteers should not be performing clinical assessments.
(5) Guidance: COVID-19: Guidance for the safe use of places of worship
“A risk assessment should also consider the security of worshippers. This may require involv
ing local partners such as the police.”
The comparison between the two word-frequency lists also revealed that non-technical expres
sions in the Guidance Corpus frequently substitute the corresponding technical terms used in the
legislative texts. One example is the noun bubble used in place of linked household (see example
[6] from UK Statutory Instrument 2021 No. 364 and example [7] from the related guidance text).
(6) The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Steps) (England) Regulations 2021
. . . on their household being part of a linked childcare household with any other household
for the purposes of . . .
(7) Guidance: Making a childcare bubble with another household
If you live in a household . . . you can form a childcare bubble. . . . Childcare bubbles are
different from support bubbles
259
2 REFERENCE TO THE OBJECT OF THE LEGISLATION
The second semantic field that was taken into consideration was the object of legislation. Nouns
referring to an area or entity that was regulated by legal measures were included in the two word-
frequency lists. The comparison between the nouns included in Table 15.2 shows some similarities
between the nouns used in the two corpora.
The most frequent noun in the Legislation Corpus is health. This noun is the second most
frequent noun in the Guidance Corpus and has a very similar number of occurrences per million
words in both corpora.
The nouns service, education, school, care, and childcare are among the top 100 most frequent
nouns in both corpora, albeit with some differences in frequency. Despite the fact that there is no
one-to-one correspondence between the legislative texts and their rewritings, since information
from one single legislative text is often recontextualized in different guidance texts, the similar
ity between the two corpora as regards the nouns referring to the object of legislation reveals that
guidance texts tend to give similar relevance to many of the topics and legal issues found in the
original law.
In some cases, the different frequency of the same nouns found in the two corpora is due to
the fact that where a hypernym is used in the legislative texts to refer to the object of legisla
tion (e.g., education), the Guidance Corpus often introduces hyponyms (e.g., school and col
lege). As illustrated by example (8) from UK Statutory Instrument 2021 No. 364 and example
(9) from the guidance text, the general term gathering is used in the legislative text to refer to
many people meeting up a group, while the guidance text uses event, which is more specific.
The gathering organiser . . . in relation to a gathering takes the required precautions. . . . The
first requirement is that the gathering organiser or manager . . .
(9) Coronavirus (COVID-19) How to safely plan a wedding or civil partnership, or funeral, wake
or commemoration
If you choose to have your event in a garden of a private home, . . . and you plan on having
more than 30 guests at your event . . .
3 REFERENCE TO CONDITIONS, TOOLS, MEASURES
The word lists of nouns referring to conditions, tools, and measures include words that express a
condition under which certain measures need to be applied, the protective tools to be used, and the
steps to be followed, as well as the possible effects in case of breach of the law. Table 15.3 shows
the nouns belonging to this category extracted from the word frequency list of the top 100 most
frequent nouns in the Legislation Corpus and the Guidance Corpus.
Data show that nouns referring to the breach of law are frequent only in the Legislation Cor
pus (e.g., offence, penalty). The subsequent qualitative analysis revealed that, where reference to
breach of law and penalties is occasionally made in the Guidance Corpus, it is reformulated and a
non-technical word is used. As exemplified in example (10) from UK Statutory Instrument 2021
No. 364 and example (11) from the guidance text, while the term fixed penalty notice is used in the
Legislation Corpus, the more colloquial word fine is introduced in the Guidance Corpus, followed
by the legal term which is added as a gloss. Interestingly, after the legal term fixed penalty notice
260
Table 15.2 Nouns referring to the object of legislation in the Legislation Corpus and the Guidance Corpus
Nouns Frequency Nouns Frequency

(object of legislation) (per million) (object of legislation) (per million)
Health 3,064 care 4,971

Service 1,266 health 3,196
education 1,228 service 1,686
gathering 813 school 1,399
school 703 event 944
hearing 684 work 896
tenancy 673 travel 808
registration 666 college 755
care 663 education 746
business 613 facility 693
transmission 563 safety 671
childcare 563 visit 635
activity 609
childcare 582
transport 556
has been introduced for the first time in the guidance, and its meaning is made clear to the reader,
it is then used in the subsequent part of the text as an alternative to the synonymous word fine.
Amount of fixed penalty: Large gathering offences
14. – (1) In the case of a fixed penalty notice issued to a person in respect of a large gathering
offence, the amount of the fixed penalty to be specified . . .
(11) Guidance: Coronavirus restrictions what you can and cannot do
If you break the rules
The police can take action against you if you meet in larger groups. This includes . . . issuing fines
(fixed penalty notices). You can be given a fixed penalty notice. . . . You can be fined . . .
The comparison between the two word lists also shows that specific means of protection are men
tioned in the Guidance Corpus (e.g., ppe; covering; mask; ventilation), whereas in the Legislation
Corpus the hypernym protection, which encompasses all the different means, tends to be used.
Similarly, while in the Guidance Corpus specific protection measures are mentioned (e.g., isola
tion; distancing), the hypernym restriction tends to be used more frequently in the legislative texts.
Nouns with a negative connotation (e.g., requirement, restriction, offence, penalty) are frequent
in the Legislation Corpus, while they have a lower number of occurrences in the Guidance Corpus.
On the contrary, references to care, support, and advice have a higher frequency in the Guidance
Corpus and tend to project a more positive light on the information communicated in the guidance
texts. The analysis also showed that the Guidance Corpus uses a broader range of synonyms to
refer to the same concept (e.g., Covid-19; Coronavirus; infection; virus; outbreak; spread; pan
demic) than the Legislation Corpus, in terms of frequency.
261
Table 15.3 Nouns referring to conditions, tools, and measures in the Legislation Corpus and the Guidance
Corpus

(conditions, tools, measures) (per million) (conditions, tools, measures) (per million)
coronavirus 4,822 covid-19 7,462

provision 3,576 care 4,971
period 2,832 test 4,344
date 2,010 risk 4,035
notice 1,936 contact 2,962
end 1,931 symptom 2,803
requirement 1,874 support 2,331
restriction 1,796 assessment 1,973
effect 1,659 coronavirus 1,938
power 1,572 advice 1,805
proceeding 1,557 face 1,801
protection 1,472 infection 1,629
detail 1,418 information 1,620
day 1,203 testing 1,598
content 1,157 ppe 1,514
offence 1,156 result 1,342
case 1,079 use 1,329
place 1,069 case 1,298
information 1,052 time 1,240
time 888 period 1,170
duty 810 measure 1,121
emergency 690 hand 1,011
care 663 isolation 949
commencement 525 control 927
condition 520 covering 922
assessment 520 transmission 900
area 514 protection 812
penalty 503 procedure 790
step 490 pcr 790
virus 790
trace 768
mask 746
distancing 710
outbreak 706
rule 662
spread 627
equipment 613
metre 609
level 600
number 596
ventilation 596
hour 596
precaution 591
pandemic 560
262
4 REFERENCE TO DOCUMENTS/SECTIONS IN DOCUMENTS
As the comparison between the two word-frequency lists in Table 15.4 shows, references to acts (e.g.,
act, regulation, document, version) and sections of acts (e.g., section, paragraph, sub-paragraph, arti
cle) are very frequent in the Legislation Corpus, while they are very limited in the Guidance Corpus.
Where reference to acts and regulations is occasionally made in the guidance texts, the non-
technical term rule is used most frequently, as examples (12) and (13) illustrate.

The rules on weddings and civil partnership ceremonies and wedding receptions or civil part
nership celebrations changed on . . .
(13) Guidance: Travel to England from another country during Coronavirus
The rules for testing and quarantine when you arrive in England are different for each list
Similarly, the legal term amendment is replaced with the noun change in the Guidance Corpus
(example 14).
(14) Guidance: Admission and care of residents in a care home during COVID-19
This note outlines the changes to the “Admission and care of residents during a COVID-19
incident in a care home”
Table 15.4 Nouns referring to documents/sections in the Legislation Corpus and Guidance Corpus

(documents/sections in documents) (per million) (documents/sections in documents) (per million)
act 8,468 guidance 5,753

section 5,439 rule 662
paragraph 4,912 list 582
regulation 4,396
schedule 3,383
direction 3,169
part 3,145
document 3,021
regulations 2,762
reg 2,060
sub-paragraph 1,867
s.i. 1,785
subsection 1,775
version 1,572
legislation 1,544
annotation 1,217
para 965
amendment 929
article 769
263
Text organization
The key 2–3-grams (lemmas) were calculated in the Guidance Corpus with the aid of Sketch
Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2004). The Legislation Corpus was used as the reference corpus in order
to obtain an indication of the most unusually frequent 2–3-grams in the Guidance Corpus com
pared to the Legislation Corpus (Table 15.5).
Table 15.5 Key 2–3-grams in the Guidance Corpus compared to the Legislation Corpus
Key 2–3-grams Guidance Corpus Legislation Corpus

(Frequency per million)
if you 3,355.85 6.28
should be 2,733.25 18.85
you be 2,296.11 0.00
need to 1,863.38 29.85
care home 1,814.81 15.71
you should 1,585.20 0.00
you can 1,523.38 0.00
of covid-19 1,492.47 0.00
such as 1,457.15 62.84
for example 1,284.94 32.99
if you be 1,284.94 0.00
can be 1,276.11 61.27
they be 1,231.95 205.80
risk of 1,227.54 72.27
guidance on 1,205.46 0.00
risk assessment 1,201.04 0.00
who have 1,196.63 358.19
this guidance 1,178.96 0.00
guidance for 1,125.98 0.00
you have 1,121.56 0.00
health and 1,108.31 196.38
will be 1,086.24 87.98
have a 1,077.41 98.97
the risk 1,055.33 45.56
follow the 1,042.08 31.42
if they 1,002.34 70.70
at home 993.51 0.00
continue to 967.02 113.11
face covering 900.78 45.56
test and 896.37 0.00
they should 830.13 0.00
test result 821.30 9.43
contact with 812.47 26.71
the guidance 785.98 7.86
how to 781.56 42.42
and trace 772.73 0.00
test and trace 768.31 0.00
the care 750.65 34.56
test positive 746.24 40.85
if you have 715.33 0.00
264
The results of the analysis indicate that the hypothetical structure introduced by if is very fre
quent (if you; if you+BE; if they; if you+HAVE). As examples (15) and (16) show, this structure is
used to communicate the law by referring to specific hypothetical situations.
(15) Guidance on shielding and protecting people who are clinically extremely vulnerable from
COVID-19
if you are meeting friends and family . . . , you can make a personal choice on whether to
socially distance within your own group
(16) Guidance for commissioners and providers of services for people who use drugs or alcohol
if someone has any of the symptoms above they should immediately self-isolate at home
The high frequency of key clusters formed by the pronoun you provides evidence of the fact that
one of the changes introduced during the rewriting process is that the recipients are addressed
directly in the guidance texts. In example (17) (from UK Statutory Instrument 2020 No. 814), rules
concerning furlough are provided using third person (employee), while in example (18) (from the
Guidance Corpus) they are communicated using the second person pronoun you.
(17) The Employment Rights Act 1996 (Coronavirus, Calculation of a Week’s Pay) Regulations 2020
. . . any reference in these Regulations to an employee who is . . . “furloughed” is to an
employee who is . . . a furloughed employee or a flexibly-furloughed employee.
(18) Guidance: What to do if you’re employed and cannot work
This is known as being put “on furlough” or “on flexible furlough”, and means that you’ll
get at least 80% of your normal pay.
The analysis of the key 2–3-grams also provided evidence of the fact that another recurrent change
introduced in the guidance texts concerns exemplification. As can be seen in examples (19) and
(20), the additions introduced by such as and for example contribute to making the rules that are
communicated clearer and more understandable.
(19) Guidance: Higher education COVID-19 operational guidance

It is important that shared areas within accommodation such as kitchens and bathrooms are
cleaned regularly to minimise the risk of transmission. . . .
This means, for example, that you and your support bubble can meet with another household,
even if the total group size is more than 6 people
The results of the analysis of the key 2–3-grams also show that guidance texts are characterized
by a much higher frequency of should, need, and can than the legislative texts, thus revealing that
guidance texts tend to provide information on rules and regulations in the form of advice (21),
necessity (22), and possibility (23) rather than imposition.
(21) Guidance for maintaining services within health and care settings
To ensure maximum workplace risk mitigation, organisations should undertake local risk
assessments based on the measures as prioritised in the hierarchy of controls
265
(22) Coronavirus restrictions what you can and cannot do

Attendees will need to show proof of vaccination or a recent negative test
(23) Guidance: Admission and care of residents in a care home during COVID-19
The fund can be used to help maintain the normal wages of staff who may need to self-isolate
Multimodal elements
The analysis took into consideration the multimodal elements that were introduced as additions
during the rewriting process from the legislative text to the guidance texts. Given the abundance
of hyperlinks that are present on the guidance webpages, the analysis focused on these elements
with the aim of identifying the function they serve.
As regards the layout, the hyperlinks are usually either embedded in the text or inserted as
clickable titles. Both text hyperlinks (taking the reader to another page or document) and book
mark hyperlinks (taking the reader directly to another part of the webpage) are very frequent. The
present study takes into consideration text hyperlinks and classifies them into seven categories
based on their function.
The first category includes hyperlinks that lead to other guidance texts on the GOV.UK website
(www.gov.uk/coronavirus). For example, in the guidance Making a support bubble with another
household the hyperlink to the guidance Making a childcare bubble with another household is
embedded in the text (example [24]; hyperlink underlined).
(24) (Guidance: Making a support bubble with another household)

Support bubbles are different from childcare bubbles.
The second category is represented by hyperlinks that connect the readers with the original legisla
tive texts, if they require a more in-depth knowledge of the law concerning a certain topic (exam
ple [25]; hyperlink underlined).
(25) Guidance: Stepdown of infection control precautions and discharging COVID-19 patients
and asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infected patients
Please note that this guidance is of a general nature and that an employer should consider the
specific conditions of each individual place of work and comply with all applicable legisla
tion, including the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
Hyperlinks falling into the third category connect the readers with the website of other depart
ments of the British government or external institutions. In example (26), the link (underlined in
the example) takes the readers directly to the website of the National Health Service, where they
can download the NHS Covid-19 app referred to in the guidance.
(26) Guidance: Coronavirus: How to stay safe and help prevent the spread
Using the NHS COVID-19 app helps stop the spread of the virus by informing you that you
have been in close contact with someone who has since tested positive for COVID-19,
even if you do not know each other.
266
The fourth category comprises hyperlinks that lead the readers to other webpages which represent
the rules visually and provide supplementary advice in the form of infographics or YouTube videos
(e.g., how to hand wash step by step, how to wear a face covering). This advice represents an addi
tion to the rules and regulations provided in the original legislation.
The fifth category includes hyperlinks that connect the reader to other versions of the same
text: Either the translation into other languages or the intralingual translations into easy read or
large print versions (e.g., Meeting Friends and Family). Hyperlinks in the sixth category lead to
different webpages where additional information is provided, such as a general overview of the
situation, updates, and key measures in place. The seventh category comprises hyperlinks that
provide the reader with forms and templates necessary to fulfil the requirements of the law (e.g.,
risk assessment template for weddings).
Conclusion
This case study provided an insight into the strategies that characterize the popularization of legal
knowledge as a form of intralingual translation in a digital environment. The study indicated that
the popularization of legislative texts satisfies the conditions put forward in Zethsen and Hill-
Madsen’s (2016, p. 705) broad definition of translation. Firstly, the existence of a source text,
in this case the Coronavirus legislation, from which the target texts derive. Secondly, the fact
that the target texts result in a new product, characterized by a different communicative purpose
–an informative rather than prescriptive purpose – and by different language features and form.
Thirdly, the fact that there is a relationship of relevant similarity between source and target texts
and that this similarity varies depending on the skopos.
The skopos of the popularized texts in the Guidance Corpus is to inform the lay public about
the rules imposed by the legislation, as well as to provide guidance and advice as regards their
implementation in people’s everyday lives. In order to be accessible to a wider audience, the leg
islative texts have undergone a process of rewording that simplify the texts at different levels. At a
lexical level, the changes concern omissions and additions in the target texts. Omissions concern,
for example, reference to institutions (e.g., department; council; body), official roles within insti
tutions (e.g., secretary; ministers), cross reference to legal documents and sections in documents
(e.g., act; amendment; article), reference to breach of law (e.g., offence; penalty). Additions can
be seen in the use of hyponyms that refer to specific events, people, and tools (e.g., ppe; covering;
mask) in place of the hypernyms found in the legislative texts (e.g., protection).
The omissions and additions reveal a shift in focus from the institutions to the public, and from
authority to support (e.g., the police referred to as local partners) in the target texts. The high
number of occurrences of nouns with a positive connotation (e.g., care, support, advice) and the
frequent use of the modals should, need, and can which characterize the Guidance Corpus also
provide an indication of this shift. While the legislative texts express the law in terms of obliga
tions and prohibitions, the popularized texts disseminate knowledge about legal measures in terms
of necessity, advice, and possibility.
The frequent use of hyponyms is also a result of the fact that, in order to communicate the legal
measures, the popularized texts make use of hypothetical, concrete situations that the reader can
easily relate to, while the legislative texts express rules and regulations in abstract terms. This
confirms the tendency to shift from the conceptual to the ontic level in popularization identified by
Simonnæs (2003, cited in Engberg, 2013, p. 20). This tendency was also found at a morphosyn
tactic level in the frequent use of the second person pronoun you to address the recipient directly
267
when communicating measures in the guidance texts, as well as the high number of concrete
examples provided.
The aforementioned changes introduced in the popularized texts, as well as the process of
“de-terminologisation” (Montalt-Resurrecció & González Davies, 2007) whereby technical terms
(e.g., linked household) are substituted with colloquial expressions (e.g., bubble) also affect the
register, which is less formal compared to the legislative texts. Despite the fact that legal terms
are often replaced by non-technical near-synonyms, in some cases they are retained in the form of
glosses added to their non-technical equivalent (e.g., fixed penalty notice/fine); on the one hand,
this ensures that some level of precision is maintained in the popularized texts, while, on the other
hand, it allows readers to gradually familiarize with the specialized terminology (cf. Gülich, 2003).
At a textual level, the readability formulas revealed that the popularized texts are easier to read
than the legislative texts, but they are still classified as fairly difficult to read. The comparison with
the reference corpus of BBC online news concerning Coronavirus prevention measures confirmed
that guidance texts are more complex than the online news articles. This provides further indica
tion of the fact that the changes introduced during the rewording process do not over-simplify
guidance texts, thus preserving accuracy and a certain degree of technicality.
The process of recontextualization of the legislative texts from written documents to digital
multimodal texts also contributes to simplification. The numerous hyperlinks added to the target
texts allow readers to choose the level of depth of the information (ranging from the documents
of the original legislation to infographics or YouTube videos) without adding complexity to the
text itself. Moreover, the fact that hyperlinks also give direct access to instruments needed to
implement the legislation (e.g., forms and templates) “redirects” the purpose of the target texts to
become a practical tool for the lay public. As the case study has highlighted, the digital environ
ment offers new opportunities for expert-to-lay public adaptations that extend the boundaries of
intralingual translation: While maintaining a relation of similarity with the source text, the target
texts acquire new forms, communicative purposes, and functions that the readers can co-construct
and customize according to their needs.
Note
1 All quotations and extracts fromwww.legislation.gov.uk/ and fromwww.gov.uk/ are used in the present paper
under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/
version/3/).
Further reading
Bhatia, V. K., Chiavetta, E., & Sciarrino, S. (Eds.). (2015). Variations in specialized genres: Standardization
and popularization. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag.
Engberg, J., Luttermann, K., Cacchiani, S., & Preite, C. (Eds.). (2018). Popularization and knowledge media
tion in the law. LIT.
Kermas, S., & Christiansen, T. (Eds.). (2013). The popularization of specialized discourse across communi
ties and cultures. Edipuglia.
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Zethsen, K. K., & Hill-Madsen, A. (2016). Intralingual translation and its place within translation studies – A
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PART IV
Rewording and editing
16
EDITING AND INTRALINGUAL
TRANSLATION
Rewriting for clarity and consistency
Linda Pillière
Introduction
A novel is usually associated in most people’s minds with the name of a specific author, but writers
do not write in isolation, locked away in some remote ivory tower, producing a book out of thin air.
Before a book is published, it has undergone a great deal of rewriting by the author, as Lessinger
(2020) demonstrates, but also at every stage in its production. Rewriting may be prompted by a
senior editor’s suggestions or by the need to meet a publisher’s specific in-house norms or style
sheet, or even by the suggestions of a copyeditor in the name of consistency and clarity. All these
rewritings can be categorised as intralingual translation insofar as they entail rewording or the
“interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language” (Jakobson, 1959,
p. 233). This chapter explores editing as a form of intralingual translation, seeking to shed light
on both the processes involved and the underlying reasons for the process. In doing so, it will also
compare and contrast the techniques and procedures of editing and translation.
The chapter will be divided into four parts. The first part will investigate translation as a
form of rewriting. The second and third parts will compare and contrast editing and translating
and examine the role of the editor in the rewriting of the typescript prior to publication. This
will require a brief presentation of the various roles of the editor and a comparison of the role
of the editor to that of a translator. In the fourth part, the rewriting techniques of the editor will
be analysed in more detail, by comparing correspondence between authors and their editors and
studying edited typescripts prior to publication. I will propose a typology of the various changes
that are suggested before studying in more detail some of the microstrategies involved and how
these may compare to interlingual strategies. My corpus will be using research material available
at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) which houses the archives of many twentieth- and twenty-
first-century writers. I have chosen to focus mainly on two of those authors: Jim Crace (1946–)
and Ian McEwan (1948–) as both are British writers of a comparable age, and their works have
been checked by both British copyeditors and US copyeditors for publication in the USA. The
archives of both writers also offer comparable material. The works I will use for case studies
are Crace’s Harvest (2013) and McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998). The limited time span in which
these novels were written allows me to offer a synchronic analysis of copyediting as a form of
273 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-21

Linda Pillière
Rewriting and translation

Rewriting as a form of translation was initially introduced by Jakobson (1959, p. 114) in his defi
nition of intralingual translation as “rewording” or “an interpretation of verbal signs by means
of other signs of the same language”. This definition implied that it was only intralingual trans
lation that involved rewriting. However, in his seminal work, André Lefevere (1992) proposed
that rewriting should be considered as an umbrella term for every type of translation, adaptation,
editing and redrafting, all of which are constrained by economic, ideological or aesthetic norms.
Lefevere’s definition of rewriting as “the adaptation of a work of literature to a different audi
ence, with the intention of influencing the way in which that audience reads the work” (1982, p. 4),
introduces a shift away from considering the concept of language as the primary object of transla
tion studies, be that rewriting in the same language, or from one language to another, to the social
actors involved in the process of translation: “Who rewrites, why, under what circumstances, for
which audience” (Lefevere, 1992, p. 7). This implies that “translation can no longer be analysed in
isolation, but . . . should be studied as part of a whole system of texts and the people who produce,
support, propagate, oppose, censor them” (Lefevere, 1985, p. 237). Whatever degree of rewriting
is involved, “rewriters adapt, manipulate the originals they work with to some extent, usually to
make them fit in with the dominant, or one of the dominant ideological and poetological currents
of their time” (Lefevere, 1992, p. 8). There are thus two principal forces at work influencing the
rewriting: Poetics and ideology. Lefevere sees poetics as “an inventory of literary devices, genres,
motifs, prototypical characters and situations, and symbols” (1992, p. 26), an internal constraint
within the literary system, while ideology is an external constraint, represented by government,
patronage and other agents of authority. Lefevere’s approach thus goes beyond a purely linguistic
approach to translation that might focus on microstrategies, to considering the underlying reasons
for the rewriting. Moreover, if rewriting can be considered common to all forms of translation,
rewriting and adaptations, then we need to consider the ways in which the interventions of an edi
tor may be comparable to that of a translator.
Translating and editing: two sides of the same coin?

Although it may not be immediately apparent to the general reader, both editors and translators
share many points in common (Greenberg, 2018; Pillière, 2021). Both remain invisible to the gen
eral reader: Editors “are always in the ‘backroom’” (McCormack, 2006, p. 83), rather than centre
stage, while translators’ names go largely unnoticed by the general reader who tends to identify
a translated work with the original author. Indeed, “for readers who cannot check the translation
against the original, the translation, quite simply, is the original” (Lefevere, 1992, p.110, original
emphasis).
Moreover, both translators and editors rewrite the source text. Indeed, for novelist and journal
ist Louise Doughty, editing and rewriting are interchangeable terms (Greenberg, 2015, p. 104), and
according to Ileene Smith, vice-president and executive editor of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, “the
editor’s engagement with the text is creative in the way that a fine translator is creative” (Green
berg, 2015, pp. 50–51). For Ginna (2017, p. 3), the resemblance between editor and translator is
more a question of communication; the editor is “a connector – a conduit from writer to reader –
but also a translator, improving the communication from each to the other”. Both editors and trans
lators rewrite with the potential reader in mind, seeking to correct or avoid textual ambiguities,
while at the same time wishing to respect the author’s ideas. Mossop (2001/2014, p. 18) takes this
a step further, drawing a parallel between the editor and “a language therapist who improves the
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Editing and intralingual translation
text to ensure ease of mental processing and suitability of the text for future users”. The role of
the editor as a “language therapist”, seeking to improve the readability of a text, is clearly evoked
by Nan Talese in her correspondence with Ian McEwan concerning The Child in Time, where she
suggests, “it is important in this novel to Americanize the words and make clear any scenes that
might now lose the reader” if the novel is “to reach that larger American audience” that she feels
McEwan’s novel deserves (McEwan, 1987b).
The grey area between editing and translating was recognised by Stetting (1989, p. 374) who
coined the term “transediting” and made a distinction between three types of transediting (Stetting,
1989, p. 376): “Adaptation to a standard of efficiency in expression or ‘cleaning up transediting’”;
“adaptation to the intended function of the translated text in its new social context: ‘situational
transediting’”; and “adaptation to the needs and conventions of the target culture ‘cultural tran
sediting’”. Yet despite the common characteristics shared by editing and translating, there has been
little research on editing fiction per se with the notable exceptions of Hemmungs-Wirtén (2001)
and Schmid (2009). What research there has been has tended to focus on editing journalism (see
Bielsa & Bassnett, 2009; Cheesman & Nohl, 2010).
Editing fiction is more complex than editing journalism insofar as it involves a greater degree
of creativity. Schneider (2023) goes as far as to argue that copyediting fiction requires a different
mindset to that required for editing non-fiction. Among the differences that she notes are those of
grammar and style which “are much more informal and cutting-edge in fiction . . . particularly in
dialogue and first-person narration” (Schneider, 2023, p. 135). She suggests ignoring misplaced
either/only, the who/whom distinction, comma splices and sentence fragments, all of which would
probably fall victim to the blue pencil in journalism. Despite these differences, the values of “con
sistency and clarity” (Schneider, 2023, p. 138) are still the main guidelines for editors in both
fiction and journalism.
Contrary to an interlingual translation, the rewriting practised by editors is, of course, always
submitted to authors for approval, and how an author reacts to the suggestions will vary. Authors
who are confident about their use of English and are firmly established writers may well write
“stet” opposite the suggested changes far more often than those who are writing their first novel.
Similarly, copyeditors may vary in how they present their suggestions, often adding an “ok?”
after their suggestion (McEwan, 1998). In interlingual translation, a translator’s rewriting becomes
apparent when the source text is compared to the target text, although there is always the possi
bility that the rewriting may be the work of a copyeditor, rather than that of a translator (Kruger,
2017). In intralingual translation, changes only become apparent when two editions of a work
are compared, as in the case of a US edition and a UK edition (Pillière, 2021), or when the type
script and editorial correspondence are compared. In the first instance, it is of course possible that
the author themselves made some changes for the US edition, especially if they themselves are
American. This may be the case for the substitution of cultural references, for example, but when
grammatical substitutions are made for structures that are acceptable on both sides of the Atlantic
but are specifically criticised by US style guides, the changes are more likely to have been made
by a copyeditor.
The various roles of editors as rewriters and translators

The rewriting role of editors occurs at various levels and can be far more varied than that of a
translator. A general distinction is usually made between substantive editing, which focuses on the
book’s content, and in the case of a novel, its plot and characterisation; line editing which con
centrates on the finer details of content and style, and copyediting which ensures the manuscript
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is ready for printing by checking spelling and removing ambiguities, repetitions and grammatical
errors. Substantive editing may include advice on reorganising passages, omission and addition.
Correspondence between Nan Talese, then publisher and editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin, and
Ian McEwan, on the manuscript of The Child in Time, provides an example of how Talese suggests
reworking the opening of the novel:
I have read the beginning of the novel starting at page 11, and while I mainly think this is
the perfect solution to the repetition of the early first meeting, I think something is lost in not
setting up the committee and the place in time at the outset.
If you start at page one, and follow to the top of page three, we will have the purpose of
the committee introduced. Then you could cut to page 11 and write a transitional paragraph
after line 8 (. . . attention and say nothing.), or even include the next two sentences to “. . .
what he was going to do about himself”.
(McEwan, 1986)
In some cases, such structural rewriting occurs between two editions of a novel. Bill Bryson’s
Notes from a Small Island (1996), for example, has been reorganised for the US reader. Its ini
tial chapter begins by focusing on Bryson’s personal observations about life in Britain, unlike
the UK edition (1995) which gives a more chronological sequence of events with a prologue
that describes Bryson’s initial arrival as a foreigner in the UK in 1973. Bryson’s disembark
ing from the midnight ferry at Dover “on a foggy night in 1973” (Bryson, 1995, p. 19) is not
mentioned in the US edition until several pages later. Such structural rewriting can obviously
introduce important changes to the narrative and influence how events are perceived by the
reader. In the case of Bryson, the restructuring of the US edition results in a change of tone,
with the narrator regarding the British from the perspective of an outsider, that of an American
first focusing on the foibles and idiosyncratic behaviour of the British, before turning to his
personal history. The UK edition, on the other hand, highlights the length of time that the nar
rator has been in the UK, thus establishing his credentials both as an expert able to speak of all
things British and as an “insider” which, in turn, results in the narrator no longer adopting an
“us and them” approach.
Rewriting on the macrolevel is not limited to changes in the overall plot structure. It can also
occur when a work containing a number of cultural references is republished in another Eng
lish-speaking country where the references could prove problematic. Works such as those by Bill
Bryson illustrate this quite clearly. The republication of the work in the United States involves
changing the standpoint of the speaker and rendering explicit what would have been understood
by the British reader. The following examples from The Road to Little Dribbling (Bryson, 2015a,
2015b) illustrate this point:
Everyone knows one thing about Skegness, that is that it is bracing.

(Bryson, 2015a, p. 323)
Everyone in Britain knows one thing about Skegness, a coastal resort in Lincolnshire, and
that is that it is bracing.
(Bryson, 2015b, p. 251)
Lincolnshire is a long way from everywhere.

(Bryson, 2015a, p. 324)
276
Lincolnshire is a big, flat, boring, empty country a long way away from anywhere.
(Bryson, 2015b, p. 252)
Such additions are short but reveal a difference in point of view: “Everyone” is no longer inclusive
of the British reader since Skegness is no longer presented as easily identifiable, and in the second
quotation a more critical stance is taken towards Lincolnshire, which would risk alienating British
readers from that county. Explicitations can sometimes run to several paragraphs, adding informa
tion that the narrator, adopting the persona of a US citizen writing to and for US citizens, deems
interesting for the new readership. Thus, in the US edition (Bryson, 2015b, p. 285) there are two
extra paragraphs added to the text’s beginning, “Speaking of islands, here is an interesting fact.
Nobody knows how many islands there are in the British Isles”. The rewriting here goes beyond
an explicitation of a cultural reference and reveals a different stance in relation to the British and
to the reader. Bryson’s works are an excellent example of extensive rewriting that can occur when
a work is republished on the other side of the Atlantic. Such extensive rewriting is rarely found in
interlingual translation, although ideological constraints may engender some omissions or rewrit
ing, especially in translated children’s literature (Borodo, 2020).
Line editors and copyeditors, on the other hand, are concerned with the finer details of a text,
the types of changes more easily identified with translation strategies. However, in practice, the
distinction between these different editorial roles is less obvious, added to which the titles given to
the various roles may change slightly from one publishing house to another. Writing to McEwan
(McEwan, 1997) about his novel Enduring Love, Pascal Cariss, then copyeditor with Jonathan
Cape, combines the typical queries of a copyeditor – “minor confusions, the odd repetition” – with
comments of a more substantive nature regarding the plot itself:
Most of what follows is, editorially, nickel and dime stuff: minor confusions, the odd repeti
tion or potential inconsistency. However, I have one larger question arising from when Joe
suddenly remembers the significance of the drawn curtains and his mind races forward. . . .
I guess I expected the implications of Clérambault’s theory to be revealed. My worries are,
first the reader feels cheated of a scene you’ve almost led him (or her) to expect; second, that
since the reader’s only access to the implications of de Clérambault’s syndrome at this time
. . . the plot here will appear overly rigged.
Similarly, Nan Talese may well focus on plot structure and characterisation as editor-in-chief, but
that does not prevent her from drawing attention to details usually considered to be within the
remit of a copyeditor; in correspondence to McEwan regarding The Child in Time, Talese not only
suggests numerous cuts (substantive editing) but also substitutions of a proper noun for a pronoun
(Stephen for he) or everyone for most people (line editing) (McEwan, 1987a).
If the work of an editor can be compared to that of a translator, the question then arises as
to whether they both use the same strategies and techniques. Translation strategies have been
approached from a number of different perspectives and have been identified as operating at both
the macrolevel and the microlevel.
At the macrolevel, various scholars have identified translation universals (Baker, 1996), laws
(Chesterman, 1997/2016; Toury, 2004) or norms (Hermans, 1999). Following Baker (1996),
most have focused on the four universals that she proposes: Explicitation, the addition of extra
information or specification of terms for the target reader; simplification which may be lexi
cal, stylistic or syntactic (Laviosa Braithwaite, 2001, p. 288); normalisation or a tendency to
“conform to patterns and practices which are typical of the target language, even to the point
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of exaggerating them” (Baker, 1996, p. 176) and levelling-out which refers to the tendency of
translations to converge towards the middle of a continuum with respect to their features and
so to standardise the language. The concept of translation universals has had a mixed reception,
and space does not allow me to present the various arguments here (see Dam-Jensen & Heine,
2013; House, 2008; Pym, 2008). Suffice to say that the four universals are generally analysed
through the use of specific linguistic features. Explicitation is found in the introduction of the
optional complementiser that (Olohan & Baker, 2000; Williams, 2005) or the addition of linking
adverbials (Mutesayire, 2004). Introducing inclusive language or avoiding neologisms is typical
of normalisation while simplification is reflected in lexical density (Laviosa, 1998) and mean
word length (Kruger & van Rooy, 2012). These universals have sometimes been placed under
umbrella terms such as standardisation (Toury, 1995; Mossop, 2001/2014), decomplexification
(Zanettin, 2012, p. 13), deforming tendencies (Berman, 1985/2012) and risk aversion (Pym,
2008). Whether one accepts the concept of universals or not, most scholars seem to agree that
there is “an almost general tendency – irrespective of the translator’s identity, language, genre,
period, and the like – to explicate in the translation information that is only implicit in the origi
nal text” (Toury, 1980, p. 60).
Insofar as editing, like translation, is a form of mediated discourse, it is hardly surprising
that it has also been analysed in terms of universal strategies (Lanstyák & Heltai, 2012; Ulrych
& Murphy, 2008) even though empirical studies on the existence of universals in edited texts,
unedited texts and translated texts have not been conclusive (Kruger, 2012; Bisiada, 2017).
Kruger’s (2012) study is especially interesting as it focuses on edited texts, unedited texts and
translated texts. She points out that despite their similarities, fundamental differences exist
between editing and interlingual translation. The latter is concerned with producing a new
text and thus resorts more easily to explicitation or simplification whereas editing is more
constrained and conventional. This leads her to suggest that editing may have its own specific
linguistic features and that some features found in translation might be the work of editors and
not translators. Her hypothesis is validated by Bisiada (2017) who applies Kruger’s univer
sals to German and concludes that a more detailed analysis of editing is required to ascertain
whether features that are identified as being typical of translated texts may in fact be the result
of revisions and editorial interventions. A further study (Kruger, 2017) provides “support for
the hypothesis that editing may affect texts in terms of formal and propositional explicitness,
the degree of normalisation or conventionalisation, and relative complexity” (Kruger, 2017,
p. 147). This suggests that the features commonly associated with interlingual translation
might actually be the result of editing and revising (intralingual translation), thus calling into
question the clearcut boundaries between intra- and interlingual translation that Jakobson’s
tripartite distinction seems to suggest. Although these studies do not focus on fiction, therefore
raising the question as to whether their conclusions are transferrable, they nevertheless provide
a useful tool for exploring whether the editing tendencies that have been observed in transla
tions can also be applied to any edited text.
At the microlevel, strategies commonly identified with interlingual translation, such as sub
stitution or expansion, can also be found in the editorial interventions, although the underlying
reasons may well be different to those found in interlingual translation. Zethsen (2009) points out
that the strategies or shifts found in intralingual translation have all been identified in interlingual
translation. A number of typologies for these strategies exists, starting with Vinay and Darbelnet’s
(1958/1995) study and its seven microstrategies – adaptation, calque, equivalence, modulation,
borrowing, literal translation and transposition – and further developed by Baker (1992/2018),
Catford (1965), Chesterman (1997/2016) and Newmark (1988), among others.
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A typology of copyediting modifications

Robin (2014, 2018) proposes a typology of revisional interventions on the basis “of language
and translational rules, norms and strategies” (Robin, 2018, p. 155). She presents five catego
ries: Rule-based, norm-based, strategy-based, preference-based and defective-based. Rule-based
modifications offer no alternatives and remove grammatical errors. Norm-based modifications
are optional but conform to the norms of the target language; if they are not applied the text may
read as unidiomatic, or stylistically original. In the photocopied typescript of The Remains of the
Day, submitted by the agent to Faber, there are a number of handwritten annotations by the then
editor Robert McCrum that are norm-based. He suggests replacing America with the United States
(Ishiguro, 1988, p. 2) and sink (Ishiguro, 1988, p. 29) with basin. Deviating from the norm may
of course be intentional on the part of the author, especially in literary texts. Crace, for example,
is recognised for his use of neologisms and has even been labelled as a “consummate wordsmith”
(Flood, 2015). Many of his neologisms are slight deviations from the lexicon such as cuissardes
instead of cuisses for a frog or hock of bread instead of hunk of bread or even a brunette of bread
instead of a baguette. Needless to say, the copyeditor, Donna Poppy, queried all these neologisms
(Crace, 2001), but Crace refused to admit any changes.
Contrary to norm and rule-based modifications, strategy-based modifications are optional and
aim at making the text more readable and accessible. According to Robin (2018, p. 157) such
modifications obey Grice’s (1975) maxims such as “the general principles of communication and
cooperation, in accordance with conversational maxims such as adequate and truthful informa
tion, clarity, relevance, brief and orderly manner of speech”. Preference-based changes, unlike the
categories mentioned so far, are unnecessary and reflect the reviser’s personal preference. Finally,
defective-based modifications are changes that are erroneous.
Given that Robin’s research focuses on revisions carried out on translations, I have slightly
modified her typology to represent more closely the possible modifications of a copyeditor (see
Table 16.1). To Robin’s initial categories I have added content-based modifications, as copyedi
tors also check for factual and logical errors, along with lay-out based modifications as some
copyeditors also suggest changes concerning paragraphs, titles and so on. Finally, I have rela
belled strategy-based modifications and used the term “style-based”, a term closer to Mossop’s
(2001/2014, p. 134) group C revision parameters. This term covers removal of awkward phrasing
and enhancing textual cohesion and readability. Under this heading can be found some of the
strategy-based modifications outlined by Robin, such as avoidance of verbosity and clarity but also
the smoothing of sentences (Mossop, 2001/2014, pp. 67–69), which includes expressing parallel
ideas in parallel forms.
Table 16.1 A typology of editing modifications (Adapted from Robin, 2018; Mossop, 2001/2014)
Modification Prescriptive force Reason for intervention
Rule-based compulsory linguistic rules of TL

in-house style guide
Content-based compulsory consistency, correctness accuracy
Norm-based optional TL norms
Style-based optional readability, clarity, smoothing
Lay-out based optional readability
Preference-based unnecessary editor’s own preference
Defective-based Erroneous not correcting errors or committing new ones
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Linda Pillière
As with any typology, the boundaries between the various categories outlined in Table 16.1 are
not always as clear-cut as may at first seem. Style-based modifications sometimes border on per
sonal preference. Repetition is a case in point. Writing to Jim Crace (Crace, 2006) regarding The
Pesthouse, copyeditor Donna Poppy outlines the words that she feels have been “overused” in the
typescript. Among these are then, of course and certainly at the start of a sentence, and though in
the middle of a sentence, all of which she suggests removing. Insofar as repetition is involved here,
these modifications could be deemed to be strategy-based. On the other hand, there is also an ele
ment of preference on the part of the copyeditor. It could be argued that the expressions are typical
of an oral narrative or the narrator’s idiolect and therefore have their place in the text. Querying the
use of the pronoun they for a singular subject (McEwan, 1978) is both norm-based, insofar as some
usage guides at the time would find the singular/plural switch unacceptable, and preference-based
insofar as not all usage guides agreed. Despite this, the typology provides a useful starting point
for our study and helps to illustrate the differences and similarities between the work of an editor
and that of a translator and the degree to which there may be a rewriting of the text.
Case studies
Using this typology, I have sought to ascertain the various levels of rewriting that might occur
in the work of a copyeditor. Trying to measure the modifications proposed by copyeditors from
a quantitative perspective is extremely difficult. Both copyeditor and author are individuals, and
although they follow an in-house style guide and the advice of editing manuals such as Einsohn
(2000/2019) or guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style, there will invariably be differences
in approach. Table 16.2 therefore offers a qualitative approach, providing examples of the various
categories.
Out of the 40 proposed changes, 33 are style-based (82.5%) if the single preference-based
proposed change is included. Of these proposed modifications, only eight were refused by the
author. Style-based modifications, as we saw earlier, seek to improve the general flow of the text.
This may involve removing wordiness or verbosity, smoothing the syntax or ensuring the con
nections between the sentences are clear. These strategies, sometimes found under other names
such as concision or clarity, are to be found in most usage guides and editing manuals (see for
example Butcher et al., 2006; Einsohn, 2000/2019; Harris, 2017; Schneider, 2023). Repetition
occurs 14 times (42%) as a reason for modification, either on grounds of concision, thus resulting
in proposed omission, or more commonly because it is deemed “awkward”, thus requiring sub
stitution or more extensive rewriting. The strategies used to improve the text’s fluidity therefore
closely resemble some of the microstrategies identified in interlingual translation such as explici
tation, omission and substitution (see Vinay & Darbelnet, 1958/1995; Catford, 1965; Chester-
man, 1997/2016; Newmark, 1988). However, while these microstrategies may be necessary in
interlingual translation, in intralingual translation they remain optional and, as seen in Table 16.2,
are sometimes refused by the author. In fiction, rewriting for consistency, clarity and overall read
ability takes a variety of forms, from simply substituting a proper noun for a pronoun to reworking
the syntax or maintaining a specific perspective. In the final section of this chapter, I will focus on
the effects of editorial rewriting and narrative perspective, as perspective and voice are especially
important in works of fiction.
Schneider (2023, pp. 139–140) underlines that novelists frequently change perspective
and write from a range of perspectives or point of view, generally choosing “their narrative
distance with care”, but she also points out that copyeditors should “watch for passages where
narrative distance has inadvertently slipped from one form to another” and seek to “ensure
280
Table 16.2 Copyediting suggestions for Amsterdam made by Pascal Cariss (McEwan, 1998)
Rule-based
Page Line Example Proposed change Reason for Author’s

(in bold in the original) intervention reaction
7 7 nineteen seventy-eight 1978 in-house style accepted

guide: consistency
Content-based
90 3 Carlton Gardens Carlton Terrace as p. 41 consistency accepted
142–3 20/1 What Clive had intended chronology: intended on consistency accepted
on Friday and posted on Thursday and posted on
Saturday was Friday
158 15 Name of bridge to be No proposed change accuracy information
inserted except re spelling to be added
Brouwersgeracht (without
final e: gracht)
Norm-based
45 7 A grand piano was Winched consistency, accepted
carried correctness
accuracy
52 11 a good story on Friday a good story on Friday TL norms accepted
about a Siamese twin about a pair of Siamese
twins
Style-based
17 1 These are . . . we are Addition of speaker clarity modified
(Garmony)
30 5–7 Jack Mobey . . . Vernon. Remove repetition concision stet
Lines 5–6 on the next page
echo this.
30 16 He knew exactly when it Backshifting of tense: when clarity accepted
began the night before, it had begun, as he had
as he stood up. . . stood up
33 6&7 George thought/he Repetition. Suggested smoothing stet
thought change: replace second
thought with imagined
37 12 right side . . . his finger Repetition smoothing accepted
right across Deletion of second right
37 15–16 second hand./His hands Repetition deletion “awkward” accepted and
modified
42 17 & 18 see/seeing Repetition “awkward” accepted and
smoothing modified
43 3–4 Clive was . . . him to go Backshifting clarity stet
44 12 Last occasion he was Change of tense clarity accepted
The last occasion he would
be alone
53 4 Vernon visited Backshifting: Vernon had clarity accepted
visited
(Continued)
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Linda Pillière
Table 16.2 (Continued)
Rule-based

55 1 There were long Backshifting: There had clarity accepted
conversations been long conversations
64 4&6 Small talk . . . small hotel Repetition “one small too smoothing accepted
many” (delete
second)
65 3 What actually happened Backshifting: What actually clarity stet
had happened
69 9 & 12 So and so (twice) Repetition smoothing stet
71 18 Of course. If it’s OK Substitution of dash for clarity accepted
to . . . ellipsis point as character is
interrupting
85 16 There was another Backshifting: There had clarity accepted
possibility been another possibility
86 16 All the while he is talking Backshifting: All the while clarity accepted
he was talking
87 19 over and over Avoid repetition since it’s smoothing accepted and
anticipated by overlapping modified
(first “over”
deleted,
second
replaced by
“above”
88 3&4 more and more Repetition smoothing accepted
Modified to
“again and
more”
91 10 Then he pulled out Backshifting: Then he had clarity stet
pulled out
97 14 not so long ago he was Backshifting: he had been clarity accepted
afflicted afflicted
98 19–20 Why did we so often Why do we so often lie . . . clarity stet
lie about sleep on Is it our vulnerability we
the phone? Was it are defending?
our vulnerability we
defended?
101 13 The young man stalked Backshifting: The young clarity stet
man had stalked
102 14 time he started listening time he started listening consistency of accepted
to his junior staff, and to his junior staff, time he the feeling of a
brought them on. brought them on. thought-process
118 7&9 Repetition of also Removal smoothing accepted and
modified with
“then” for
second “also”
282
Rule-based

119 2&4 Repetition of down Removal smoothing accepted and
modified:
second
“down”
replaced with
“by the trees”
119 4 Filled us in Queried consistency (of accepted
“conspiratorial us (narrator voice)
and reader?) jarred
119 15 Vernon knew Garmony “abutting buts seems smoothing stet
was sunk, but he could awkward”
not help but not Although he could not help
124 6&7 Fought her husband’s . . . Repetition smoothing accepted and
neglected corners modified
second corner
= aspects
129 13ff “Timescale is momentarily Backshifting: Alter was of clarity Queried
disorientating” the first sentence to had
been
131 18 might not have felt so Might not feel so strongly clarity Accepted
strongly
145 8 When Clive arrived Backshifting: When Clive clarity Accepted
had arrived
158 15 the critic who Backshifting clarity Accepted
pronounced Insert had after who?
Preference-based
45 16 Some of the posters were “Anal I know, but double editor’s own Accepted
worth more than some of some still niggles” preference
the paintings
consistency and clarity in whatever point of view and tense the author has chosen”. While
the above is wise advice, it is also, perhaps deliberately, rather vague, and in the case of free
indirect style, where there is unavoidably “some blending between the speech or thought of
a character and the narrative voice” (Hodson, 2014, p. 87), there will automatically be slip
page from one point of view to another. Such shifts may result from the presence of deixis or
change of tense. Proximal deixis points to the speaker’s position in time (now) or space (here)
while distal deixis refers to a time (then) and a space (there) unoccupied by the speaker. These
adverbs are therefore crucial in indicating point of view, whether it be the character’s or the
narrator’s, and “serve to anchor the fictional world, which, in turn, provides a window and
vantage point for readers” (Simpson, 1993, p. 15). Other deictic markers include this, that and
deictic verbs such as come and bring (see Sotirova, 2024, for a detailed analysis of the role of
the linguistic features to be found in free indirect style). It goes therefore without saying that
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Linda Pillière
the substitution of one deictic for another, or its removal, or a suggested change in tense on
the grounds of clarity and consistency can have important repercussions on the perspective or
point of view created.
In Harvest by Jim Crace, events are recounted by the main character Walter Thirsk, who nar
rates both the past and the present “an instance of fairly complex simultaneous narration which
leaves the exact position from which the story is narrated tantalisingly vague” (Huber, 2016,
p. 71). For Huber (2016, p. 71), “the novel seems to attempt to evade historical hindsight both on
the level of the historical distance of the reader and on the level of Walter’s own perspective on
the narrated events”. It is therefore of little surprise that there are continual shifts from proximal
deictics and present tense to distal deictics and past tense. Huber (2016, p. 73) posits that Crace’s
use of the present tense is responsible for creating three effects: “The lack of a retrospective narra
tive assessment of the situation” which “allows the novel to withhold judgement, while the reader
is implicitly asked to weigh the moral implications of the characters’ actions”; the creation of an
oral speaking voice that suits the uneducated main character, Walter; and finally the “fluent shift
between a narrative and an iterative use of the present tense” which at times stresses “the continu
ity and changelessness of the rural way of life” presented in the novel. Not surprisingly, the shifts
from present to past did not escape the notice of copyeditor Donna Poppy, and while Crace is full
of praise for the editing, he does note in an email to her that some of the changes that she suggests
introduce a more formal note: “There was some tension between the formal and the conversational
and I had to wonder once in a while if Walter would be as observant as you” (Crace, 2012a). In
similar fashion, he writes to Kate Harvey, then editorial director at Picador, “there has been a tussle
between Donna’s perfect grammar and Walter’s conversational tone. (Walter won mostly)” (Crace,
2012b). How far Walter “won” is open to question as the copyeditor’s suggested smoothing of
tenses, and the substitution of the past tense for the present, found its way into the final published
work, as shown by the following example:
What wind there’s been since yesterday when we dispatched the final sheaf has gath
ered up and spread much of the lighter, finer chaff. The village has been freckled by
the chaff.
(Crace, 2012c, p. 41)
The suggested style-based changes, which were probably based on the presence of the adverb
“yesterday” and a desire for consistency (distal deictic and past tense), resulted in the following
modifications for the published work:
What wind there was since yesterday after we dispatched the final sheaf gathered up and
spread much of the lighter, finer chaff. The village has been freckled by the chaff.
(emphasis added; Crace, 2013, p. 60)
Similarly, at another point in the novel, Walter is describing Master Jordan’s version of events:
The cousin’s version, though, is not so tender on the ear. There is no regret. He does not have
a dream in which we “friends and neighbours” are made rich and leisurely, where we are
sitting at our fires at home and weaving fortunes for ourselves from yarn; I think he judges
us rich and leisurely enough already. No. Master Jordan only has a scheme.
(Crace, 2012c, p. 68)
284
The published novel has again followed the copyeditor’s suggestions:
The cousin’s version, though, was not so tender on the ear. There was no regret. He did not
have a dream in which we “friends and neighbours” were made rich and leisurely, where we
were sitting at our fires at home and weaving fortunes for ourselves from yarn; I think he
judges us rich and leisurely enough already. No. Master Jordan only had a scheme.
(emphasis added; Crace, 2013, p. 100)
Likewise, the reporting verbs for Master Jordan’s speech, which are in the present in the typescript,
he says, are modified to he said in accordance with the copyeditor’s suggestion. The use of the pre
sent tense to relate what someone else has said is typical of informal oral narratives (Quirk et al.,
1972, p. 1457) and often used to present a more vivid account, but again the suggested change was
probably made for reasons of consistency as the reporting verb in the present alternated with the
narrative and reporting verbs in the past tense.
Even past-tense narration may give rise to rewriting, notably when an action takes place in a
past that is anterior to the main narrative. For Schneider (2023, p. 141), a common error in this
instance is to forget to use the past perfect tense, what she calls the “super past”, and she illustrates
her point with the following example:
I tiptoed into the room, which was obviously ransacked before I arrived. (past tense only)
I tiptoed into the room, which had obviously been ransacked before I arrived. (past tense
followed by past perfect, to indicate prior action)
Schneider goes on to comment: “Past perfect indicating the ‘past of the past’ usually provides
an effective signpost that’s something happened before the current action”. In spite of these rec
ommendations, Schneider (2023, pp. 140–141) recognises that the use of the past perfect is not
“always necessary and can be intrusive, particularly in long flashback passages”. The problem
then is that there is no hard and fast rule, so some copyeditors err on the side of safety, or practise
what Pym (2008) labels as “risk aversion”, while others are more likely to adopt a less rigorous
approach. If we take the case of Ian McEwan and Amsterdam (McEwan, 1998), as illustrated in
Table 16.2, there are 13 instances when the copyeditor, Pascal Cariss, suggests a backshifting of
tenses. Cariss (McEwan, 1998) queries “some possible tense confusions” which, in fact, are sug
gestions for using the past perfect instead of the simple past, for example, referring to page 43 of
the typescript, he writes:
Clive was . . . him to go. Shouldn’t the tenses be altered here to read: Clive had been a true
friend when Vernon’s second marriage came apart, and he had encouraged him to go? Or
does the choice of tense reinforce the idea that this is Vernon’s thought process?
As Table 16.2 illustrates, McEwan did not accept all the suggested changes for backshifting tenses
suggested by the UK copyeditor. However, when the UK edition is compared with its US counterpart,
there are 17 occurrences of backshifting of tenses that are not to be found in the UK edition (McEwan,
2006a). There seems to be little grounds for considering this to be a dialectal difference; it is far more
likely that the US copyeditor applied the rules of clarity and consistency with more zeal (for a more
detailed analysis of such changes see Pillière, 2021). These changes were apparently made without the
knowledge of the author (private correspondence) or Nan Talese (McEwan, 2006b).
285
Linda Pillière
Concluding remarks
This chapter has examined the work of editors from the perspective of intralingual translation, and
more broadly, as representing a form of rewriting. By studying editing as a form of rewriting, the
idea of the novel as a collaborative enterprise is brought clearly into focus, be that a translation or
not. As Harvey (2003/2014, p. 69) points out: “In-house editorial policies make it dangerous to
assume that the translator as individual . . . is singly responsible for textual outcomes even in the
main body of the text”. The existence of various versions and editions of a text also challenges the
traditional concept of a stable identifiable source text or target text.
The chapter has also highlighted some of the similarities between editors and translators and
notably the fact that both rewrite a text with the target reader in mind while seeking to remain as
close as possible to the intentions and aims of the original author. Both translators and editors are
mediators and practise similar techniques and strategies at the macrolevel and the microlevel of the
text. Universals that have been identified in translation studies such as explicitation, simplification
and normalisation are also found in editing, as are microstrategies such as addition and substitu
tion. However, in interlingual translation some of the strategies will be motivated not simply by
a desire to clarify the text but by the fact that two different linguistic systems are involved. This
is especially true in the case of strategies such as transposition and modulation, which have not
been studied in this chapter and which are arguably less common in editing. Thus, while translat
ing from one language into another, interlingual translation, requires skilful rendering of a source
text into the target language, editing focuses more on clarity, consistency and concision (Butcher
et al., 2006; Einsohn, 2000/2019). Nevertheless, these differences are differences in degree or
focus rather than fundamental differences and are not sufficient to support arguments in favour of
clear-cut boundaries between intra- and interlingual translation.
Further reading
Gross, G. (Ed.). (1993). Editors on editing: What writers need to know about what editors do. Grove Press.
Ulrych, M. (2015). Traces of mediation in rewriting and translation. EDUCatt.
References
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Baker, M. (2018). In other words: A coursebook on translation. Routledge (Original work published 1992).
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17
TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN
The American version of a
British medical dictionary1
Introduction
Richard D. Hoblyn (1803–1886) wrote and published his medical dictionary in London in 1835
under the title A Dictionary of Terms Used in Medicine and the Collateral Sciences. He could not
possibly have expected that, only a few years after it was first released, a second edition would
see the light of day in 1844. This edition, one year later, would become the source for the first
American edition (1845), printed in Philadelphia and revised by Isaac Hays (1796–1879), editor
of the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, and one of the founders of the American Medical
Association. Hays’ translation or adaptation includes not only a great number of new headwords
but also a significant quantity of cross references and new definitions of terms. In the following
pages, the methods and strategies applied in the intralingual translation carried out in Hoblyn’s
work will be explained by analysing the final published product, released in both countries (Great
Britain and the United States). This analysis will be accompanied by a wealth of examples and set
within a theoretical background.
Historical background and lexicographical context

During the 19th century, Europe experienced an extraordinary fever of lexicographical works
dealing with medicine, mainly in France and, to a lesser extent, in Germany and Great Britain.
In France, at least 20 modern original dictionaries of medicine were published between 1740
and 1800, as well as Diderot’s French translation of what is considered the first modern medical
dictionary, written in English by Robert James, A Medicinal Dictionary (published in London
between 1743 and 1745).2 In Germany and Great Britain in the last decades of the 18th century,
lexicographical compendia also started to crop up, but to a much lesser extent than in France. This
lexicographical fever was mainly reflected in two types of works: Terminological and encyclopae
dic dictionaries, which differed fundamentally in their treatment of the terms and definitions they
offered. On the one hand, encyclopaedic dictionaries were created to compile knowledge from
different areas of medicine, taken from different books and even from journals or newspapers. On
the other, terminological dictionaries (generally known at the time as “Vocabularies”) were aimed
at words or terms, which explains why the lemmas therein were not particularly long, but rather
short, accompanied by precise definitions, which is why this type of repertoire did not usually
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-22 290

Two sides of the same coin
comprise more than one volume, or two at the most. The aim of the authors was not to give an
account of advances in medicine, but rather to fix, set, or clarify the meaning of the terms. The dif
ference between dictionaries, glossaries, and encyclopaedic works has long aroused controversy
(and continues to do so) in the specialized literature (Hoare, 2009; Loveland, 2019; Ogilvie &
Safran, 2019; Yeo, 2001). Indeed, there is no clear red line between dictionaries and encyclopae
dias. A medical terminological dictionary, however, was understood in the 19th century to be a
work in which words were explained, defined, and clarified, while also explaining the correct use
of the new ones and their meanings.
In Germany, and particularly in France, terminological dictionaries were scarce, but ency
clopaedic works developed rapidly. In Spain and Britain, on the contrary, where translations of
medical texts from French and German were common, the concern to fix the meaning of the
new words and to protect the national languages gave rise to the publication of terminological
rather than encyclopaedic works (Gutiérrez Rodilla, 2017), since they would include etymologi
cal information, as well as the explanation of the correct use of new words. These repertoires
were mainly intended for medical professionals or students. It was in this context that Richard D.
Hoblyn’s 1835 work, A Dictionary of Terms Used in Medicine and the Collateral Sciences (Lon
don, 1835), was released, as well as R. G. Mayne’s A Medical Vocabulary or Explanation of All
Names, Synonyms, Terms and Phrases Used in Medicine . . . (Edinburgh, 1836). These dictionaries
were intended to help students of medicine find their way through the jungle of technical terms of
classical origin. Due to the number of editions, there is no doubt that Hoblyn’s compilation was,
by far, more well known.
Richard D. Hoblyn had obtained his degree at the University of Oxford (Foster, 1891) and was
a cleric who retired to become a prolific author of a great number of handbooks covering a wide
range of topics (Hoare, 2009, p. 81): A Manual of Chemistry (1841); A Manual of the Steam Engine
(1842); British Plants. Comprising an Explanation of the Linn. Classification, and Descriptions
of the More Common Plants, Arranged According to That Method (1851), and A Manual of Natu
ral Philosophy, reedition of the manual previously published by John Lee Comstock in 1846
and which contains the Dictionary of Philosophical Terms. That very same year, taking Com
stock’s Manual as a source, he compiled various textbooks aimed at students, such as First Book of
Astronomy, First Book of Natural Philosophy, and First Book of Heat, Light and Optics, and Elec
tricity, which were expanded versions of previous works that eventually became part of the series
Scott’s First Books in Science. This series was published as a collection of elementary textbooks
“introduced in schools, as preparatory to a more finished education, and for students intended for
the learned professions” (Comstock & Hoblyn, 1846b). The first two volumes in this collection
included, in fact, dictionaries. Richard D. Hoblyn’s passion for lexicography can also be seen in
his 1850 work, A Dictionary of Scientific Terms. However, given the numerous editions his medi
cal dictionary achieved, one must assume that this was his most renowned work and the one that
enjoyed the widest circulation. Only a decade after it was first published, the second edition saw
the light of day in 1844 – it was still published as late as 1912 (15th edition, London) – and became
the source of the American edition, published in 1845 by Isaac Hays (1796–1879), who was the
editor of one of the first medical journals of the time (American Journal of the Medical Sciences)
and, as stated earlier, would later found the American Medical Association.
It should be mentioned that, around the time of the dictionary’s release, there were different
ways to enter the medical profession. Thus, professional training in Great Britain was a concern
that became a parliamentary battle from 1832, when the British Medical Association was founded,
to 1858, when the Medical Registration Act was finally passed, and some sort of a standard was
ultimately established (Walker, 1956).
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In the early years of the 19th century, only the wealthy could afford to attend the expensive
medical studies at Oxford or Cambridge, where exams were conducted in Latin – there was an
exception in Scotland, though, where students of lesser means could enrol at medical schools.
In the United States, many benefited from private tutors and academies or studied abroad.
Alongside these university physicians, there were other healers (i. e., general practitioners)
who had received education in private and hospital schools, where the training gained through
apprenticeship was supplemented with informal lessons and access to private libraries (Bonner,
1995, pp. 63–70). Apprenticeship had been very popular, especially in the American context,
where
(s)uccessful practitioners took in young men to serve as their assistants, read their medical
books, and take care of household chores. They were fed, clothed, and at the end of their
term, typically three years, given a certificate of proficiency and good character. An appren
tice’s education might be as good as his preceptor’s library and personal commitment; there
were expectations as to what had to be learned but no firm standards.
(Starr, 1982, p. 40)
Therefore, there were two types of teachers of medicine: “(T)hose who taught apprentices in
Britain and America, especially outside the cities, were often hardworking general practitioners
who lacked academic training or access to the wards of a hospital” and whose resources “for teach
ing were therefore limited, and the instruction they gave was informal, sporadic, and practical”;
and those who were “far more likely to have attended a university and to aspire to the standing of
a gentleman” (Bonner, 1995, p. 89).
Regarding the syllabus taught, by 1840 the following specialties were considered: Anatomy
(including dissection, physiology, and morbid anatomy), medical chemistry, pharmacy, surgery,
and midwifery. Students were also introduced to the practice of medicine “in a hospital or under
the tutelage of a preceptor” (Bonner, 1995, p. 145).
There was, consequently, a movement to create a more systematic approach to the training, that
is, a common standard of medical education, both in the US and in Europe. In Great Britain, the
Medical Registration Act, passed in 1858, “was the climax of a half-century of effort to bring order
and some measure of legal equality out of the chaos of British practice” (Bonner, 1995, p. 193). In
the United States, the American Medical Association took care of this reform effort to get medical
faculties to establish a minimal standard training. However, regardless of the country, there was a
desire for more practical training, so the alternative and cheaper ways outside the university were
still available and quite successful.
In short, there was a need for collecting medical terms in a single volume that would help
future practitioners in their own language. Only by understanding this context can we fully grasp
the importance and success of Hoblyn’s dictionary and Hays’ edition: The former had received his
education in a university, such as Oxford, where Latin was used as a language of science, and the
latter was an advocate for change in the training of doctors; though invisible, the impact of their
personalities and views on physician training can be traced throughout the text.
Theoretical framework of intralingual

translation as considered in this chapter
After Jakobson’s canonic classification of interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic transla
tion, much has been discussed on the topic of intralingual translation, understood as rewording
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or “interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language” (Jakobson, 1959,
p. 233), but this type of translation is in fact the variety that has garnered less attention from the
part of scholars in favour of interlingual and intersemiotic studies (Mossop, 1998; Schubert, 2005;
Whyatt, 2017; Zethsen & Hill-Madsen, 2016). Some authors fully question the notion of intra
lingual translation such as Mossop (2016), who even suggests naming this type of intralingual
rewording cislation. He proposes to clarify first what should be understood as lingua:
A Lingua X (the source lingua) is different from another lingua Y (the target lingua) if the
lexicon, the syntax or the sounding/spelling/signing of X are sufficiently different from those
of Y, so that Y speakers need help because they lack the linguistic knowledge necessary to
understand the basic meaning of what is being conveyed in X.
(Mossop, 2016, p. 5)
According to this definition, then, the case study at hand does not fall under the category of intra
lingual translation, since differences between British and American English, as will be shown later,
were not of such magnitude in 1845. Mossop mentions then a concept that might be considered for
the case at hand, content editing (Mossop, 2016, p. 7), to which we refer later.
Other authors argue that intralingual translation has no place within Translation Studies. New-
mark, for example, states, “the qualitative difference between ‘interlingual’ and ‘intralingual’
translation is so great that it makes a nonsense of the concept of translation” (Newmark, 1991,
p. 561). Some others erase the line between these categories, such as Pym:
(t)he kinds of translation that can take place between idiolects, sociolects and dialects are
essentially no different from those between more radically distanced language systems . . .
(T)here is no strict cut-off point at which wholly intralingual rewriting can be said to have
become wholly interlingual.
Pym (1992, p. 25)
A similar idea is at the core of Whyatt’s consideration, when stating that both intralingual and inter-
lingual translation rely “on the same faculty of the human mind: Its ability to interpret meaning
from linguistic expressions and reformulate it depending on the cognitive profile of the assumed
reader” (Whyatt, 2017, p. 189). Indeed, as Pillière (2021, p. 15) puts it, “Jakobson’s model of
communication and his tripartite definition of translation are abstract, decontextualized models
that leave aside the context – social, economic, cultural – in which translation takes place”. How
ever, defining intralingual translation solely on social, economic, and cultural distinctions could
be problematic (Pillière, 2021, p. 15), and it also neglects the diachronic aspects of language. In
fact, dealing with the two standard varieties of the pluricentric language that English is can also be
understood from a political or even ideological perspective, as some researchers have pointed out
(Algeo, 1986, 1989, 2006; Denton, 2007).
We shall then turn our focus towards a definition of intralingual translation that allows both for
a general categorization of “intratranslated works”3 and for the specific case at hand, the American
adaptation of Richard D. Hoblyn’s dictionary. Zethsen (2009) combines Jakobson’s three dimen
sions with Toury’s definition of translation (1995) and arrives at the following description of the
concept of translation (also applicable to intralingual translation): Translation happens when a
transfer has taken place between the source and the target text, and the relationship between source
and target text can take many forms but it rests on the skopos of the target text (Zethsen, 2009,
p. 800). This skopos thus becomes the key factor in analysing the kind of transfer that has taken
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place; the case study that will be presented later pivots on the notion of the skopos of the American
version of Hoblyn’s work.
If we understand the notion of skopos as Vermeer (1978) did when he first coined the term within
Translation Studies, then one must bear in mind that specialized dictionaries such as Hoblyn’s
work are intended to reach only a very specific and specialized audience. Kussmaul proposed that
the skopos of a text is closely linked to its function, and therefore
The function of a translation depends on the knowledge, expectations, values, and norms of
the target readers, who are again influenced by the situation they are in and by the culture.
These factors determine whether the function of the source text or passages in the source text
can be preserved or have to be modified or even changed.
(Kussmaul, 1995, p. 149)
This idea is clearly linked to that of the origin of dictionaries: They are designed to fulfil the
intended audience’s needs, that is, “the content and design of every aspect of a dictionary must,
centrally, take account of who the users will be and what they will use the dictionary for” (Atkins
& Rundell, 2008, p. 5). Thereby, bringing together the notion of skopos with the need for such a
work itself, as well as the reasons that motivated Isaac Hays to publish an American edition just
for an American target audience, we then have all the pieces in place to tackle the case study of
Hoblyn’s dictionary. If we return to Mossop’s approach, what we have here is a mixture of dialect
rewording and content editing (Mossop, 2016, pp. 5–7) rather than intralingual translation, since
Mossop considers dialectal translation or the Americanization of British texts to be interlingual
and not intralingual translation, arguing that the latter is applied when the parameters used to dif
ferentiate the target audience are knowledge and age. However, we agree with Pillière’s considera
tion that labelling translations as interlingual or intralingual would mean dividing up a text and
having to ascribe each fragment to different categories, which would lead to a never-ending circle
of theorizing (Pillière, 2021, pp. 16–17).
As regards the type of intralingual translation carried out on Hoblyn’s work, we shall draw from
Petrilli’s diamesic, diaphasic and diglossic types (2003, pp. 19–20). We need not consider the dia
mesic type, given that it refers to translation between written and oral texts. Rather, our focus then
turns to diaphasic and diglossic translations. If diaphasic translation includes a “conversion between
registers”, that is, turning an expert-oriented text into a text for lay people, then the editor of Hoblyn’s
dictionary in the US did not use this type of translation, as the target audience possessed a similar
degree of medical knowledge to that of the students and medical personnel targeted by the source
text. The most applicable label then is diglossic. However, as Hill-Madsen posits, “it makes no sense
to frame the opposition between American and British English as one between a ‘standard’ and a
‘non-standard’ variety of English”, and therefore diglossic translation “must be defined as conversion
between dialects as such” (Hill-Madsen, 2015, p. 89). One could of course argue that American Eng
lish should, by no means, be described as a non-standard dialect of English (on this point, see Pillière,
2021). One should also, however, bear in mind in that regard that the 19th century was the century
in which Noah Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), con
sidered the first (only) American dictionary, as well as the game-changing An American Dictionary
of the English Language (1828). Webster, like many of his contemporaries, fervently believed in the
independence of the US, and soon understood that language could play a major role in it. He there
fore devoted his life to writing his dictionary, containing over 70,000 entries, among which many
were strictly American vocabulary, first documented and registered therein (see Fodde-Melis, 2005).
Hoblyn’s American dictionary was published merely 20 years after Webster’s seminal work.
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Case study: Richard D. Hoblyn’s A Dictionary of Terms Used in Medicine

and the Collateral Sciences and its American edition
The following case study does not focus solely on the previously discussed notion of intra
lingual translation from British to American English, since it was too soon in 1845 to see
the trace of Americanisms and American spelling in Hays’ edition. As mentioned previously,
Mossop (2016) argues, “intralingual rewriters . . . engage in stylistic and content editing”
(p. 9). It is therefore desirable to explore the differences and/or similarities between trans
lation and editing, since “[e]diting plays an essential role in these transformations, and yet
it is rarely the focus of literary or translation studies” (Pillière, 2021, p. 35). This issue is
described in depth and via examples on BrE-AmE editions in Pillière’s work: She sets out
the many different roles of an editor, in the light of our 21st-century publishing industry, and
one has to conclude that Isaac Hays was indeed involved in the entire editing process, and
therefore acted as:
1 Acquisition or commissioning editor: He decided to publish Hoblyn’s dictionary in America

and had an expert knowledge on the issue and the American book market regarding medicine.
2 Developmental editor: He worked on the macro-level of the text (word choice, syntax, rewrit
ing of sentences and even paragraphs).
3 Production editor or managing editor: He scheduled and managed the entire production pro
cess, except for the last step of sending the book to be printed.
4 Line editor: He worked on the style and the creative content and also took care of major rewrit
ing of the original text.
5 Copy editor: He carried out a detailed work on the manuscript at the micro-level of the text.
6 Last but not least, he also assumed the role of the proofreader, checking the final version of the
text before sending it to the printing press.
Given the time when Hoblyn’s edition was published in the US, it is then advisable to consider
the role of Isaac Hays as both that of an expert and also self-made editor. He did not consider
himself a translator, but rather an editor and reviewer. In fact, he hints at that idea on the very
front page of the dictionary: “First American, from the Second London Edition, Revised, with
Numerous Additions, by Issaac Hays, M.D., Editor of the American Journal of the Medical
Sciences”.
There are a few significant points regarding the compilation of this dictionary for the instruction
of medical students. For this study three works have been analysed: The first and second London
editions (1835 and 1844) and, of course, the 1845 American edition. An initial physical analysis
shows that the three volumes are similar in size (19 cm for the 1835 edition and 20cm for both the
1844 and 1845 editions) and in the layout of pages in two columns. However, the number of pages
increased in later editions from 328 pages in the first London edition to 394 in the second and up
to 402 in the American version. The size of the font, on the other hand, decreased from edition to
edition. The analysis of the megastructure4 of the dictionary, that is, the front matter – sections that
precede the A–Z text – and the back matter – sections that follow the A–Z text, gains importance,
for “the content of these sections varies a great deal depending on the perceived needs of users”
(Atkins & Rundell, 2008, p. 176). The front-matter section in the first London edition (1835) is
a 13-page-long author’s prologue and includes a list of 55 suffixes and the specialized terms that
are coined with them. The front-matter section in the second London edition is just a pagelong
preface; the American edition takes this second London edition as a source, and therefore includes
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the very same preface, only this time accompanied also by an editor’s preface as a front-matter
section. On the other hand, the back-matter section includes a 44-page-long Supplementary List in
the first London edition, whereas both the second London edition and the American edition include
a 13-page-long list of affixes at the end of the dictionary, which happens to be the first edition’s
front-matter section list of affixes. Furthermore, the second London edition completes this list with
a collection of additional material, mainly tables, on different issues relating to the medical field
which could not be included in the body of the text (Gómez Martínez, 2019). As far as the A–Z text
is concerned, the American edition includes more than 700 additions, as will be explained under
the section “Content variation or content editing”.
However, this chapter focuses specifically on the adaptation of this medical dictionary for its
potential readers, therefore taking into consideration Zethsen’s parameters regarding what in the
light of current Translation Studies can be understood and interpreted as intratranslated works:
Knowledge, time, culture, and space (Zethsen, 2009, p. 805). Mossop also considers that intralin
gual rewriters write “for a new audience which differs from the original audience by some features
other than the languages they know, such as expertise or age” (Mossop, 2016, p. 9). Out of the
four parameters that Zethsen suggests, it should be considered that time cannot be applied to the
case study at hand here, since both editions were published very closely in time (1835–1844 [first
British editions] and 1845 [American edition]), and therefore with no temporal distance between
them. The parameter space, on the other hand, refers to “instances where the text is either reduced
or extended”. This is indeed the case of Hoblyn’s dictionary, but the extension of the reworded text
has rather to do with the other two parameters (knowledge and culture) than with a clear extending
or reducing intention on the part of the American editor, who as a close reader of the British dic
tionary adapted the compilation to ensure that the potential reader had no problem understanding
the text; so his task consisted in content editing, becoming a mediator between the original piece
of work and the reader (Pillière, 2021). The other two parameters then, knowledge and culture,
shall be the focus of our study.
Knowledge
This parameter is related to the “target group’s ability to understand a text, its level of general
background knowledge or its level of expertise (or lack of) in connection with a specific subject”
(Mossop, 2016, p. 9; Zethsen, 2009, p. 806). The intended user of the dictionary determines, in
most cases, the design of both the macrostructure and the microstructure, that is, the A–Z text.
When designing a book, there is always a purpose or market to focus on or, as Landau puts it, the
need to address the question “who will buy the book? This is the first consideration in diction
ary publishing as well” (2001, p. 345). In the Preface to the 1835 edition, Hoblyn describes the
intended users of the dictionary:
The object of this Dictionary is to present to the student, in a concise form, an explanation
of the terms which are most used in Medicine: modern, and even recent expressions, have
been carefully introduced; the few obsolete terms which have been retained, will be prin
cipally found, in a Supplementary List, at the end of the volume. . . . Although the primary
object of this work is to explain medical terms, by giving their etymology and signification;
it has been thought proper to furnish the student with nomenclatures of the several sciences
connected with Medicine; . . . and other information useful to the student and to the young
practitioner.
(DTMCS,51835, p. vii)
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In the second edition (1844) he introduces a few changes as compared to the first, but always keep
ing students in mind:
An Appendix has been added, in which several important subjects have been treated at
greater length than was compatible with their insertion into the body of the work. These
subjects, some of which are arranged in a tabular form, afford matter for study, as well as for
occasional reference, to the medical student.
(DTMCS, 1844, preface)
The editor of the American edition (1845), Isaac Hays, keeps Hoblyn’s first lines in his preface, so
it is clear that the intended dictionary user is still the medical student:
The object of this work is to present to the student, in a concise form, an explanation of the
terms most used in Medicine, and the Sciences connected with it, by giving their etymology
and signification.
(DTMCS, 1845, editor’s preface)
The target audience was thus the same in all three editions, regardless of the nationality, so no
explanatory translations nor interpretation (be it explication or addition) were needed.
Culture
Jakobson defined intralingual translation as the rewording of a text “by means of other signs of
the same language”, and therefore we shall turn the focus towards that same language. However,
if considered to be the same, why would there be a need of a rewording or interpretation? One
can always go back to Oscar Wilde’s renowned words: “[W]e have really everything in common
with America nowadays, except, of course, language” (1887/2006). Which are then the differences
that cause British and American English to be considered different languages? If there were and
still are indeed American editions of British texts of all kinds, there must be relevant differences.
This issue has given rise to substantial research on the differences between British and American
English and from various perspectives (for instance Algeo, 1986, 1989, and 2006; Armstrong &
Federici, 2006; Bruyère & Cachin, 1997; Cachin, 1998; Cronin, 2000; Davis, 2014; Denton, 2007;
Hill-Madsen, 2019; McArthur, 1998; Pillière, 2021, among many others). However, the dilemma
that shapes intralingual translation, BrE and AmE adaptation and Zethsen’s parameter of culture,
has not been fully explored yet, and Hoblyn’s dictionary adaptation or rewording gives us the
opportunity to do so in the following pages.
As translation theorist Bassnett (2007) reminds us in this precise quote,
Language is embedded in culture, linguistic acts take place in a context and texts are created
in a continuum not in a vacuum. A writer is a product of a particular time and a particular
context, just as a translator is a product of another time and another context. Translation is
about language, but translation is also about culture, for the two are inseparable.
(p. 23)
In view of this, the context where the editions of the dictionary were published becomes the key
element to understanding the alterations made to the dictionary when transferred across the pond.
As is often the case with interlingual translations, local dialects, as well as cultural references or
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idiomatic expressions that might be very different between source and target culture, are key topics
that the translator necessarily has to address. Therefore, we must pay attention to the geographical
context which could affect two cultural dimensions: On the one hand the diatopic variation, that is,
changes in the language; and, on the other, what we have called content variation, which refers to
changes in the concepts or the reality of the society who uses the target language. This goes hand
in hand with what Mossop considers an alternative to the concept of intralingual translation, that
is, “dialect rewording” and “content editing” (Mossop, 2016).
Diatopic variation
AmE has long been considered a variety of the English language ever since Noah Webster declared
linguistic independence shortly after American colonies gained independence; it was Webster
who, for example, adopted the AmE distinctive spellings -or instead of -our and -er instead of -re.
Furthermore, his two-volume An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) included
not only new words, but also new meanings of existing words which had appeared in the new
nation (Romaine, 2009, pp. 594–595).
Even though Hays’ edition (1845) of Hoblyn’s dictionary (1835/1844) was published a few
years after Webster’s work, there is no trace of AmE in the text, either at a lexical level or in
spelling. BrE’s preference for autumn over fall is well known: “French-derived words have often
gained a strong grip on the standard dialect . . . autumn predominates . . . over fall, which until
recently has been most favoured in the Midlands and south as well as being the norm in North
America” (Upton, 2014, p. 403). On the other hand fall has been the most common form in the US
since the early 19th century:
fall, n.2 . . . a. The season between summer and winter; autumn.
Although common in British English in the 16th century, by the end of the 17th century fall
had been overtaken by autumn as the primary term for this season. In early North American
use both terms were in use, but fall had become established as the more usual term by the
early 19th century.
(Oxford University Press, n.d.c)
If we have a look at Hays’ edition, we soon realize that the term fall does not even occur and
autumn is preferred, following the second London edition (1844):
HARVEST BUG. The Acarus autumnalis, a variety of the tick insect, which infests the skin
in the autumn,6 producing intolerable itching, succeeded by glossy wheals; it has hence
been called wheal-worm.
(DTMCS, 1845)
In spelling, the North American dictionary does not differ from the British editions either. It does
not follow Webster’s adoption for the -or and -er endings, in words such as colour, which “has
been the most common spelling in British English since the 14th cent.; but color has also been in
use continually, chiefly under Latin influence, since the 15th cent., and is now the prevalent spell
ing in the United States” (Oxford University Press, n.d.b). Another clarifying example is centre:
Though the prevalent spelling in the early modern period, from the 16th to the 18th centu
ries, was center . . . , (h)owever, the technical volume of Bailey (Vol. II.), 1727–31, and the
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folio, 1730–6, have centre; Johnson (1755), who based his dictionary on an interleaved copy
of Bailey’s folio of 1730, adopted this spelling, and following Johnson’s precedent, centre
has become the usual form in British usage, whereas in U.S. usage center prevails.
(Oxford University Press, n.d.a)
The following are a series of examples extracted from Hoblyn’s three different editions:
TEMPERING. The operation of heating iron to a certain extent, indicated by the colour
presented on the surface of the metal.
(DTMCS, 1835, 1844 & 1845)
UVEA [uva, grape). The posterior surface of the iris, so called from its resemblance in col-
our to a ripe grape. See Iris.
(DTMCS, 1884 & 1845)
ACHROA. . . . A colourless state of the skin, depending upon a want of the pigmentary or
usual colouring matter of the rete mucosum. Compare Dyschroa.
(DTMCS, 1844 & 1845)
ARGAND LAMP. A name applied, from one of the inventors, to all lamps with hollow or
circular wicks. The intention of them is to furnish a more rapid supply of air to the flame,
and to afford this air to the centre as well as to the outside of the flame.
(DTMCS, 1844 & 1845)
Not even in the additions to the original text is the AmE spelling used, as we can see under the
definitions of achromatopsia or centrifugal:
[ACHROMATOPSIA. . . . Inability to distinguish colours].

(DTMCS, 1845)
[CENTRIFUGAL. . . . Leaving the centre. In Botany this term is applied to inflorescences

in which the central flowers open first.]
(DTMCS, 1845)
Diatopic variation does not affect the American edition of Hoblyn’s dictionary; thus, the editor,
to fulfil his intention to fit the American medical students and doctors’ needs, as rendered in the
preface, chose to focus on content variation.
Content variation or content editing

Subject-field dictionaries are aimed at a restricted market that determines what should or should
not be included. Dictionaries are, in this sense, shaped by the needs of their users, so the geo
graphical distance between Great Britain and the United States affects other cultural elements and,
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therefore, the terms used to express the concepts or the reality. The new information added in the
American edition (compared to the second London edition) is displayed within brackets, as out
lined in the dictionary’s prologue. This edition includes more than 700 additions, of which more
than 500 are new headwords or lemmas7 and around 100 are sublemmas8 (that is, a secondary form
of the main entry). These are, on some occasions, the result of derivational processes. As the editor
of this dictionary, Isaac Hays made sure that the text offered to the new readers, medical students
mainly, reflected the state of the country. It is therefore necessary to consider the social context
of the United States, a country that tried to emulate the European medical profession with the
creation of medical schools, although the reality of medical training, especially in rural contexts,
involved training with another physician, in order to acquire knowledge and share his library.
The US was a different world from the one reflected in Hoblyn’s dictionary; hence, the editor
specifies in the preface the introduction of native American plants, one of the greatest differences
of the American edition, which also depends on the target user of the dictionary:
Believing that its republication in this country would be useful, the Editor consented to
revise and adapt it to the wants of the American practitioner. With this view he has added
the native medicinal plants, – the formula for the officinal preparations, &c, – and made the
work conform with the Pharmacopoeia of the United States.
(DTMCS, 1845, editor’s preface)
On many occasions, when dealing with plants or recipes, the sources are clear; some additions were
extracted from the United States Dispensatory which had been first published in Philadelphia in 1833
edited by George B. Wood and Franklin Bache, both physicians and professors. This book was, for
several decades, the only one of its kind in the US and thus remained a pharmaceutical book of refer
ence (Sonnedecker, 1986, p. 279), so it seems clear that it was a reliable source at the time:
Colchicine [Colchicia, U. S. Disp.]. A vegeto-alkali, procured from the Colchicum autumnale.

(DTMCS, 1845)
Apart from trying to reflect the geographical context – with the introduction of native medicinal
plants, Hoblyn converts some of the dictionary articles into a pharmaceutical guide. By the time
this compilation was released there had been a movement in the US to establish a standard in the
training of doctors that would bring together theory and practice. Out of 424 doses, the American
editor included 62 new ones from The Pharmacopoeia of the United States, which had been first
published in 1820 (Haller, 1982):
DOSE. . . . A determinate quantity of a thing given. Ride. – For children under twelve years,
the doses of most medicines must be diminished in the proportion of the age, to the age
increased by 12. . . .
[The following list exhibits the doses for an adult, of the medicines (Ph. U. S.) most com
monly employed in practice.]
(DTMCS, 1845)
The same applies to syrupus:
SYRUPUS. A syrup. A solution of sugar in water, in watery infusions, or vegetable juices;

the proportions are generally two parts of sugar to one of the fluid. . . . [The following are
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the officinal syrups of the Ph. U. S., with the mode of preparing them: [1. Syrupus. Ph. U. S.
Refined sugar, ℔iiss.; water, Oj. Dissolve the sugar in the water with the aid of heat, remove
any scum which may form, and strain the solution while hot. . . .
[18. Syr. Ferri sesquinitratis. Syrup of sesquinitrate of iron. The following formula for
this very useful preparation is given by Mr. A. Duhamel in the Am. Jour. of Pharmacy
for July, 1845. “Take of iron wire, free from rust, and cut in pieces, ʒvj.; nitric acid, f℥ss;
water, f℥viij.; Sugar, ℥xiv. Add to the iron the acid previously mixed with the water, and set
aside the mixture for twelve hours, that the acid may be saturated. Decant the liquor from the
undissolved iron, add the sugar, which you dissolve in it by heat, and finally strain.” Dose,
gtt. x. to gtt. xxx. Very efficacious in some forms of chronic diarrhœa.
(DTMCS, 1845)
Nevertheless, in other cases, when not dealing with plants or recipes, the source is mentioned
within the article:
[CONTRO-STIMULUS. A term given by Rasori to a doctrine which he originated, and

which is founded on the contro-slimulant properties supposed to be possessed by certain
medicines.]
(DTMCS, 1845)
Though, on most occasions, the source remains unknown:
[GIBBOUS. (gibbus, protuberant). An irregularity or swelling on the back, or other part of the
body. In botany, applied to leaves, petals, &c., when irregularly swelled on one side or both.]
(DTMCS, 1845)
Some other additions that affect the collection of lemmas or sublemmas addressed are those
intended to update the information offered in the British edition for the new audience and their
knowledge of the world. In this sense, the climates of the US have been included within the main
headword, climate:
[III. CLIMATE OF THE UNITED STATES.

[The United States stretch over a vast extent of territory, and embrace a corresponding variety
of climate. The late Dr. Forry, who investigated this subject with much care, classified the
country in three general divisions, embracing three systems of climate, viz; – the Northern, the
Middle, and the Southern.
[I. THE NORTHERN DIVISION. – This extends on the Atlantic coast from Eastport, Me., to
the harbour of New York, and is characterized by great range of temperature and violent con
trasts in the seasons; the rigour of the climate being somewhat tempered on the sea-coast by the
ocean, and in the region of the lakes by those inland seas.
2. THE MIDDLE DIVISION. – This extends from the Delaware Bay to Savannah, and is char
acterized by great variableness of temperature, though the extremes are much less than in the
Northern Division.
[3. THE SOUTHERN DIVISION. – This embraces the whole region south and west to Texas
and the Rocky Mountains, and is characterized by the predominance of high temperature.
[(1.) Peninsula of Florida (. . .).]
(DTMCS, 1845)
301
Also, the metric system of units of measurement is explained:
[CENTIGRAMME. The hundredth part of a gramme, a French measure, equal to 0.1544 gr. Troy.]
[CENTILITRE. The hundredth part of a litre, a French measure, equal to 2.7053 fluid drachms]
[CENTIMETRE. The hundredth part of a metre, a French measure, equal to 0.3937 inch.]
(DTMCS, 1845)
While it is true that the addition of text provides useful information, the omission of con
tent, for example etymologies, is no less valuable. In the professional medical training in
Britain there was a clear distinction between university physicians who had received edu
cation in classical languages and general practitioners who had learned by apprenticeship
and at private schools. And so, one can understand that Hoblyn, having studied at Oxford,
would pay close attention to etymologies, whereas Hays would dispense with that informa
tion, for students who attended the medical schools in the US came, mostly, from years of
apprenticeship.
In all three editions, headwords, which include nouns – both simple words and multiword
expressions, abbreviations, and partial words – prefixes, are followed by the etymology when the
word is not English in origin. As expected, mainly Greek and Latin etymons are found:
PRESBYOPIA (πρεσβυζ, old, ὥψ the eye). Far-sightedness. A state of the eye observed in
advanced age, and strongly marked in old persons. It is the opposite of myopia.
(DTMCS, 1835 & 1844)
PRESBYOPIA (πρεσβυζ, old, ὥψ, the eye). [Presbytia.] Far-sightedness. A state of the
eye observed in advanced age, and strongly marked in old persons. It is the opposite of
myopia.
(DTMCS, 1845)
LIGNIN (lignum, wood). Woody fibre, or the fibrous structure of vegetable substances.
When heated in close vessels, it yields pyro-ligneous acid; and a peculiar spiritous liquor is
produced, called pyro-xylic spirit.
(DTMCS, 1835)
LIGNIN (lignum, wood). The basis of woody fibre – the most durable product of vegetation.
When healed in close vessels, it yields pyro-ligneous acid and a peculiar spirituous liquor is
produced, called pyro-xylic spirit.
(DTMCS, 1844 & 1845)
There also lemmas of German or Spanish origin:
BECCABUNGA (bach bungen, German, water-herb.) Brooklime; a species of Veronica:

Order Violaceai.
(DTMCS, 1835)
BRANCA (Spanish for a foot, or branch). A term applied to some herbs supposed to resem
ble a particular foot, as branca leonis, lion’s foot; branca ursina, bear’s foot; &c.
(DTMCS, 1835)
302
Sometimes, this information, included in the definition in both London editions, has been deleted
in the American:
SAPO. Soap; a term derived, according to Beckmann, from the old German word sepe.
According to the latest chemical views, Soap is not a combination of oil and alkali, but a
true saline compound, resulting from the union of the salifiable base (sodium) with the oleic
and margaric acids, which are formed from the oil by the re-action of the alkali upon it.
(Paris.) . . .
(DTMCS, 1835 & 1844)
SAPO. Soap. The term soap is usually applied to the product of the action of alkalis on
fixed oils and fats, while the term plaster is commonly applied to the product of the action
of oxide of lead on fixed oils and fats. The former is frequently termed a soluble soap,
while a plaster is denominated an insoluble soap. The term soap is also applied to alkaline
resonates. . . .
(DTMCS, 1845)
The result of Hays’ rewording or rewriting is a lexicographical compilation where culture plays a
crucial role and is the reason why the editor extended or reduced the content found in the original
dictionary. Trying to fulfil the intended audience’s needs, he modified the original dictionary to
include the terms that would describe the world as they knew it in the US.
In this section the notion of intralingual translation has been explored in the light of current
Translation Studies but also taking into account the 19th-century situation of medical sciences
in Britain and America. It is never easy to draw a clear line between linguistic categories, and
this case study is no exception: The scholarly works cited in this chapter prove that the mere
notion of intralingual translation needs to be further developed, characterized, and studied, and
it would be of great interest to have it done via the numerous examples that can be found in the
medical field on the one hand, and on the specialized dictionaries on the other. We have seen
that this case study corresponds to various categories: It is not a mere diglossic intralingual
translation, nor is it solely an American edition of the original text. When undertaking research
like this, scholars need to admit that it is possible to have one example illustrating the various
categories of intralingual translation and one which also combines both content editing and
dialectal rewording.
In conclusion
In an environment of extensive development of medical lexicography in Europe, Hoblyn designed
his Dictionary of Terms Used in Medicine and the Collateral Sciences with a clear pedagogical
purpose in mind. As someone who specialized in writing educational texts, as proved by his pre
viously published works, Hoblyn’s intention was to gather the medical terminology in use at his
time and not only explain the etymology of the terms, but also give as much information about
them as was available at that time. Therefore, this dictionary had a twofold purpose: Normative
and informative. On the one hand, it was meant to account for new concepts with the largest and
most complex explanation and classification possible, although some definitions are very short and
precise. On the other hand, most lemmas are alphabetically ordered but some are nested in other
headwords, for they belong to the same conceptual node or have the same morphological compo
nents. The dictionary could, then, be used to resolve the communicative needs of students, as well
303
as to study the different medical areas of knowledge like in an abridged handbook, on both sides
of the Atlantic, as the chaotic nature of medical training was very similar:
In 1851, medical education in the UK was in a mess. The training of a practitioner in Britain
in 1850 could vary from university study, to a series of courses in a provincial hospital, to
broom-and-apron apprenticeship in an apothecary’s shop. The Victorian public were con
fused as to who was a doctor, a general practitioner (the term “general practitioner” was
unknown before 1800 but was firmly established by 1840), a physician, a surgeon, a barber
surgeon, an apothecary, a druggist, or a snake oil merchant! . . . It took 16 bills and two select
committees over 18 years for the 1858 Medical Act to be passed.
(Pickles, 2019, p. 515)
In a context where medical training was being put to the test in an effort to establish a standard
throughout the country, Hays, as one of the founders of the American Medical Association, an
institution which fought for reform, took a well-known British dictionary and rewrote it for the
new audience offering an adaptation acting mainly as an editor. The result was an intralingual
translation where he had to decide on the parameters of knowledge and culture, that is, the target
user and the cultural elements, such as diatopic variation and content variation due to the geo
graphical distance.
When designing a dictionary, there is always a target audience and market and, therefore, the
target user of the dictionary dictates, in most cases, the macrostructure as well as microstructure
of such compilations; in this case, medical students. If such users speak different varieties of a
language (i.e., BrE and AmE) and live in different worlds, it follows that the editions of the same
work are two sides of the same coin thanks to the intralingual translation process undertaken.
Notes
1 The authors wish to acknowledge their participation in the Research Projects funded by the Span
ish National Research Programme PGC2018–094266-B-I00 and PID2019–109565RB-I00/
AEI/10.13039/501100011033, as well as in the Project FS/1–2022 funded by Fundación Memoria de D.
Samuel Solórzano Barruso.
2 Some say the first was J. Guyot’s dictionary, published in Brussels in 1733 (Quemada, 1955, p. 36). Also,
McConchie points out that James did compile his dictionary himself, but by stitching together the work of
others, “sometimes in translation and sometimes epitomized or reworked” (2019, p. 143).
3 We understand “intratranslated works” as those works that underwent some type of intralingual transla
tion, be it dialect rewording, content editing, or any of the types set out by Petrilli (diamesic, diaphasic,
and diglossic). See Mossop, 2016, and Petrilli, 2003.
4 megastructure. The totality of the component parts of a reference work, including the macrostructure and
the outside matter (Hartmann & James, 1998, s. v.).
5 DTMCS stands for Hoblyn’s Dictionary of Terms Used in Medicine and the Collateral Sciences. In all the
examples given, the year of the published version is displayed: 1835 for the first British edition, 1844 for
the second British edition, and 1845 for Hays’ American edition. Bold letters in the examples or quota
tions are ours.
6 All bold type emphasis in this and the following quotations has been added; however, italics were in the
source text.
7 lemma. The position at which an entry can be located and found in the structure of a REFERENCE
WORK. The relationships of the lemma in the reference work are two-way: within the overall (e.g., alpha
betical) MACROSTRUCTURE it constitutes the point of ACCESS where the compiler can place and the
user can find the information listed; within the MICROSTRUCTURE it establishes the “topic” on which
the rest of the entry is a “comment”, e.g., the definition of the HEADWORD. Some authorities favour
including all information preceding the definition within the notion of the lemma, i.e., all “formal” items
304
such as spelling, pronunciation and grammar, while others use the term as a synonym for “headword” or
even the whole ENTRY (Hartmann & James, 1998, s. v.).
8 sub-lemma. The position at which a SUB-ENTRY can be located within an entry. Typically, this is
either one of several numbered senses of a HEADWORD, or one of several associated derivative
words or phrases, which can be clustered by means of NESTING or NICHING (Hartmann & James,
1998, s. v.).
Further reading
For those readers interested in further exploring the history and role of medical dictionaries in the 19th cen
tury, as well as the role of intralingual translation from British to American English, which are the two main
aspects addressed in this chapter, we shall recommend the works that follow:
McConchie, R. (2019). Discovery in haste: English medical dictionaries and lexicographers 1547 to 1796.
Walter de Gruyter.
A first good reading to approach medical dictionaries in English language and, therefore, valid to gain general
knowledge in order to tackle the study of works like the one dealt with in this chapter. This work offers
an in-depth study of English medical lexicography up to the 19th century and presents a good approach to
this issue for undergraduate and postgraduate students new to the field.
Gutiérrez Rodilla, B. M. (1999). La constitución de la lexicografía médica moderna en España. Soto-Touxos.
Written in Spanish, it has not been translated into any other language. Covering Spanish modern medical
lexicography, this book offers a perfect overview of 19th-century medical dictionaries mainly in Spain,
but deeply related to the European-wide lexicographical fever of the moment. This work could be a good
complementary resource after McConchie’s reading.
Pillière, L. (2010). Conflicting voices: An analysis of intralingual translation from British English to Ameri
can English. E-rea. https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.1404
Regarding intralingual translation from British to American English, Pillière’s works are of great interest to
students willing to gain both theoretical and example-based knowledge on this complex issue.
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18
“THE RULE IS NO FUSS”
An analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s shift to
unnatural narration from the perspective
of intralingual translation and editing
Enora Lessinger
Introduction
“I wanted to write a book not from the viewpoint of someone looking back and ordering his experi
ence, but of someone in the midst of chaos”, Ishiguro said in an interview about his fourth novel,
The Unconsoled (Shaffer & Wong, 2008, p. 117).
The primacy of chaos over order described by Ishiguro is one of the most striking aspects of
the British writer’s fourth novel. The metaphor of “looking back and ordering [one’s] experiences”
is particularly fitting for the purpose of the present chapter, which explores the process of writing
and rewriting of The Unconsoled as a particular type of intralingual self-translation. It studies in
particular the genesis of the narrative technique of unnatural narration used in The Unconsoled
(1995) by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, through an analysis of the archival material present
at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) in Texas. This material reveals the author’s extensive rewriting
from the first drafts of preparatory short stories to the published novel.
The analysis in this chapter relies on the argument that the rewriting under study takes place as
part of the editing work performed on the text, in line with the dictionary definition of the word
“editing”: “To prepare for publication by correcting, rewriting, or updating” (Thesaurus Results
for EDITING, n.d.). As shown throughout this chapter, this substantial editing amounts to an intra
lingual translation process,1 with each new draft or version of the text constituting a translation of
an earlier one, as well as being the source text for the next.
Theoretical framework
Rewriting as intralingual translation

As pointed out by Schrijver et al., “translation has sometimes been described as a form of rewrit
ing” (2012, p. 99). Lefevere in particular, in his seminal Translation, rewriting & the manipulation
of literary fame, writes, “[t]ranslation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text” (1992, p. vii).
The present chapter adopts a comparable stance, but rather than adhere strictly to Lefevere’s
model, it draws inspiration from it. Here, I argue that much as translation may be a form of rewrit
ing, rewriting can in turn be a form of translation. It seems important to posit that the approach
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-23 308

“The rule is no fuss”
adopted here sees rewriting as a form of translation, rather than the other way round, for two
reasons.
The first is that the present discussion focuses on the notion of intralingual translation, relying
on Jakobson’s landmark definition:

(1959/2000, p. 114, emphasis original)
Rewriting being a variation of rewording (see, e.g., Lanselle, 2019; Weber & von Merveldt, 2020),
it makes sense to approach it as a subcategory of translation rather than the other way round.
The second reason is that I focus here on a very specific kind of rewriting: The genesis of a nov
el’s narrative voice through different drafts and stages of writing and rewriting. While Lefevere’s
model proposes a systemic analysis of the process of translation, taking into account a variety of
intra- and extra-systemic constraints, my approach relies primarily on microanalysis and focuses
on the influence of poetics. Here, I define a (creative) text’s poetics as the aesthetics precepts that
dominate the form and language of that particular text, relying on Genette’s claim that “literary
creation is always at least partially inseparable from the language in which it occurs” (Genette,
1982/1997, p. 216).
The rewriting that can be observed in the HRC archive involves significant alterations of both
the form and the content of the narrative. I argue that the interconnectedness of the two can be
observed not only here but also in any text where language and aesthetics occupy centre stage.
This interconnectedness, particularly characteristic of literary texts, forms the basis of my argu
ment that in The Unconsoled, the author’s rewriting process corresponds to a type of intralingual
self-translation. I define such self-translation as the process of rewriting performed on a given text
by this text’s author, where the resulting text differs significantly from the original text in content
and/or, where the text’s poetic plays a central role, in form.
Intralingual translation as editing

I have argued that under certain circumstances, rewriting could be assimilated to intralingual self-
translation. I further argue that such self-translation also forms a key part of the editing process
performed on a text.
The striking similarities between editing and translating were first academically investigated
by Stetting (1989), leading her to coin the term of “transediting” adopted by several researchers
since (see, e.g., Schäffner, 2012; Schrijver et al., 2012). Stetting argues that editing “has always
been included in the translation task” (1989, p. 371), with the translator adding, rephrasing and/
or removing portions of the text to make it fit its communicative aims. Particularly relevant to this
paper is the fact that the “cleaning up” of manuscripts is included in her list of typical cases of
transediting (373–374).
Schrijver et al. (2012) address the question of the unclear boundaries between transediting
and transcreation, the latter being a term widely used in the translation of marketing and advertis
ing, suggesting that “[t]he overall function of the TT might be what sets apart the two concepts:
Informative vs. persuasive function” (Schrijver et al., 2012, p. 101).
This crucial distinction, based on Reiß’s seminal work on text types (1971/2000), is also highly
relevant to the link made here between editing and intralingual translation. The focus of the present
work is on stages of the editing process performed on a text whose main function is expressive.
309
Enora Lessinger
The honing of the novel’s unnatural narrative voice – that is to say, of the novel’s narrative poet
ics – is plainly the main drive behind many of the changes observed. These changes in the narra
tive voice pertain to the aesthetic organisation of content, which, in a text whose main function is
expressive, makes them significant enough that each new version of the text can be viewed as an
intralingual translation of the previous one.
It should be noted, however, that self-translation differs from other kinds of intralingual trans
lation in at least two ways. First, it is performed by the same person who wrote the original text,
which means that source and target texts stem from the same person (though other people can play
a role in these changes, and the HRC Ishiguro archive shows marks of the influence of Ishiguro’s
wife and editors). Second, as a consequence of the first point, the translator also benefits from the
status of author. This means that the pressure to be “faithful” or live up to the original text, or what
Pym describes as the translator’s increased communicative risk (2005), does not apply to self-
translation. As I will show, this leads to the use of significantly different micro-strategies to those
typically observed in intralingual translation.
Methodology
Research questions and approach used in this chapter

The aim of the present study is twofold:
1 To show that the rewriting performed by the writer on a literary text as part of the editing work
before publication can amount to a particular type of translation: Intralingual self-translation.
2 To identify and analyse the (self-)translational strategies used by Ishiguro to achieve The
Unconsoled’s narrative poetics of unnatural narration.
To these ends, I explore the genesis of The Unconsoled’s narrative poetics through an analysis of
the Kazuo Ishiguro archive acquired in 2015 by the Harry Ransom Center. I had the privilege of
exploring this archive shortly after its acquisition, approaching the drafts and preparatory material
for the novel through the prism of genetic translation studies,2 and this chapter exploits the results
of my findings.
Material
Ishiguro’s fourth novel starts with the first-person narrator – Ryder, a famous pianist – arriving in
an unnamed city. He has come to deliver a musical performance, but nothing goes according to
plan. Ishiguro’s notes on the novel’s “back story” (see Appendix 18.1) explicitly state that Ryder’s
underlying motivation for giving this concert lies in the childish hope that it will bring his parents
back together. During the days leading up to the performance, Ryder encounters more and more
ludicrous obstacles. It thus comes as little surprise that the final performance is an unmitigated
disaster: “Ends up isolated.” “Art as useless consolation.” (HRC 20.16).
The material under study in this chapter comprises the novel The Unconsoled and its “genetic
dossier” (see Cordingley & Montini, 2015, p. 2): The author’s numerous notes on the writing pro
cess, the novel’s two main drafts, and a short story entitled “Experiment 2” with its three drafts,
containing early versions of several scenes featuring in the published novel. This short story was
explicitly written in preparation for The Unconsoled, in order to refine its narrative strategy of
unnatural narration, which represented a shift from the unreliable narration typical of Ishiguro’s
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earlier novels (Fonioková, 2015). In his notes on “Experiment 2”, Ishiguro also reflects at length
on the way the so-called dream techniques that underlie the novel’s structure are implemented in
the short story and on how they should then make their way into the novel.
The narrative voice itself is characterised by a violation of the laws of the rational world that
has been described as unnatural narration (Richardson, 2000). More specifically, The Uncon
soled is set in an oneiric, non-mimetic world that obeys laws of its own, so that it falls to the
reader to decipher them. Not so, however, for the researcher who has access to the HRC archive,
as these rules are explicitly formulated in the novel’s genetic dossier. In particular, Ishiguro
lists the 20-odd “dream techniques” that he used to achieve his stated goal of implementing a
convincing dream-like logic (see Appendix 18.2). Using the notes, drafts and different versions
leading up to the published text, I explore the editing process performed by the author on the
text, focusing on intralingual (self-)translational shifts reflecting the transition to a less realistic
mode of writing.
Analysis
The “tour de force” sequence in the lift

“Experiment 2”, one of Ishiguro’s short stories aimed at refining some of his “dream techniques”,
starts with the narrator arriving in a town where he is expected to give a musical performance, and
which he gradually recognises as his hometown. He is taken to his room by the hotel porter, who
gives him an uncannily long speech during the lift ride. Before they reach their destination, the
narrator suddenly realises that somebody else is in the lift with them. The published novel contains
a very similar scene from a diegetic point of view, but with some key stylistic changes explored
here.
In his preparatory notes for The Unconsoled, Ishiguro describes this whole first scene as a “tour
de force sequence in the lift”. The lift ride that takes Ryder3 to his room is, in both the experiment
and the novel, the first challenge to the implied reader’s4 assumptions of a verisimilar narrative,
due to the absurd length of the ride itself and Ryder’s late realisation that there is a third person
in the lift. When Gustav the porter launches into an extended monologue, the reader’s attention
progressively shifts from the content of the discourse to its sheer length.
The three dream techniques present in every version of “Experiment 2” and of the novel
are what Ishiguro calls “warped time frame”, “extended, tangential monologue” and “delayed
entrance”. Ishiguro’s archival notes show that he was always conscious of the relative opac
ity of these narrative techniques and endeavoured to keep in mind the possibility of actual
readers failing to identify them as deliberate narrative techniques rather than as the author’s
clumsiness:
The first time we use [warped time technique] is in the lift. Okay, so this is a bit crude.
Gustav says we’re only going up two floors and they stay there for ages. . . . Only trouble is,
someone might conceivably think it’s a very long way up, but surely not.
(HRC 48.5, see Appendix 18.3)
This last sentence shows the central role played by the implied reader in the self-translational pro
cess of crafting the narrative voice. These two possible reader reactions pitched against each other
are illustrated by two literary reviews of the novel’s translation into Brazilian Portuguese at the
time of publication. The first one, published in the influent daily newspaper Folha de São Paulo
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by Ryoke Inoue, corresponds to the reader reaction described by Ishiguro as “someone might con
ceivably think it’s a very long way up”:
The discrepancies with what would be possible – for example, a conversation of over fifteen
minutes while an elevator is ascending from the ground floor to the floor where Ryder will
be hosted, which leads us to wonder how tall the building is or how fast the elevator can
be – suggest that Kazuo Ishiguro simply transcribed a dream, or a nightmare, letting things
occur exactly as they appeared to him, without even bothering to put them in order.
(Inoue, 1996, my translation)5
Three months later, Brazilian writer Bernardo Ajzenberg published a review in answer to Inoue’s,
displaying a reaction closer to that of the novel’s implied reader imagined by Ishiguro:
Inoue . . . ironically quotes the conversation between Ryder and the porter while they are
rising in the elevator. . . . Ishiguro has already demonstrated that he is fully in control of
realistic narrative techniques, and it is obvious that he sought, in spite of the success of his
previous novels, to boldly and deliberately subvert the model he was working with.
(Ajzenberg, 1996, my translation)6
The inevitable gap between implied and actual reader is deepened by the fact that in The Uncon
soled, “the reader cannot look for a natural explanation of the unnatural elements but needs to
accept the world’s strange rules” (Fonioková, 2015, p. 126). The form taken by these underlying
rules and their degree of prominence are the result of the intralingual translation process under
study here.
Warped time frame

In each version of the text, the central “warped time frame” technique lies in the length of the
porter’s monologue. The first significant variation in this scene relates to Gustav’s remark, or lack
thereof, on the floor number that Ryder’s hotel room is located on. Each of the experiment’s three
drafts reads as follows:
EX2–1; 2; ND7 “You know, you really ought to put those cases down.”/. . . “When I first
started in this profession, very many years ago now, I used to place the bags on the floor. . . .
But you won’t find me doing anything of that sort now. Besides, sir, we’re only going two
floors up.”/We continued our ascent in silence for a few moments.
(HRC 47.16)
In the final version of The Unconsoled, the first and last sentences of the passage read slightly
differently:
FV “You know, you really ought to put those down.” . . . “Besides, sir, we’re not going up
far.”/We continued our ascent in silence.
(Ishiguro, 1995, p. 5)
Here, there is no specific mention of the number of floors they have to cover, but instead a vague
remark on “not going up far”. This corresponds to a form of implicitation, a phenomenon much
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less frequently observed in translation than its counterpart, explicitation.8 This deviation from
typically observed patterns can be explained by the idiosyncrasy of the goal pursued through the
editing process. The function of this particular change can be traced back to Ishiguro’s notes on
“Experiment 2”:
Gustav says we’re only going up two floors and they stay there for ages. . . . It might have
been better without the direct reference to only being in the lift for two floors. . . . Whenever
possible, it’s more subtle not to refer to the time warps directly. Certainly in dreams, people
don’t refer to it, because there’s no surprise.
(HRC 48.5)
The decision to remove the reference to two floors thus stems from the stated goal to model fic
tional reality after the logic of dreams such as we experience them in the actual world. This goal
is highly idiosyncratic and differs significantly from that of typical intralingual translations, which
often aim at making a text more accessible (see, e.g., Hill-Madsen, 2015; Zethsen, 2009). This in
turn can explain the presence of implicitation, a relatively unusual micro-strategy recurrent in the
material under study.
Ishiguro’s notion that the characters should express “no surprise” is further illustrated by the
implicitating shifts carried out in the passage from the first to the second draft of “Experiment 2”:
Ryder and Gustav’s exit from the lift bears the trace of a similar effort to avoid drawing attention
to the defamiliarising technique.
EXP2–1 ‘ At this stage, the lift doors opened and we stepped out of the lift. It seemed to me we
had been in the lift a long time, and I was surprised to see from the window in the corridor that
we could have been only on the first or second floor. The porter, no doubt noticing my look,
said quietly: ‘I’m sorry, sir. It is a slow lift. But it’s been here a long time and it’s perfectly safe.
That’s what matters after all’. ‘Quite’, I said, and followed him down the corridor.
EXP2–2; ND; D1 Just at this moment, the doors of the lift opened. The porter stepped out and set
off down the carpeted corridor.
FV Just at this moment the elevator doors slid open and the elderly porter set off down the cor
ridor. (11)
The erasure of everything following “we stepped out of the lift” in the second draft of “Experi
ment 2” (see Appendix 18.4) and its omission in every subsequent stage of rewriting plainly stem
from the observation, “it’s more subtle not to refer to the time warps directly”. After the first draft,
no comment is made at all on the uncanny length of the ride, and its non-verisimilar dimension
remains implicit. This omission takes the narrative away from realism and anchors it more firmly
on the side of unnatural narration. No rational explanation is provided in subsequent versions, and
no intra-diegetic reaction of surprise echoes the implied reader’s.
Ishiguro’s stated desire for greater subtlety thus leads to a process of implicitation, and as a
consequence, to complexification. This can seem to undermine the claim that in intralingual trans
lation, “simplification is the keyword” (Zethsen, 2009, p. 808, emphasis original), but as outlined
earlier, this can be explained by a difference in skopos and text types. Zethsen (2009), for instance,
bases her analysis on Danish translations of the Bible; Hill-Madsen (2015) on specialised, pharma
ceutical texts; and Whyatt et al. (2017) on tourism-related promotional texts. The main function of
the first and third studies’ texts is, still according to Reiß’s category, operative, while the second’s
is informative. In the present study, by contrast, the text’s main function is expressive: The editing
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process is driven primarily by the aesthetics rules dictated by the text’s poetics, rather than by
concerns of readability and accessibility. The omission of any references to the novel’s departure
from rational laws calls for an active participation of the reader, who is encouraged to perform her
meneutic work on the text. In unreliable narration, the technique used in Ishiguro’s earlier novels,
this interpretive work consists in uncovering the novel’s underlying version(s) of fictional reality
(see Lessinger, 2020). Here, however, it involves identifying the laws regulating the textual world.
The degree of interpretive work demanded by the narrative pact increases from the first draft to
subsequent versions, whereas a tendency for translations to be easier to process than their corre
sponding source text has been observed in both intralingual (e.g., Zethsen, 2009) and interlingual
translation (e.g., Heltai, 2005, Saldanha, 2008).
However, these shifts also result in a highlighting of the narrative strategy, and therefore
amount to narratological explicitation (see Hirsch & Lessinger, 2020).9 As showed by Hirsch and
Lessinger (2020), meaning processability and narratological explicitness can be inversely pro
portional, but the more common scenario is for translators to perform shifts amounting to both
increased meaning processability and narratological explicitation. Here again, it is the reverse that
can be observed. This is likely to proceed from the fact that literary self-translation – especially
where the author-translator is a well-established figure in the literary world, as is the case here – is
regulated by a different set of norms. In other words, on Toury’s “continuum anchored between
two extremes: General, relatively objective rules on the one hand, and idiosyncratic mannerisms
on the other” (1995/2012, p. 65), literary self-translation is closer to the “idiosyncrasy” pole.
Delayed entrance
The “tour de force sequence in the lift” also serves for the author to practise the dream technique
of “delayed entrance/exit”: “[H]ow people enter and how they ‘fade away’ has to be done very
subtly. . . . Someone just gets discarded by the viewpoint” (HRC 48.5).
“Delayed entrance” occurs when a character that was not present in the scene suddenly appears,
which is precisely what happens when the narrator suddenly realises the presence of a third person
that was in the lift all along:
EX2–1 “Miss Stella will confirm this to you, sir.” “Miss Stella?” I asked. The porter, I noticed,
through his eyes, now crumpled in his face through the great effort of holding the bags – though
he managed to keep any excessive sense of strain out of his voice – was looking past my shoul
der to a corner of the lift behind me. I realized with a start that we were not alone in the lift.
In the corner – I had not looked around when I had got in, so preoccupied had I been with the
porter and his efforts to hold my bags – a small young woman was standing, practically pressed
into the corner.
EX2–2; ND; FV10 “I’m sure Miss Hilde will vouch for what I’m saying.” “Pardon me,” I said, “but
who is this Miss Hilde you keep referring to?” No sooner had I said this, I noticed that the porter
was gazing past my shoulder at some spot behind me. Turning, I saw with a start that we were
not alone in the elevator. A small young woman in a neat business suit was standing pressed
into the corner behind me.
(1995, p. 9)
Here again, the key variation takes place between the first and second drafts of the experiment. In
the first draft, the narrator provides an explanation which, although it may not be sufficient to fully
account for his obliviousness, tones down the unnaturalness of the episode. However, this explanation
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is discarded in the rewriting process, and Ishiguro writes in his notes, “[delayed entrance] is required
to convey some surprise. But no great astonishment” (HRC 48.5, emphasis original).
In line with this observation, only a moderate degree of surprise is expressed from the second
draft of “Experiment 2” through to the published novel, perceptible only in the narrator’s body
language: “I saw with a start that we were not alone.” As with the “warped time frame” tech
nique, Ishiguro stresses the importance of not explicitly commenting on the departure from real
ism, stressing, “disappearance/departure [should not be] explicitly commented upon” (HRC 48.5).
This omission of Ryder’s comments on a new character’s sudden apparition results, here again, in
a paradoxical highlighting of the unnatural dimension of the scene.
Finally, we can observe a shortening of the passage in the translation from first to second draft.
Zethsen (2009) presents space, that is, variations in lengths, as one of four main parameters in
intralingual translation, arguing, “[i]ntralingual translations instigated by the parameter of space
(reducing/extending translations) are typically . . . seen when explanation is needed due to com
prehension limits in the target group caused by time, culture or lack of knowledge” (807). Hill-
Madsen similarly observes a tendency to expansion in his case study of intralingual translation
(2015, p. 93). Here, on the contrary, the text is shortened, as a result of which the textual world is
even further removed from the implied reader’s actual world. The target text’s reduced meaning
processability also leads to a complexification of the reader’s interpretive work, but the atypical
nature of this shift reflects above all the idiosyncratic parameters in place here. The status of the
translator – here, also the author; the type of text undergoing intralingual translation – a literary
text where poetics plays a key role; and the goal pursued by the writer-translator – creating a non
verisimilar fictional universe regulated by its own laws.
The “no fuss” rule

“The dreaming mind just discovers without fuss”, Ishiguro writes in his notes (HRC 48.5, empha
sis original). This idea, in line with the “no surprise” guideline explored earlier, recurs a number
of times throughout the genetic dossier: “[T]he rule about this technique: no fuss”; “as usual, no
fuss”; “[a]s ever, the rule is no fuss” (HRC 48.5). The translational shifts performed at different
stages of the text’s genesis – erasures and omissions in particular – reflect this desire to avoid
drawing attention to the defamiliarising techniques at work. This is particularly perceptible in the
scene where the narrator recognises his hotel room as his childhood room, which makes use of the
“unwarranted recognition of place” technique.
Unwarranted recognition of place

In “unwarranted recognition of place”, the narrator experiences an unaccountable sense of famili
arity with the place he finds himself in: “N. ‘recognises’ a place . . . though it’s very doubtful if it
really can be the place he recognizes, and there’s no evidence at all that it is. His recognition is a
purely interior one, even conflicting at times with the evidence” (HRC 48.5).
Untypically, the archival material reveals here a high level of editing, with no less than five
different versions of this scene, each presenting significant variations. For the sake of brevity, only
the earliest version is reproduced here extensively, with elements undergoing key variations in
subsequent versions highlighted.
EX2–1 I had been examining the room for only a few seconds when I realised how very familiar
it was . . . [A]s I came back into the main room, the wave of recognition hit me immediately.
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It was, I realised, the bedroom I had had as a child, up to the age of seven, before my parents
had divorced and I had gone to live with my aunt. . . . Was it possible, I wondered, that
the house had been converted into this hotel? In which case, it was a remarkable coincidence,
or else extremely thorough preparation on the part of those organising this visit. Had it been
planned? Then the manager must have been in on it, but primarily, and most obviously,
Miss Stella must have been behind it.
EX2–2; ND11 I had been examining it from the bed for a little time when an odd feeling came
over me. . . . [A]s soon as I came back into the main room, the sense of recognition struck
me again. This hotel room, I realised, was the same room that had served as my childhood
bedroom, the room in which I had slept each night until the age of seven – until my parents
had divorced and I had gone to live with my aunt. . . . There was no doubting it was the same
room. Was it really possible the house we had lived in then had been converted into this hotel?
If that were so, my coming to be in this room was the result either of the most remarkable
coincidence, or else of elaborate forethought and planning. Had it been planned? If so,
Miss Stratmann was the one behind it.
D1 [A]t that point I am sure I did not have even the faintest stirrings of the revelation that
was later to strike me to come. . . . But as soon as I came back into the main room, the sense of
recognition struck me again. This room, I realised, was the very one that back in England
had served as my childhood bedroom.
D2 It was then . . . that the realisation first dawned on me. . . . [A]s soon as I came back into the
main room, the sense of recognition struck me again. This room, I realised, was the very one
that back in England had served as my childhood bedroom.
FV [I] sat up on the bed and looked around, the sense of recognition growing stronger by the
second. The room I was now in, I realised, was the very room that had served as my bedroom
during the two years my parents and I had lived at my aunt’s house on the borders of
England and Wales. (16)
The first thing to note is that there is a marked shortening from the earliest to the latest version.
This is consistent with the “no fuss” rule and with Ishiguro’s general tendency to strip down his
narratives as he writes. Here again, one of the chief reasons why the earlier drafts are longer is
that the narrator expresses surprise and provides tentative explanations for the unlikelihood of the
episode.
A number of textual elements appear in each of the versions reproduced here, albeit with slight
differences, but a gradual de-explicitation12 and increased anchoring in unnatural narration can
also be observed. Let us look in more detail at the passage where the narrator recognises his own
childhood room:
EX2–1 I realised how very familiar it was. . . . But as soon as I came back into the main room, the
wave of recognition hit me immediately.
EX2–2; ND [A]n odd feeling came over me. . . . But as soon as I came back into the main room,
the sense of recognition struck me again.
D1 [A]t that point I am sure I did not have even the faintest stirrings of the revelation that was later
to strike me to come. . . . But as soon as I came back into the main room, the sense of recogni
tion struck me again.
D2 It was then . . . that the realisation first dawned on me. . . . But as soon as I came back into the
main room, the sense of recognition struck me again.
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FV I was just starting to doze off when something suddenly made me open my eyes again and stare
up at the ceiling . . . the sense of recognition growing stronger by the second.
(16)
The shift from “wave of recognition” in the first draft of “Experiment 2” to the more sober
“sense of recognition” in subsequent versions, or the intralingual translation of “the revela
tion that was later to strike me” to the less emphatic “the revelation that was later to come” in
the novel’s first draft, bear witness to a process of de-explicitation of the narrative technique.
Furthermore, the textual elements pointing to the divorce of Ryder’s parents are progres
sively toned down, as can be seen in the description of the period in which he inhabited the
room as a child. While the first and second drafts of “Experiment 2” mention the bedroom
“before my parents had divorced and I had gone to live with my aunt”, the two drafts and
final versions of the novel make only veiled allusions to the narrator’s aunt in England: “The
very [room] that back in England had served as my childhood bedroom” (EXP2–1; EXP2);
“the two years my parents and I had lived at my aunt’s house on the borders of England
and Wales” (FV). Overall, this progressive de-explicitation makes the underlying version of
fictional reality (the traumatic divorce of Ryder’s parents) less accessible for the reader – a
process similar to that observed in the genetic dossier of Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills
(Lessinger, 2020).
In conclusion, in this scene, the editing work performed by Ishiguro on the text revolves around
the honing not only of a dream technique, but also of the novel’s overall narrative mode, which
largely relies on narratological implicitness. In particular, we can observe that the process of self-
translation in this passage gives rise to an implicitation of textual elements pointing to unnatural
narration and to a de-explicitation of the novel’s subtext. In this light, I argue that on the adequacy–
acceptability axis described by Toury (1995/2012), in his process of self-translation, Ishiguro
moves here from greater acceptability – a more mimetic narrative mode – to greater adequation
with the novel’s narrative poetics of dream logic.
Unwarranted familiarity with situation

The last example analysed here is taken from the closing scene of “Experiment 2”. In this episode,
Ryder is taken by Hoffman, the hotel manager, to a reception allegedly given in his honour. However,
neither Hoffman nor the guests seem particularly honoured by Ryder’s presence, and their attitude
even borders on rudeness. This scene corresponds, in the novel, to a reception attended by Ryder in
his dressing gown in chapter 10, where he also goes largely unrecognised by the other guests.
Shortly after arriving at the reception, Ryder starts realising the reason that the guests are
paying him so little attention: They were originally waiting for another celebrity, and Ryder
was called as a last-minute substitute. He then starts visualising the scene that took place before
his arrival, a feat that corresponds to the dream technique of “unwarranted familiarity with
situation”:
N. arrives at a situation he should know nothing about. But he does and there’s no surprise
on his part about how he knows. This is a familiar experience I have in dreams. . . . Now in
fiction, we might be able to do this by having N. go into a room and just saying in the narra
tive, “I realised A was thinking B”, or “It was clearly the case that B was having to XYZ . . . ”
(HRC 48.5)
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In the novel, one of the most prominent markers of unnatural narration is precisely the use of the
key expressions “I realised” and “it occurred to me”, which function as signals that the narrator is
about to provide information that he would not normally have access to or describe a situation that
contradicts rational laws.
For the sake of readability, the variations that are most relevant to the narrative technique
are highlighted:
EX2–1 Then as I continued to walk in circles, led by my hostess, I gained the distinct impres
sion that the people in the room had gathered not to honour me, but some other distinguished
figure – perhaps this Hearn the hotel manager had talked of – and that . . . I had been called in
as his replacement. This had led, I realised, to large sections of the room demanding an expla
nation. . . . In fact No doubt, at first immediately after the announcement the atmosphere had
been so hostile that there had been a real danger of the whole party dissolving then and there.
But then one of the town elders – perhaps it was quite probably the very white-haired man I
could see deep in conversation with two women on the other side of the room – had got up onto
the platform and calmed down everyone. . . . [T]he speech would in all likelihood have gone
on for so long, no-one daring to interrupt the old man, he being someone of great esteem, that
the speech would have only finished minutes before my arrival. . . . It was clear this was what
had taken place.13
EX2–2; ND14 [T]hen as I continued to walk with my hostess, I gained the distinct impression that
the people in the room had gathered not to honour me, but some other distinguished figure –
most probably this Rudolph Hearn the hotel manager had talked of. Then not long before my
arrival, someone had announced . . . that at the last minute I had been secured as his replace
ment. This had led to many people angrily demanding an explanation . . . Indeed immediately
after the announcement, the mood had grown so hostile there had been a real possibility the
party would break up then and there. But then one of the town elders – quite probably the little
white-haired man I could see across the room deep in conversation with a young woman in a
bright red dress – had got up onto the platform and calmed everyone down. . . . So it was that
by the time I had arrived – just several minutes after the white-haired man had finished speak
ing – a genuinely celebratory atmosphere had taken over the proceedings. Having grasped
what had occurred, I was then somewhat disturbed when my large hostess waved towards the
lectern.
Here, I argue that three types of textual elements serve the author in honing the narrative voice:
The opening and closing sentences in both versions, the use of epistemic markers and the presence
or absence of the modal verb “would”.
Firstly, in the opening sentence of the passage in each draft, the narrator mentions having
“gained [a] distinct impression” of the reason behind the general lack of enthusiasm. This
phrase works as a gateway into the narrative mode of the dream technique of unwarranted
familiarity, echoed further on in the first draft by the expression “I realised”. In his notes upon
re-reading his experimental short stories, Ishiguro ponders on the role and necessity of these
markers, writing,
[I]t’s important to keep the “I realised”, “It was clear” etc. lead-ins. . . . To not have these, the
reader might just think, oh we’ve suspended first person for the moment. The bizarreness of
the N having this power should be emphasized. But again, as usual, no fuss.
(HRC 48.5)
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In this scene, the translational shifts performed by Ishiguro as part of his editing work render the
narrator’s account progressively more assertive. In the first draft of “Experiment 2”, the sequence
ends on “It was clear this was what had taken place”, underscored in the typescript, while the
sentence closing the passage in the two subsequent drafts begins with “having grasped what had
occurred”. These two sentences denote a marked evolution towards a more confident narrative
voice within the passage, but it is also interesting to note that the second version is less emphatic
than the first one, both from a typographic and semantic point of view – perhaps because emphasis
was seen as contravening the “no fuss” rule.
Second, both versions of the scene are punctuated by epistemic markers such as “perhaps” or
“quite probably”. These markers reflect the degree of certainty expressed by the narrator in his
account of a scene that he has in fact not witnessed and of which he has had no rational way of
gaining knowledge. The overall tendency is again one of greater assertiveness in the later version:
“Perhaps” becomes “most probably”, and “no doubt” is translated as “indeed”. This later version
also has an additional “So it was that etc.” in the penultimate sentence, which contributes to anchor
the scene in the textual world.
The crossing-outs in the first draft further testify to the importance of these epistemic markers
in Ishiguro’s conscious endeavour to strike the right balance between assumption and assertion
of the narrative voice. This bears testimony to the prevalence of the narrative poetics in the suc
cessive stages of self-translation, that is, of achieving a convincing and coherent reproduction of
dream logic in the novel’s fictional reality.
The modal “would” also plays a crucial role in this balance. In the first draft, towards the
end of the passage, several verbs are used in combination with this modal. It corresponds
here to the past form of the modal “will” in its radical dynamic value, that is, expressing a
strong probability: “The speech would in all likelihood have gone on for so long etc.”; “the
speech would have only finished minutes before my arrival”. However, the modal is absent
from the second and neat drafts of the experiment: “This had led to many people demanding
an explanation”; “by the time I had arrived – just several minutes after the white-haired man
had finished speaking – a genuinely celebratory atmosphere had taken over the proceedings”.
In the margin (see Appendix 18.5) of the first draft of “Experiment 2”, next to “Indeed, the
speech would in all likelihood have gone on for so long etc.”, Ishiguro wrote, “ditch condi
tional tense” (HRC 47.16, emphasis original). This editorial comment further confirms the
importance of the presence or absence of the modal “would” in the intralingual translation
strategy.
The scene just analysed also appears in the novel, but in a different form. The main shared
features of the two scenes are the pre-eminence of another figure compared to Ryder and the use
of the dream technique of “unwarranted familiarity with situation”:
FV Then, as I continued to cast my gaze about me, I began steadily to realise just what had
taken place before our arrival. The present occasion was the largest to date of the dinners
given in Brodsky’s honour. . . . I was still turning over all that had happened prior to our
arrival when I caught sight of Stephan on the other side of the room, talking to an elderly
lady.
(126–129)
The evolution towards greater assertiveness is even more pronounced here, with the passage
from “I gained the distinct impression” to “I began steadily to realise just what had taken place”,
and the absence of any qualifying modals: “Was”, “had turned up the tension”, “all that had
319
Enora Lessinger
happened”. The shift to this “unwarranted technique” is thus less gradual in the final version of
the novel, which, in turn, is likely to make the meaning harder to process for the reader. This
seems at odds, here again, with Zethsen’s claim that in intralingual translation, “[t]he parameter
of knowledge often involves interpretation (explicitation, explanation, addition) of information”
(2009, p. 802). I argue that this departure, too, can be attributed to the text’s idiosyncratic narra
tive poetics, which entails a departure from the implied reader’s “real-world frames” (Fonioková,
2015, p. 126).
Conclusion
I have explored here the shift to a new type of narrative strategy in Ishiguro’s fiction – unnatural
narration – through an extensive editing process. The analysis has shown that this shift was imple
mented by means of micro-strategies different to those typically observed in intralingual transla
tion: Omission, shortening and de-explicitation. In particular, the passage from the first draft of
“Experiment 2” to the novel’s published version shows a tendency to erase rather than to add. This
is consistent with the results of the analysis of A Pale View of Hills’s genetic dossier (Lessinger,
2020). This use of omission as a recurrent micro-strategy seems at first glance to put in question
Zethsen’s (2009) and Whyatt et al.’s (2017) claim that intralingual translation generally leads to
simplification, but I argue that this discrepancy does not necessarily undermine their conclusions
and can be explained by a combination of factors.
First, we are dealing here with a self-translation, so that translator and (re)writer are the
same person. This has a clear impact on the status of both the translator and the transla
tion. Crucially, it leads to a decreased communicative risk for the translator: Ishiguro benefits
from his status as an (acclaimed) author and does not have to bear the translator’s burden of
increased communicative risk described by Pym (2005) and Becher (2010). Moreover, as evi
denced in Ishiguro’s notes, narrative complexity is precisely at the heart of the poetics of the
text, and poetics play a key part in the writing and rewriting process of a novel – or of any text
in the category of “expressive” texts (Reiß, 1971/2000). Finally, the fact that “Experiment 2”
was only meant to serve as an exercise to hone the narrative voice also creates a peculiar
narrative pact. Since it was not intended for publication, the implied reader assumes a lesser
importance, presumably leading to greater creative license.
The recurrent use of these unusual micro-strategies in the editing process is clearly aimed at
implementing the translation’s explicit goal: Striking the right chord for the narrative voice, so
that the effect of the “dream techniques” regulating the fictional universe should be perceptible
without being obvious. As a result of the erasure in the target text of any rational explanations
proffered by the narrator in earlier versions and of the toning down of the signs of his surprise,
the unnatural dimension of the narration becomes gradually more prominent, which in itself
amounts to narratological explicitation (Hirsch & Lessinger, 2020). However, this absence of
commentary on the novel’s underlying logic and the increasing gap between real world and
fictional reality also result in decreased meaning processability, in itself a form of implicita
tion. This illustrates two things. On the one hand, there is an overall tendency for narratological
explicitness and meaning processability to be inversely proportional in the case of narrative
strategies based on implicitness. On the other hand, literary self-translation does not seem to
be subject to the same norms as the type of intralingual translation that has mostly been studied
so far, that is, where the translator and author are different people and where the text type is
informative or operative.
320
Appendices
Appendix 18.1 Ishiguro’s notes on The Unconsoled’s “back story”
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Enora Lessinger
Appendix 18.2 Ishiguro’s 23 “dream techniques”
322
Appendix 18.3 Ishiguro’s notes on the “warped frame time frame” technique
323
Enora Lessinger
Appendix 18.4 Excerpt from the elevator scene in the first draft of “Experiment 2”
324
Appendix 18.5 Excerpt from the reception scene in the first draft of “Experiment 2”
325
Enora Lessinger
Notes
1 I draw from Jakobson’s canonical definition of translation and the work of researchers who subsequently
adopted or adapted it, arguing in favour of a broader definition of translation to include intralingual trans
lation (see e.g., Hill-Madsen, 2015; Steiner, 1975; Whyatt et al, 2017; Zethsen, 2007, 2009). The defini
tion of “intralingual translation” adopted here is based on Zethsen’s (2007, p. 299): “A source text exists
or has existed at some point in time. A transfer has taken place and the target text has been derived from
the source text”. Such is the definition also adopted here.
2 Crossing the fields of genetic studies and translation studies, genetic translation studies emerged as a disci
pline of its own in the past 20 years or so. It studies the different phases of creation of translations, through
the analysis of what all the available material surrounding the translating process – manuscripts, typescripts,
drafts, translators’ notes, etc. See for instance Cordingley and Montini (2015) and Paret-Passos (2011).
3 Some of the characters’ names are different in “Experiment 2” and in the novel; from here on, for the sake
of consistency and unless quoting, the characters’ names from the published novel will be used.
4 The term “reader” is generally taken here to mean “implied reader” (see Iser, 1978/1984, on the concept
of implied reader), as opposed to actual, real-life readers.
5 “As discrepâncias com o que seria possível – por exemplo, uma conversa de mais de 15 minutos enquanto
o elevador está subindo do térreo para o pavimento onde Ryder ficará hospedado, o que nos leva a per
guntar qual a altura desse prédio ou qual a velocidade do elevador – fazem pensar que Kazuo Ishiguro
simplesmente transcreveu um sonho – ou um pesadelo – fazendo suceder os fatos exatamente como eles
lhe apareceram, sem nem ao menos se preocupar em ordená-los.”
6 “Inoue . . . cita com ironia a conversa entre Ryder e o carregador de malas enquanto sobem de eleva
dor. . . . Ishiguro já demonstrou ter pleno domínio da técnica narrativa realista, e é evidente que procurou,
apesar do sucesso dos anteriores, subverter ousada e conscientemente o modelo com o qual trabalhava.”
7 The mention “EXP2–1” precedes quotes from the first draft of “Experiment 2”, while “EXP2–2” refers
to its second draft and “EXP2-ND” to the third, “neat draft” of the experiment. “D1”, in turn, refers to
the first draft of The Unconsoled, “D2” to its second draft and “FV” to the published, final version of
the novel. A semi-colon indicates that the version following it is identical to the preceding one.
8 Since Blum-Kulka first formulated her landmark explicitation hypothesis (1986), the phenomenon has
been widely researched, in particular after Baker introduced and popularised the concept of translation
universals (1993, 1995). Baker identified in particular the tendency for translations to display simplifica
tion, explicitation, normalisation and levelling-out. While the definition of the term “explicitation” is
much debated, the results of the various case studies investigating this phenomenon in translation support
overall Blum-Kulka’s notion that translations tend to be more explicit than non-translated texts. See, e.g.,
Øverås (1998), Olohan & Baker (2000), and Saldanha (2008).
9 By narratological explicitation, Hirsch and Lessinger (2020) refer to cases where the narrative strategy is
more prominent and perceptible in the target text than in the source text.
10 Some subtle differences exist between these different versions, but for the sake of brevity and because
these variations were not relevant to the point being made, these versions are listed together here.
11 The only difference between the second draft of “Experiment 2” and its neat draft is the use in the neat
draft of “preparation” instead of “planning” and of “would have been” instead of “was” in “Miss Strat
mann was the one behind it”.
12 I borrow this term from Murtisari’s explicitation/implicitation framework based on relevance theory
(2016). I speak of de-explicitation for intralingual shifts that do not render the information implicit (such
as the erasure of the reference to the parents’ divorce) but merely make it less explicit or prominent.
13 This last sentence is underscored in the original text.
14 The only difference between the second and neat drafts of “Experiment 2” in this passage is the absence
of the crossed-out text in the neat draft.
Further reading
Alber, J. (2013). Unnatural narrative. In P. Hühn, et al. (Eds.), The living handbook of narratology. Hamburg
University. www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/unreliability
Asimakoulas, D. (2020). Rewriting. In M. Baker & G. Saldanha (Eds.), Routledge encyclopedia of translation
studies (pp. 241–245). Routledge (Original work published 1997).
Cordingley, A., & Montini, C. (2015). Genetic translation studies: An emerging discipline. Linguistica Antver
piensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, 14, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.52034/lanstts.v14i0.399
326
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https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1996/10/07/ilustrada/14.html.
Baker, M. (1993). Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications. In M. Baker, G.
Francis, & E. Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair (pp. 233–250). John
Benjamins.
Baker, M. (1995). Corpora in translation studies: An overview and some suggestions for future research. Tar
get. International journal of translation studies, 7(2), 223–243. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.7.2.03bak
Becher, V. (2010). Abandoning the notion of “translation-inherent” explicitation: Against a dogma of transla
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Blum-Kulka, S. (1986). Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation. In J. House & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.),
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Cordingley, A., & Montini, C. (2015). Genetic translation studies: An emerging discipline. Linguistica Antver
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Palimpsestes. Revue de traduction, 34, 84–100. https://doi.org/10.4000/palimpsestes.5982
Murtisari, E. T. (2016). Explicitation in translation studies: The journey of an elusive concept. Translation &
Interpreting, 8(2), 64–81. http://doi.org/10.12807/ti.108202.2016.a05
Olohan, M., & Baker, M. (2000). Reporting that in translated English. Evidence for subconscious processes
of explicitation? Across Languages and Cultures, 1(2), 141–158. https://doi.org/10.1556/Acr.1.2000.2.1
Øverås, L. (1998). In search of the third code: An investigation of norms in literary translation. Meta: journal
des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, 43(4), 557–570. https://doi.org/10.7202/003775ar
Paret-Passos, M. H. (2011). Da crítica genética à tradução literária: o caminho da (re) escritura. In-traduções
revista do programa de pós-graduação estudosos da tradução da UFSC, 3(5), 1–12.
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19
INTRALINGUAL VARIATION
AND TRANSFER IN LEGAL AND
INSTITUTIONAL TRANSLATION
The case of pluricentric languages
Introduction
Legal knowledge structures and discourses are shaped by the varied ways in which social relations
and institutions are organised across legal traditions and jurisdictions. These idiosyncrasies are
reflected in culture-bound elements of legal texts and generate incongruities that are characteristic
of legal translation. Studies in this field have traditionally focused on the challenges of mean
ing transfer between the source and target languages and legal systems, most often resorting to
comparative law methods. In this context, the search for communicative adequacy in translation
decision-making may also involve comparative analysis of legal concepts of national systems that
share the same language. This applies to institutional translation into “pluricentric languages” or
languages that are official in more than one jurisdiction in particular, as multiple interrelated legal
norms and linguistic conventions operate, and may interact, in the same language at various levels
(regional, state, supranational), and condition the translator’s task.
Culture-bound singularities at the national or local levels also coexist with institution-specific
preferences and conventions at the international level, which can be regarded as characteristic
discourse features and “institutional cultures” themselves. These features call for conformity and
consistency across institutional texts for the sake of legal certainty, standardisation and continuity
(Prieto Ramos, 2014; Šarčević, 2018; Stefaniak, 2017).
This chapter will examine intralingual variation and intralingual interactions between national
and international legal orders, and will question the extent to which forms of intralingual transfer
are involved in legal and institutional translation into pluricentric languages or languages that
are official in multiple national legal systems. To this end, it will first focus on cultural variations
between jurisdictions in the same language. To gain a broader perspective, it will then review and
illustrate other scenarios of intralingual translation primarily associated with time and knowledge
as additional variation parameters (see, e.g., Zethsen, 2009, p. 809) that also apply to legal and
institutional settings.
In this review, of a predominantly qualitative and by no means exhaustive nature, intralingual
translation or rewording will be understood in line with the seminal definition by Jakobson (1959,
p. 233) as “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language”. All
329 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-24

forms of intralingual rewording or transformation will be considered, including those occurring

for interlingual translation and those involving only parts of a text, particularly terminology and
phraseology, and not necessarily reformulations of entire texts.
Intralingual variation and transfer across

jurisdictional and institutional boundaries
As a communicative bridge between legal systems and traditions, legal translation is constrained
by the multiple specificities of legal language across jurisdictions. This “jurisdictional variability”
can be associated with legal cultural boundaries that result in both interlingual and intralingual
incongruities between legal concepts and structures in different jurisdictions. Such variability is
generally considered as a distinctive feature of legal language as opposed to specialised language
in other domains, such as chemistry or medicine, which revolve around universal concepts.
Legal system-bound incongruities include not only conceptual and terminological diver
gences, but also differences in textual genres and their discursive conventions (see, e.g., Biel,
2009; Chromá, 2011; Mattila, 2013). It is thus not surprising that legal translation has often been
described as a matter of comparative legal analysis (De Groot, 1988; Engberg, 2013; Pozzo, 2015)
in which the search for a “tertium comparationis”, or conceptual commonalities between incon
gruous legal notions, is essential for informed decision-making. While the primary focus in legal
translation studies has been on inter-systemic and interlingual translation, comparative legal anal
ysis may also be paramount in intra-systemic translation (i.e., translation within a multilingual
legal order), especially when translation decisions are made for an international audience sharing
the same target language. This will be one of the four major instances of intralingual jurisdictional
variation and transfer illustrated as follows.
Inter-systemic translation into pluricentric languages

or between same-language jurisdictions
The most typical consequence of intralingual jurisdictional variation is the need not only to situate
the source text within its legal framework but also to identify the legal framework of reference for
the production of the target text (TT) among several jurisdictions that share the same language.
For example, the translation of a divorce decree issued by an Irish court for several administrative
purposes in Spain will be different from the translation of a judgment of dissolution of marriage
from California to be used in Peru (Example 1). Likewise, the translation of a bilingual confiden
tiality agreement prepared by a multinational company for several Spanish-speaking jurisdictions
may require adaptations depending on the target legal system (Example 2). The regulations and
established terminology with regard to courts, termination, administrative proceedings or com
pany types, to name but a few aspects, may differ significantly between countries.
While national jurisdictions that share the same language also often share the same broad legal
tradition, for example, the civil law tradition in French-speaking or Spanish-speaking countries,
the influences on particular branches of national law may be very diverse, and not only from the
legal system of the original colonising countries (see, e.g., Eder, 1950, for a historical overview of
the impact of common law on Latin American legal systems). Culture-bound singularities can be
especially marked in denominations of bodies and legal procedures, as they tend to reflect local
idiosyncrasies and traditions. Jurisdictional variations may call for transfer adaptations in parallel,
that is, several simultaneous target versions for several jurisdictions, or subsequent retranslations
based on the original source text (ST) and/or a previous translation into the same target language.
330
Intralingual variation in legal and institutional translation
The degree of rewording will primarily depend on the level of divergence between national legal
orders on the subject at hand and the concomitant need to conform to local requirements and expecta
tions to ensure the relevant legal effects. For instance, in the preceding Example 1, the documentary
translation in question (according to Nord’s (1997, pp. 47–52) distinction between documentary and
instrumental translation) will facilitate target readers’ understanding of the details and nature of the
original document so that a divorce can be recognised for administrative purposes in the target system.
To this end, it might require adaptations to certified translation requirements in each of the countries
involved. In the case of a divorce decree to be translated for official use by the Peruvian and the Span
ish administrations, adaptations may affect not only parts of the wording, but also the format and cer
tification formulas to be adhered to by a certified translator (“traductor público juramentado” in Peru
and “traductor-intérprete jurado” in Spain) (on official translation, see, e.g., Mayoral Asensio, 2003).
In Example 2, where the instrumental translation will be part of bilingual copies of an agree
ment to be signed by the parties, intralingual rewordings and clause adaptations to local regula
tions may be mandatory. In clauses on contract termination and dispute settlement, for instance,
special attention must be paid to court names and proceedings, and to concepts such as “resolu
ción” and “rescisión”, which may express “termination” under varying circumstances and with
different effects according to the national legal system of reference for each target version.
Compromise building in the translation of

international legal texts into pluricentric languages
In the context of translation for the production of multilingual legal texts at international organisa
tions, intralingual jurisdictional variability inevitably leads to processes of linguistic compromise
building to facilitate understanding among international audiences. While macrotextual genre
conventions are specific to each institution, terminological issues often emerge when translating
notions whose closest corresponding concepts in the target language diverge between national
jurisdictions to be covered by the translation. Intralingual comparative legal analysis thus becomes
critical in the process of interlingual translation within an international legal order, especially
when no rendering has been clearly established for the term in question.
The ultimate aim of such a comparative analysis is to provide translations that are “neutral”
and broadly understandable to a global community of target language users. This entails avoiding
national singularities and prioritising conceptual commonalities when making translation deci
sions. If we take the example of “due process” in the context of translating European Union (EU)
texts and other international legal texts into Spanish, the primary referent legal system in the target
language will be that of Spain (the only Spanish-speaking Member State) in the case of the EU,
as opposed to those of the entire Spanish-speaking community in the case of intergovernmental
organisations such as the United Nations (UN) or the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The concept, which originated in common law, can be defined as: “The conduct of legal pro
ceedings according to established rules and principles for the protection and enforcement of private
rights, including notice and the right to a fair hearing before a tribunal with the power to decide the
case” (Garner, 2014, p. 610). Table 19.1 shows the concepts that correspond most closely to “due
process” in the most populated Spanish-speaking countries, including in constitutional law and
procedural law, both civil and criminal. The concept of “garantías procesales” can be considered
the most widespread “common denominator” in Spanish. It encapsulates the essential principle
without conveying any national singularities. Albeit less used in national legislations, “debido
proceso”, which reflects the influence of common law, can also be understood across jurisdictions
in Spanish. These two concepts actually predominate in institutional database recommendations
331
Table 19.1 Procedural concepts corresponding to “due process” in most populated Spanish-speaking coun
tries (Prieto Ramos & Guzmán, 2018, p. 87)
Constitution Criminal procedure Civil procedure legislation

legislation
Mexico formalidades esenciales del garantías

procedimiento;
garantía del debido proceso
legal
Colombia debido proceso garantías procesales debido proceso
Spain tutela efectiva garantías procesales tutela judicial efectiva;
garantías procesales
Argentina juicio previo fundado en
la ley
Venezuela debido proceso debido proceso; garantías procesales
garantías del debido proceso
Peru debido proceso; igualdad efectiva de las
tutela jurisdiccional partes en todas las
actuaciones del proceso
Chile proceso previo legalmente juicio previo y proceso legal
tramitado;
garantías de un
procedimiento y una
investigación racionales
y justos
Guatemala derecho de defensa garantías procesales
Ecuador debido proceso; juicio previo;
garantías básicas garantías previstas
for the translation of “due process” into Spanish (in the EU’s Interactive Terminology for Europe
[IATE], the UN’s UNTERM and the WTO’s dispute settlement glossary), while “tutela judicial
efectiva” is also included in IATE in line with the terminology used in the Spanish legal system
(Prieto Ramos & Guzmán, 2018, pp. 86–88; see also Bestué Salinas, 2009, on the translations into
Spanish of the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts and the Principles of
European Contract Law).
However, institutional standards or recommendations do not always exist for such concepts,
or they are insufficiently reliable or simply not applicable to a particular translation (see Prieto
Ramos, 2020). They may vary between institutions and translation precedents (see next subsec
tion), thus contributing to further constraints on the translation process. In all these instances, the
intralingual comparative analysis remains “hidden” as part of terminological research to make
interlingual translation decisions for international audiences. They do not involve the intralingual
transfer between a ST and a TT but an instrumental intermediate step that permeates translators’
cognitive processes and may be reflected in translation resources (e.g., terminological entries).
Intralingual adaptations to international institutional conventions

The varying nature and scope of supranational and international legal orders (e.g., EU law versus WTO
law), and the divergent discourse conventions that characterise “institutional cultures” in each official
332
language, condition translation work and also become apparent when such legal orders interact in the
same language. The intralingual inconsistencies that derive from fragmented terminological work, in
particular, often result in lexical dispersion not only between institutions but also between texts within
the same institution. Regardless of the degree of terminological uniformity or disparity between or
within institutions, editing and intralingual adaptations may be necessary when communicating with a
particular organisation in order to conform to its conventions, for example, in a national notification on
financial regulations for more than one international organisation (Example 1) or in references to EU
trade measures in the context of WTO texts on trade policy implementation (Example 2).
In the first case, the terminology preferred for “hedge fund” in Spanish, for example, may vary
greatly between institutions. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) includes the borrowing and
several other renderings of the term in its English-Spanish glossary: hedge fund, fondo de inver
sión especulativo, fondo especulativo de cobertura, fondo de inversión de alto riesgo, fondo de
cobertura, fondo de retorno absoluto, fondo de inversión libre (IMF, 2016). The last three transla
tions were added in the 2016 edition of the glossary, which specifies that Spanish legislation is the
source for “fondo de inversión libre”. Interestingly, UNTERM and IATE also integrated “fondo de
inversión libre” in line with the term introduced by Spanish law in 2005.1 However, other transla
tions of the term were also previously recommended and became widespread in international insti
tutional settings, especially “fondo de cobertura” at the UN, which called for institution-specific
intralingual adaptations. The persistent lack of harmonisation in the target language complicates
translation work. This tends to affect the initial stages of importation of neologisms from English
more severely (on terminological innovation and harmonisation in international organisations, see
Prieto Ramos & Morales Moreno, 2019).
While these institutional variations may occur in any field, texts of a legal nature are par
ticularly sensitive to inconsistencies, not only because of their thematic heterogeneity, but also,
in particular, because of the need to ensure legal certainty and the implications for the imple
mentation of legal obligations. Conformity to terminological preferences may even entail intra
textual inconsistencies in instances of interinstitutional quotations. In Example 2, the concept of
“prima facie evidence” was translated as “información que contenga a primera vista elementos de
prueba” in “information showing prima facie evidence” in Council Regulations (EC) 597/2009
and 1225/2009 on antidumping and anti-subsidy procedures, and in the latest amendments of these
“basic regulations”, Regulations (EU) 2016/1036 and 2016/1037 of the European Parliament and
of the Council. However, IATE has included a diversity of other recommendations for the transla
tion of the term into Spanish over the years, while an internal glossary of mandatory reference for
the subject, Léxico antidumping y antisubvenciones of 1997 (later updated in 2009), recommended
“indicios razonables”. As a result, this translation of “prima facie evidence” prevails in EU texts
on trade defence in Spanish. However, the Spanish formulation in the aforementioned basic regu
lations is used in EU notifications on antidumping or countervailing measures to the WTO, where,
in fact, “prueba prima facie” is the preferred term employed in Spanish (see Prieto Ramos, 2020,
pp. 139–143). Interinstitutional inconsistencies may thus be necessary within a same text in order
to observe divergent conventions at several institutions. In turn, this can lead to persistent intralin
gual terminological fuzziness and to perpetuating the recourse to the original English text for legal
interpretation and disambiguation purposes.
Conceptual transplants from international into national jurisdictions

Intralingual cross-jurisdictional transfer also takes place when international or supranational
legal concepts are integrated into national legislation based on legal instruments produced at the
333
supranational level in a common official language. The implementation of international legal inno
vations at the national level may rely on the direct applicability of legal acts (e.g., EU regulations)
or may require the adoption of some domestic legislation (e.g., multilateral agreements integrated
into national law through domestic statutes).
The transposition of EU directives, that is, their incorporation into EU Member States’ national
laws through domestic legislation, constitutes a particularly interesting example of the latter
scenario. This process of “translating” or “localising” EU directives into national law has been
described as a form of intralingual translation (Kjaer, 2007, p. 77; Biel, 2014, p. 59). In order to
reinforce the autonomy of EU law and promote the harmonisation of EU national laws, without
causing confusion or interference with national legal concepts, efforts are made to avoid the adop
tion of these national concepts to express EU legal concepts. More “neutral” and non-national-
specific terminology is preferred. This is reflected in Principle 5.3.2 of the Joint Practical Guide
of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission (European Union, 2015, p. 18): “As
regards legal terminology, terms which are too closely linked to a particular national legal system
should be avoided”. The following example is provided:
The concept of “faute”, which is well known in French law, has no direct equivalent in other
legal systems (in particular, English and German law); depending on the context, terms such
as “illégalité” and “manquement” (in relation to an obligation) etc., which can easily be
translated into other languages (“illegality”, “breach”, etc.), should be used instead.2
This kind of “legal engineering” (Prieto Ramos, 2014, p. 318) thus tends to involve both interlin
gual and intralingual legal analyses in processes of drafting and translation, as well as intralingual
verifications and adaptations in the context of transposing directives. The intralingual transfer into
national legislation, however, does not need to be literal. The “forms and methods” are chosen
by the national authorities (Article 288 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union).
According to the CJEU:
transposing a directive into national law does not necessarily require the provisions of the
directive to be enacted in precisely the same words in a specific express legal provision of
national law, since the general legal context may be sufficient if it actually ensures the full
application of the directive in a sufficiently clear and precise manner.
(Judgment in Case C-58/02 Commission v Kingdom of Spain [2004] ECR 0000, para. 26)3
Paradoxically, the terms used in the same official language for the same EU concept may dif
fer between national legal systems as a result of divergent transposition decisions. For example,
“advertising” in Directive 2006/114/EC was localised as “marketing communication” in Ireland’s
Statutory Instrument No. 774 of 2007 (see this and other examples of “localisations” of EU ter
minology of consumer protection directives in UK, Irish and Maltese transposing acts in Biel &
Doczekalska, 2020, pp. 201–203).
When EU terminology is not homogeneous as a result of inconsistent translations into an EU lan
guage (as in the situation described in the previous subsection), this variability may be replicated at
the national level in the same language. For example, Peruzzo (2012) observed that there has been a
proliferation of EU Italian terms for “restorative justice” since 2002 and a more limited variation of
terms to refer to the same new concept in Italian national legislation (see also Van Wallendael, 2016,
summarised in English in Temmerman, 2018, on the impact of transposing Directive 2013/32/EU
on migration in EU Dutch into transposing acts in Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium).
334
Intralingual adaptations to diachronic changes and specific

target group needs within a jurisdiction
Other instances of intralingual rewordings can be associated to time and knowledge variation
parameters in legal and institutional settings. As opposed to the cross-jurisdictional interfaces con
sidered earlier, the focus here will be on intralingual adaptations that take place within the same
jurisdiction, either national or international, and not as a result of interactions between legal orders
or diverse legal conventions across jurisdictions in a common language.
The fact that legal provisions are in constant evolution makes legal communication subject
to diachronic adaptations in line with new legal realities or amendments. Legal reforms may
overturn previously existing denominations and definitions and trigger intralingual rewordings of
related documentation (e.g., regulations, institutional websites, brochures), especially when they
may have an impact on legal rights and obligations. For example, in the context of the reform of
the French judicial system in 2019, two types of courts, “tribunaux d’instance” and “tribunaux
de grande instance”, were merged into a single category, “tribunaux judiciaires”.4 Likewise, the
reform of Spanish criminal procedure in 2015 brought about, among other changes, new terminol
ogy to avoid the confusing and pejorative connotations of “imputado”.5 Following recommen
dations of the “Comisión para la Claridad del Lenguaje Jurídico”, which promotes clear legal
language, the term was replaced by “investigado” to refer to the “accused” during the pre-trial
investigation phase, and “encausado” when initiating the trial (see also intralingual rewordings in
the context of the reform of the Hungarian Criminal Code in Dobos, 2020, pp. 86–87). Given their
further-reaching legal implications, intralingual translations of entire legal instruments are under
standably uncommon. A prominent example is the intralingual translation of the Greek Civil Code
from the Katharevussa form of Greek into Modern Greek, which was completed in 1984 with a
view to modernising and simplifying the language (see Vlachopoulos, 2007, which also examines
the special case of Cypriot common law in Greek).
Simplification is also a major strategy of intralingual translations that are aimed at facilitat
ing the comprehension of legal provisions and proceedings among the general public or spe
cific non-expert target groups. Accessibility to the law has traditionally been hindered by the
intricate formulations of “legalese”, a formal style or jargon developed by legal specialists for
legal purposes (see, e.g., Mattila, 2013; Tiersma, 1999), and often perceived as “wordy, unclear,
pompous [and] dull” (Mellinkoff, 1963, p. 24). Given the importance of law for many aspects
of social life, it is not surprising that the demands for clear legal communication emerged as a
key driving force of the so-called “plain language movement”, particularly since the 1970s in
the United States, and then in other English-speaking countries and the rest of the world (see
Williams, 2015, for a historical overview). According to the International Plain Language Fed
eration: “A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear
that the intended audience can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use
that information”.6
The rewriting of legal texts in plain language to meet the needs of lay readers has gained
momentum around the world and is probably the most widespread form of intralingual transla
tion of legal texts to date. Interestingly, some of the earliest and most significant plain language
rewriting initiatives were undertaken in areas where citizens’ understanding of legal texts can be
especially beneficial for the functioning of justice and the legal system, including the rewriting
of tax legislation in New Zealand (subsequently followed by the UK, Australia and South Africa;
see Richardson, 2012; Sawyer, 2013a, 2013b), and the rewording of court instructions for juries
and divorce law forms in the United States (see, e.g., Dyer et al., 2014; Marder, 2006). Table 19.2
335
Table 19.2 Examples of California’s civil jury instructions before and after rewriting in plain English7
Before (Book of Approved Jury Instructions) After (Judicial Council Civil Jury Instructions)
Failure of recollection is common. Innocent People often forget things or make mistakes in what
misrecollection is not uncommon. (Instruction 2.21) they remember. (Instruction 107)
“Preponderance of the evidence” means evidence A party must persuade you, by the evidence
that has more convincing force than that opposed presented in court, that what he or she is required
to it. If the evidence is so evenly balanced that to prove is more likely to be true than not true.
you are unable to say that the evidence on either This is referred to as “the burden of proof.”
side of an issue preponderates, your finding on (Instruction 200)
that issue must be against the party who had the
burden of proving it. (Instruction 2.60)
The amount of caution required of a person whose A person with a physical disability is required to
physical faculties are impaired is the care which use the amount of care that a reasonably careful
a person of ordinary prudence with similarly person who has the same physical disability
impaired faculties would use under circumstances would use in the same situation. (Instruction 403)
similar to those shown by the evidence.
(Instruction 3.36)
shows some illustrative plain English adaptations introduced in jury instructions for civil cases in
California, a pioneering state in plain language drafting for the courts, in 2003 (see also Tiersma,
2006, 2010).
More recently, rewriting into easy language has emerged as another prolific area of intralingual
translation of legal texts as a result of new national legislation for the inclusiveness of people with
intellectual disabilities or special needs, in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons
with Disabilities of 2006 (see Broderick, 2020). In comparison with plain language, easy language
involves a higher level of comprehensibility and simplification. It has been characterised as “the
maximally comprehensible variety of a natural language” (Maaß, 2020, p. 42). In countries such as
Germany, new legislation on equality for people with disabilities has led to a growing demand for
legal translation into easy language.8 According to Rink (2020), summarised in English in Maaß
(2020, p. 126), legal texts “are rather problematic for readers with communication impairments
as they are either too long and elaborate (Scenario A) or too short and trivial for them to develop
concepts on the text subject (Scenario B)”.
Other instances of intralingual tailoring to the needs of specific target groups may include age
considerations, particularly for the dissemination of legal information of relevance for certain
population segments. For example, Dobos (2020) discusses the retranslation of the Hungarian ver
sion of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into three versions for different age groups
(see example in Table 19.3). This author also rightly notes that intralingual translation may also
be necessary in the reverse direction, from non-expert to expert language, for example, in police
interrogations and court trials (Dobos, 2020, p. 86). This points to intralingual register adaptations
in oral interactions more broadly (see also Anesa, 2012; Heffer, 2005), including “popularising”
communicative efforts by experts according to the needs of the target audience (see, e.g., Liao,
2013; Gotti, 2016).
Among the organisations responsible for supranational or international law production and
dissemination, EU institutions have stood out as early advocates of clearer legal communica
tion. The need for further clarity in EU legal drafting was explicitly recognised at the Edinburgh
336
Table 19.3 Intralingual translations of Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into Hun
garian for three different age groups (back translations from Hungarian into English from Dobos,
2020, p. 85)
Original text Version for group Version for 8–12 Version for 12–16
under 8 years old year old group year old group
1. States Parties shall assure to the child In any matters Any time when Children have the
who is capable of forming his or her affecting you, an adult makes right to say what
own views the right to express those you have the a decision on a their opinion
views freely in all matters affecting right to express matter affecting is about what
the child, the views of the child being your opinion. you, you have the should happen
given due weight in accordance with The adults should right to express when adults make
the age and maturity of the child. listen to you, and your opinion, decisions on
2. For this purpose, the child shall in should consider and adults should matters affecting
particular be provided the opportunity what you are take it into them, and also
to be heard in any judicial and saying. consideration. have the right
administrative proceedings affecting of their opinion
the child, either directly, or through being taken into
a representative or an appropriate consideration.
body, in a manner consistent with the
procedural rules of national law.
European Council in 1992 and was established as the first drafting principle to be observed by
EU legislative drafters for the sake of legal certainty and citizens’ equality before the law: “The
drafting of a legal act must be: clear, easy to understand and unambiguous; simple and concise,
avoiding unnecessary elements; precise, leaving no uncertainty in the mind of the reader” (Euro
pean Union, 2015, p. 10).
Efforts have been made to address “Eurospeak” or “Eurolect” readability issues (see, e.g.,
Gardner, 2016; Sandrelli, 2018), particularly in English original texts, which, unlike their transla
tions into other EU official languages, are not primarily drafted by language professionals. The
“Fight the Fog” campaign was already launched by the European Commission in 1999 to promote
plain English, including a guide on how to write clearly (see latest version, European Commission,
2015). More than two decades later, however, it is not easy to perceive tangible progress in light of
the complexity of EU legislative procedures and the important weight of precedents and the acquis
communautaire in the development of EU law.
This situation has made expert-to-layperson web communication even more critical for
the dissemination of EU law and policies in plain language, especially as Brexit has added a
renewed sense of urgency to the matter of EU communication with its citizens. Efforts have
also been made to enhance accessibility among people with intellectual disabilities by provid
ing easy language versions of key explanatory pages about the EU institutions (see European
easy language standards in Inclusion Europe, 2017). Table 19.4 includes an example of how the
functions of the European Commission are established in EU law and how they are outlined in
EU webpages in plain English and easy-to-read English. The adaptation for the general public
is characterised by a very significant restructuring of the content, as well as explicitation tech
niques, while the easy-to-read version highlights the central role of the European Commission
in a most simplified way.
337
Table 19.4 Functions of the European Commission as expressed in EU law and their rewordings in EU
webpages
Article 17 of the Treaty on Plain English version1 Easy-to-read version2

European Union
The Commission shall promote What does the Commission do? [T]he European
the general interest of the Proposes new laws Commission
Union and take appropriate The Commission is the sole EU institution The people of
initiatives to that end. It shall tabling laws for adoption by the Parliament the European
ensure the application of the and the Council that: Commission suggest
Treaties, and of measures - protect the interests of the EU and its laws for the European
adopted by the institutions citizens on issues that can’t be dealt with Union.
pursuant to them. It shall effectively at national level
oversee the application of - get technical details right by consulting
Union law under the control experts and the public
of the Court of Justice of Manages EU policies & allocates EU
the European Union. It shall funding
execute the budget and manage - sets EU spending priorities, together with
programmes. It shall exercise the Council and Parliament
coordinating, executive and - draws up annual budgets for approval by
management functions, as laid the Parliament and Council
down in the Treaties. With - supervises how the money is spent, under
the exception of the common scrutiny by the Court of Auditors
foreign and security policy, Enforces EU law
and other cases provided for in - together with the Court of Justice, ensures
the Treaties, it shall ensure the that EU law is properly applied in all the
Union’s external representation. member countries
It shall initiate the Union’s Represents the EU internationally
annual and multiannual - speaks on behalf of all EU countries in
programming with a view to international bodies, in particular in areas of
achieving interinstitutional trade policy and humanitarian aid
agreements - negotiates international agreements for
the EU
1 https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/institutions-and-bodies/institutions
and-bodies-profiles/european-commission_en
2 https://european-union.europa.eu/easy-read_en
Discussion and concluding remarks

Our review of scenarios of intralingual variation and transfer in legal and institutional settings,
both between and within national and international jurisdictions, has revealed several forms of
intralingual comparative legal analysis and rewordings, some of which are characteristic of pluri
centric languages. As outlined in the following summary table (Table 19.5), we can conclude that
the coexistence of a plurality of legal systems and discourses in the same language, denominated
here as “intralingual jurisdictional variability”, often entails intralingual comparative analysis for
interlingual translation for an international audience, or may require adaptations of a translation
for multiple national or regional audiences. While the intralingual analysis involved in the first
scenario remains “hidden” and instrumental in translation decision-making, the cognitive effort
338
Table 19.5 Overview of intralingual variation and transfer in legal and institutional settings
Origin of intralingual Purpose Main variation Form of intralingual analysis or transfer Characteristic of
variation parameter pluricentric languages?
Diverse legal (a) Adaptation to target language group Legal culture (a) Rewording for different national Yes
conventions in in a selected jurisdiction in interlingual (national and jurisdictions in the same language
several jurisdictions translation (inter-systemic) international) (more than one target text in the same
in the same language)

language (b) Intralingual compromise in interlingual
translation for international audience (b) Intralingual comparative analysis for Yes
(intra-systemic) interlingual translation
Diverse institutional Compromise-building for interlingual Legal culture Intralingual adaptations for interlingual Not necessarily, but
conventions in the translation for international audience (institutional) translation or intralingual editing more common
same language or consistency with institutional
conventions
International legal Adapting national law to implement Legal culture Intralingual adaptations for legal No, but more common
339
provisions to be supranational or international law (national and implementation

integrated into international)
national law in the
same language
Legal reforms or Updating information in line with new Time Intralingual rewording (ST and TT in No
innovations within a legal provisions same language)
jurisdiction
Diverse levels of legal Adaptation to target reader needs to Knowledge Intralingual rewording (ST and TT in No
knowledge and enhance understanding and accessibility same language)
special target needs
within a jurisdiction
required of translators may be partially comparable to that applied to interlingual textual reformu
lation, as incongruities between legal concepts and discourse conventions are above all culture-
bound rather than a question of language difference.
In practice, legal translators working in pluricentric languages may spend as much time
decoding the original texts as researching legal notions of several jurisdictions that share the
same target language. Albeit not intralingual translation strictly speaking, this kind of intralin
gual process deserves acknowledgment. For example, translators of an EU text in English into
French or German, two languages that are official in more than one EU Member State, will have
to consider the potential implications of intralingual variation, as opposed to the translators of
the same text into Latvian or Hungarian, with a single referent national legal system. The degree
of intralingual jurisdictional variation, and therefore the need for intralingual verifications, will
also be higher when translating UN texts into Arabic or Spanish than into Chinese or Russian,
for instance.
Likewise, pluricentric languages that are official in several supranational and intergovern
mental institutions are exposed to a wider diversity of institutional conventions or “institutional
cultures”, especially with regard to terminological preferences, which call for intralingual adap
tations. Transposition processes of international legal provisions into national legal systems are
also necessarily more diverse, and prone to intralingual disparities, in the case of pluricentric
languages. All in all, culture-bound variations associated with jurisdictional and institutional sin
gularities lead to distinctive intralingual considerations in legal and institutional translation into
pluricentric languages.
In contrast, intralingual rewordings that derive from legal reforms (i.e., diachronic changes)
or adaptations to specific group communicative needs (i.e., knowledge-bound variations)
within a single jurisdiction are largely dependent on decision-makers’ actions to update the law
and facilitate access to it in an efficient and inclusive manner. Developments in the areas of
legal and institutional translation into plain language and, more recently, easy language have
been very significant, although not always recognised as “intralingual translation” (e.g., the
intralingual rewordings of tax legislation mentioned earlier were officially known as “rewrite
projects”).
Despite the fuzzy labels, intralingual translation has gained momentum as a result of new legal
measures on inclusiveness and accessibility to the law. As legal communication specialists fac
ing extremely diverse communicative needs, legal translators are well equipped to take a leading
role in this growing segment of the language industry. In an environment of increasing automa
tion, such prospects may add new resonance to Obenaus’s (1995) vision of the “legal translator
as information broker”, as well as further motivation to explore this under-researched field. It is
expected that the overview and perspectives offered here will also contribute to stimulating future
reflection on this subject.
Notes
1 Real Decreto 1309/2005, de 4 de noviembre, por el que se aprueba el Reglamento de la Ley 35/2003, de
4 de noviembre, de instituciones de inversión colectiva, y se adapta el régimen tributario de las institu
ciones de inversión colectiva (on collective investment undertakings).
2 This does not mean that EU legal concepts are not influenced by pre-existing legal traditions to varying
degrees. When the same term is eventually used for an EU legal concept and a national one in a particular
language, the meaning must be interpreted according to the applicable supranational or national legal
framework, as confirmed by the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) (Case 283/81 Srl CIL
FIT and Lanificio di Gavardo SpA v Ministry of Health [1982] ECR 3415, and Case C-103/01 Commission
v Germany [2003] ECR I-5369).
340
3 In line with other case law mentioned in this judgment: Case 29/84 Commission v Germany [1985] ECR
1661, para. 23; Case 247/85 Commission v Belgium [1987] ECR 3029, para. 9; and Case C-217/97 Com
mission v Germany [1999] ECR I-5087, para. 31.
4 See France’s Loi n° 2019–222 du 23 mars 2019 de programmation 2018–2022 et de réforme pour la
justice.
5 See Spain’s Ley Orgánica 13/2015, de 5 de octubre, de modificación de la Ley de Enjuiciamiento Crimi
nal para el fortalecimiento de las garantías procesales y la regulación de las medidas de investigación
tecnológica.
6 www.iplfederation.org/plain-language/
7 See other examples at www.courts.ca.gov/partners/314.htm
8 Maaß and Rink (2021, p. 1) refer to a “robust translation market for the translation of legal text types into
Easy Language” in Germany, in compliance with the right of people with communication impairments to
receive “official notifications, general rulings, public-law contracts and printed forms in Plain and com
prehensible language” (“in einfacher und verständlicher Sprache”) and, if necessary, “in Easy language”
(“in Leichter Sprache”) according to para. 11 of the Federal Act on Equality for People with Disabilities
(Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz, BGG), as translated by the same authors.
Further reading
Cheng, L., et al. (Eds.). (2014). The Ashgate handbook of legal translation. Ashgate.
Prieto Ramos, F. (Ed.). (2018). Institutional translation for international governance: Enhancing quality in
multilingual legal communication. Bloomsbury.
Simonnæs, I., & Kristiansen, M. (Eds.). (2019). Legal translation: Current issues and challenges in research,
methods and applications. Frank & Timme.
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PART V
Education and language acquisition
20
EXPANDING TRANSLATION
STUDIES
A functionalist approach to the use of intralingual
translation in language education
Georgios Floros
Introduction
The resurgent interest in translation as a generally useful and diverse tool in language education
(both language and content learning) has recently led to a much more systematic use of transla
tion and of theoretical approaches from translation studies in language teaching. Within this very
optimistic framework of using translation in other learning contexts, the focus has primarily been
only on the interlingual mode, and more specifically on newer approaches and forms of translation
such as corpus-based translation studies and audiovisual translation (see, for example, Lertola,
2019; Zanettin, 2014). This chapter adds another perspective to the possibilities of using transla
tion and translation studies in language education by emphasizing the role that can be played by
intralingual translation as opposed to interlingual translation, which is usually the preferred mode
when it comes to using translation studies in other academic disciplines.
More specifically, it will be argued that intralingual translation may fruitfully be used in some
specific contexts of language education. Based on previous research (Floros, 2021a), as well as
on forthcoming work on the teaching of Ancient Greek through translation, this chapter will high
light two cases which are representative of the scope of intralingual translation within language
education: The first case focuses on the possible use of intralingual translation in foreign language
learning, and more specifically within the context of translanguaging in mixed classrooms (see
Fu et al., 2019; for the explanation of the terms, see later). The second case focuses on the way
intralingual translation is used in learning older forms of language, such as teaching Ancient Greek
in the Greek educational system (see Maronitis, 2000), which exemplifies the problematic aspects
of teaching diachronic variation.
The conceptual frameworks of this chapter are (a) what has been termed by González Davies
(2014) as translation in other learning contexts (TOLC) and (b) functionalism in its wider sense.
TOLC draws on the emerging interest in translation studies as a discipline “(also) at the exporting
end” (Dam et al., 2018, p. 9), that is, a discipline that is not only informed by other disciplines,
but also informing other disciplines. The other conceptual framework used for this chapter is
functionalism, understood as the prevailing paradigm in translation studies ever since the 1980s.
This paradigm is wide enough to encompass all forms of translation, from literary to specialized
translation, and questions that go beyond the issue of translation purpose to questions regarding
347 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-26

Georgios Floros
the positioning of cultural products and concepts within cultural formations, be they national or
supranational (see, in particular, polysystem theory, Even-Zohar, 1979, 1990. For the understand
ing of polysystem theory as a functionalist approach, see Snell-Hornby, 2006).
Translation in other learning contexts and functionalism

When talking about the use of translation in language education today, reference is made to quite
a wide range of possibilities regarding topics, methods, and genres (see, for example, Tsagari &
Floros, 2013, and the Further Reading section). Translation exercises contribute to both language
teaching and language assessment (Tsagari & Floros, 2013). Such exercises are now used not only
in the traditional way, that is, for teaching grammar and vocabulary, but also for enhancing text
comprehension and L2-writing skills, for boosting collaborative learning, and for creating more
efficient interaction among students as well as between teachers and students. Translation is used
as an activity that can provide tangible results in various sub-competences within language learn
ing, and also in order to enhance the very experience of learning itself. The systematic inclusion
of the native language(s) in a comparative framework of learning (as opposed to a strictly mono
lingual classroom), as well as the use of textual genres which range from literature to multimodal
texts from the areas of audiovisual translation and audio description (see, for example, Navarrete,
2018; Sokoli, 2018; Vermeulen & Escobar-Álvarez, 2021), have contributed to elevating the pro
file and usefulness of translation in the classroom.
The concept that perhaps best represents this elevated profile of the use of translation in
language learning is that of translation in other learning contexts, which has been provided by
González Davies (2014, 2021). In her description of TOLC, González Davies capitalizes on the
optimal position regarding the use of L1 in language learning, which supports that there is peda
gogical value in the use of L1 and that such value should be explored (Macaro, 2001), and departs
from the assumption that “an optimal use of translation in learning contexts other than translation
studies has substantial potential” (2014, p. 8). She then provides a detailed account of how TOLC
is to be conceptualized, while implying, at the same time, that TOLC is not simply what is known
so far as pedagogical translation. TOLC suggests that translation is a “skill in its own right, as well
as a spontaneous or informed learning strategy for the development of (inter)linguistic and inter
cultural competence” (2014, p. 8). Learning contexts where different languages and cultures come
into contact thus offer the possibility of looking at translation as having an enriched scope and role
to play, one that stems from the contemporary need to train not simply for linguistic competence,
but also for the acquisition of intercultural mediation skills, that is, skills that allow a person to
interact with people of different cultures and resolve cultural misunderstandings.
Among the basic premises of TOLC are the ideas of plurilingualism and complexity. On the
one hand, plurilingualism is understood as more than multilingualism, which implies knowledge
and/or co-existence of several different languages (see also Council of Europe, 2001). Plurilingual
individuals are those who have more than one language at their disposal (multilingualism) and,
in addition, are characterized by multilinguality, which is defined by Aronin and Ó’Laoire (2004,
p. 17f., quoted in Aronin & Singleton, 2012, p. 80) as “reflecting origins and ethnic belonging,
political affiliations and environmental influences, reference groups, and individual development
level and cognitive abilities”. Complexity, on the other hand, means that TOLC follows the prin
ciple of connectivism, according to which all knowledge, of whatever kind, is related, and the
interdependence hypothesis, which challenges the direct method and the exclusion of L1 from
learning processes by positing that the inclusion and use of L1 through translation may outrun the
drawbacks of interference (cf. González Davies, 2014, p. 12). Another aspect that supports the
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understanding of TOLC as relying on complexity is the adoption of the dynamic model of multi
ligualism (Herdina & Jessner, 2002). This model suggests the application of chaos or complexity
theory by positing that “linguistic, psychological, social and contextual factors interrelate to pro
duce multilingual proficiency” (González Davies, 2014, p. 13). In this sense, the complexity of the
model lies in the fact that the linguistic factors do not work in isolation but are complemented by
other factors which interact with them in shaping the form of the multilingual outcome of speak
ers. González Davies (2014) observes that translation is not even mentioned in the studies describ
ing that model, probably due to lack of epistemological traffic and cross-fertilization between
translation studies and language acquisition as distinct, yet related disciplines. However, transla
tion has the potential to act as a tool that fosters the inclusion, exploitation, and advancement of
multilingual proficiency precisely because it considers and incorporates not only the transfer of
linguistic meaning, but also the social, contextual, and psychological aspects of meaning. The
study conducted by González Davies (2014) shows strong evidence that the plurilingual para
digm is beneficial for additional language learning, if translation is used in a way that unfolds its
potential as a critically and socially oriented activity and not merely as an exercise in linguistic
correspondence retrieval (see also Floros, 2020). In any case, perhaps the most valuable aspect of
TOLC is its wide conceptualization, which allows for the examination of translation not only in
foreign or additional language learning, but also in any learning context involving language.
Seen from a functionalist perspective, translation in language education (and TOLC in particu
lar) have the purpose of enhancing language and mediation competence, not of preparing profes
sional translators. This is a widely accepted change of function regarding the use of translation
outside translation studies, just like the changes of function that can be encountered in every
professional translation task under skopos theory. But TOLC can be further explored within a dif
ferent functionalist approach, that of polysystem theory. In his model for describing the position
of translated literature and literary translation within the literary system of a particular cultural
formation as well as within the literary (poly)system of the world, Even-Zohar (1979, 1990) intro
duced the notions of centre and periphery as key components of any such system and understood
cultural products (be they literary works or translated literary works) as being in a constant strug
gle to occupy a (more) central, and therefore more dominant, position within the system. Thus, for
example, in Even-Zohar’s view, translated literature has a pivotal role in the literary polysystem
if it “participates actively in shaping the centre of the polysystem” (Even-Zohar, 1990, p. 46f.).
The understanding of domains of cultural production as forming dynamic systems with a core
(centre) that is surrounded by peripheral positions has been very influential in translation studies,
and it may actually form the basis for understanding any cultural product and concept as engaging
in a systematic interplay with other cultural products and concepts within society. In this sense,
the notions of centre and periphery need to be conceptualized as the two ends of a continuum
and not as mutually exclusive categories, since there may be constant relocation of products and
concepts within a system across time, with centrally positioned items moving to more peripheral
positions and peripheral items moving to more central positions as a society’s values, preferences,
convictions, understandings, and so on change over time. Therefore, the theory of polysystems
may also be seen as belonging to the functionalist approaches in translation studies, since it takes
into consideration extralinguistic factors such as societal and cultural changes, the agents who are
responsible for such changes and for the purposes they hide, as well as the possible changes and
alterations of the concepts and products themselves, in order for them to be able to move to more
central positions.
Taking language education as an example, a schematic representation according to polysystem
theory could probably yield a depiction such as the one shown in Figure 20.1.
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Georgios Floros
Figure 20.1 Schematic depiction of language education (LE) as a polysystem
If we imagine that the system as a whole (core and outer circles) refers to language education
(LE) currently (at this particular moment in time), the centre of the system is occupied by a set
of dominant approaches, while other approaches and concepts are positioned in the outer circles
(peripheries). Thus, the various approaches may have a stronger or weaker influence on the core
understanding of what language education is and how it is constituted, depending on how far from
the centre they are positioned. If we assume that one of these approaches in the outer circles is
translation, we may infer that currently it is positioned near the core, taking the form of TOLC
(T-TOLC). Previously, when translation was still understood in the traditional form of pedagogical
translation (T-PT), it was probably positioned far from the core, as it was not considered a useful
activity that could reach beyond the teaching and learning of grammar. The contemporary concep-
tualization of the use of translation in the form represented by the TOLC concept has upgraded the
position of translation within language education, bringing it closer to the elements forming the
core of that discipline.
Despite the undeniable improvement of the position of translation in language education, the
discussion of translation is restricted to the interlingual mode. The interlingual mode is the default
one when referring to translation in language education, since it is logical to immediately think
of multilingualism when it comes to the learning of a second, foreign, or additional language. For
a very long time, intralingual translation has been thought of as a mode of translation within the
exact same language (see, for example, Mossop, 2016), despite chronologically or geographically
conditioned differences between the forms of language in question. From the point of view of dia-
lectology, emphasis has been given on the dialectal differences at the level of the so-called hard-
core features of language, that is phonology, syntax, morphology, and lexis (cf. Crystal & Ivić,
2014), leaving aspects such as pragmatics, register, or terminology out of the realm of possible dif-
ferences. Nevertheless, research in the last two decades has shown that the latter group of aspects
350
also forms a domain where significant differences between varieties of the same language can be
traced (regarding phraseology, see Piirainen, 2004; regarding terminology, see, for instance, Flo
ros, 2014, 2017). A representative example is provided by the examination of the Cypriot Greek
dialect (CGD, spoken on the island of Cyprus) as opposed to Standard Modern Greek (SMG, the
variety of mainland Greece), where evidence suggests that, despite being indeed historically and
diachronically related varieties of the same language, they still display significant differences that
keep them apart, to the extent that while CGD speakers understand SMG, the same cannot be said
for the other way round (for the lack of convergence between CGD and SMG see, indicatively,
Tsiplakou & Armostis, 2020). When it comes to the translation between CGD and SMG, it was
suggested in previous work (Floros, 2016) that there may even be untranslatability between the
two varieties in specific contexts of occurrence, contrary to the widespread understanding that
since Cyprus and Greece share the same language, no such issue might be posed.
Intralingual translation has already been described by Zethsen (2009) as a mode of transla
tion very similar to the interlingual one, in the sense that the differences between the intralingual
and the interlingual mode seem to be more differences of degree than of kind. This means that in
intralingual translation, one practically deals with the same translation problems and challenges
as in the interlingual mode, even though such problems and challenges may occur with a lesser
frequency and lower intensity, due to the apparent kinship between two varieties of the same
language. In this framework, this chapter aims to put forward the idea that intralingual translation
can also be used in language education just like the interlingual mode, by providing two examples
which highlight such possibility.
Intralingual translation in contexts of translanguaging

In so-called uniform educational contexts where students share the same L1 and learn an addi
tional language, the use of translation seems almost self-explanatory. While the use of interlingual
translation has been well advocated for in such contexts, a problem arises because contemporary
economic, political, social, and cultural challenges such as migration and advances in educational
approaches have turned uniform classrooms into an exception (see, for example, Fu et al., 2019; Ji
& Laviosa, 2021). The reality today is mixed classrooms and high-complexity schools (González
Davies, 2021), where plurilingual identities are at play and fostered. Still, translation could be seen
in such classrooms as an effective tool not only for communication (cf. Källkvist, 2013), but also
for the better integration of pupils of different provenance (see García & Sylvan, 2011).
Mixed classrooms are linguistically diverse classrooms, which can actually mean two things:
Classrooms where pupils/students learn an additional language without sharing the same L1 (e.g.,
EFL classes of students with different provenance), or classrooms for learning a language which
for some students is their first language, while for others it is their second or third one. Such are, for
example, the English classes in many American schools today, where first- or second-generation
immigrant students from various cultural backgrounds intermingle with monolingual students
with English as a first language. These circumstances pose additional challenges to the integration
of translation in language learning, since there is no fixed language pair of L1 and L2 to translate
from/into. It is usually impossible to find teachers who have a command of all L1 languages that
may be spoken or understood by students; it is equally impossible to always appoint two or more
teachers with knowledge of different languages for co-teaching such a classroom. Therefore, the
deployment of (interlingual) translation in such contexts may at times become problematic.
Meanwhile, the idea of the involvement of the different languages spoken in a classroom has
generally not been neglected, despite practical difficulties. Building on the work by García (2009)
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and Garciá and Wei (2014), Fu et al. (2019) promote translanguaging for emergent bilinguals both
as a discursive practice and as a teaching methodology. The authors maintain that translanguag
ing reflects a dynamic conceptualization of bilingualism, in the sense that all language knowledge
of an individual forms a single linguistic repertoire instead of separate repertoires corresponding
to each language or language variety an individual commands. As a result, it is assumed that
individuals use the knowledge and tools of all languages or varieties they know when they com
municate. This simultaneous use of all language resources is encouraged in the classroom, as it
alleviates intimidation, frustration, and feelings of incompetence in migrant children. Thus, today,
translanguaging is gaining ground in US schools with large populations of plurilingual pupils.
Contrary to a seeming opposition between translation and translanguaging (see Floros, 2021a,
p. 290), the former fits very well into the framework provided by the latter, since translation is an
activity that also requires bilingual performance by keeping all language resources active, espe
cially in the transfer phase of translation. The approach by Fu et al. (2019) is very useful not only
because it addresses the contemporary challenges in education but also because it offers space for
translation to contribute to this. In fact, Fu et al. (2019) aptly refer to translation activities in the
translanguaging classroom, which formed the basis for extensive suggestions to be made in Floros
(2021a) regarding the use of translation, and especially of the interlingual mode, in translanguag
ing. In this respect, a challenging problem arises with mixed classrooms that also encompass
monolingual pupils.
Monolingual pupils or students are not thought to possess the same linguistic resources as bi-
or multilingual ones. Thus, when bi- or multilingual individuals are using translation exercises in
the framework of translanguaging, monolingual individuals could be somewhat disadvantaged.
In Floros (2021a), it was suggested that intralingual translation can provide a possible solution.
The intralingual mode may be used as a tool for enabling monolingual students to work in the
same classroom with bi- or multilingual ones and experience (the benefits of) translation through
diatopic, diastratic, or diachronic variation of their own language, while others use the interlingual
mode. In order to be able to capitalize on the intralingual mode for such a case, a series of hypoth
eses and clarifications are needed.
Habitually, individuals who do not speak a foreign language in the traditional sense, that is,
a language that is not native, are considered monolingual. However, this is a rather problematic
perception of monolingualism, since individuals might have (even passive) knowledge of dialectal
variations of their first language or might live in diglossic contexts (Ferguson, 1959), where varie
ties of the same language are used synchronically. The latter cases refer to contexts where the high
variety is used along with the dialectal variety, as, for example, in Cyprus (SMG and CGD) or
Switzerland (Hochdeutsch and Swiss German). Thus, national provenance or the institutionaliza
tion of an official language in a country are not sufficient for understanding individuals as mono
lingual. If, in addition, we take into consideration, as was indicated earlier, that dialectal varieties
do not necessarily converge with high varieties over time or that the differences between varieties
are not confined to hard-core features such as phonetic and syntactic aspects only, but extend to
terminology, pragmatics, and register as well, one might easily infer that knowledge of a dialectal
variety of the same language (diglossia or bilectism) can also be taken as a plurilingual condition
(cf. also Grohmann & Kambanaros, 2016). Therefore, it can be assumed that such individuals also
exercise translation between the varieties in the sense of what has been termed mental or silent
translation in L2 learning (see, for example, Floros, 2020; Kern, 1994; Kobayashi & Rinnert,
1992; Pym et al., 2013; Titford, 1985). In this case, of course, the intralingual mode of translation
is at play, instead of the interlingual one, and it is up to the teacher to encourage the conscious
exercising of such translation in the form of suitable exercises and tasks.
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The fact that intralingual translation can take place if prompted brings about another param
eter to be taken into consideration. A functionalist perspective regarding (so-called) monolingual
individuals in a translanguaging classroom would entail that the purpose of using the intralingual
mode is not the exact rendition of a text in a different language version or the improvement of lan
guage skills. By looking at the various forms of the same language as resources that are of equal
use to the resources provided by different languages, the purpose of using the intralingual mode is
the very experience of what it takes to translate language, as well as the activation of the complete
linguistic repertoire of the pupils/students.
In this light, intralingual translation could capitalize both on dialectal (geographical) varia
tions that “monolingual” pupils or students might command (as indicated earlier), or even on
sociolectal variations of the same language, since translation can actively contribute to learning
register as well. Realizing the differences among various registers (especially regarding tenor and
mode) and learning to communicate in many of them simultaneously can be very fruitful not only
for monolingual students, but also for plurilingual ones, especially with the learning of an addi
tional language. It is true that when teaching an additional language, the form of language that is
usually promoted is the official one, while other, more colloquial or – socially – more restricted
ones such as youth language and slang are neglected. This, of course, is understandable, due to
limited teaching times and possible lack of systematically recorded resources of sociolectal vari
ations. Today, however, audiovisual material and social media texts can provide a useful resource
for such intralingual exercises. Likewise, canonical and classical literary texts can also prove
very resourceful for intralingual translation, especially for advanced classes. From a functional
ist perspective, intralingual translation exercises focusing on register or diachronic variation can
offer a much wider overview and understanding of the forms a language can take. This may prove
beneficial for both monolingual and plurilingual students sitting in the same classroom, as such
exercises enrich the spectrum of language resources and thus foster the learning of and advancing
in the same language. The issue of diachronic variation is taken up more extensively in the next
section, which will present the second example of the scope of intralingual translation within
language education.
Intralingual translation in teaching diachronic variation

The use of the intralingual mode for teaching diachronic variation of a language will be shown
through the example of the Greek language, and, more specifically, with the example of teaching
Ancient Greek in Greek secondary education. One of the most important figures in diachronic
intralingual translation between Ancient and Modern Greek was Maronitis, who distinguished
three subtypes to intralingual translation: The philological, the literary, and the school translation
(see Maronitis, 2000). The philological and the literary intralingual translation differ in terms of the
agent, the addressees, and the result. Regarding the agent, philological intralingual translation is
carried out by specialists in Ancient Greek philology, while in literary intralingual translation it is
carried out by literary authors. As for the addressees, philological intralingual translation addresses
a specialist audience of philologists, while the literary type addresses the wider audience, who
differ from philologists, as they do not necessarily have knowledge of Ancient Greek. As a result,
philological intralingual translation produces a somewhat faithful translation. It depends on and
is oriented towards the original, while the result of the literary type is a freer translation, oriented
less towards the source language variety and more towards the target language variety, since it
aims at creating a new text by reproducing the spirit of the original (see, also, Maronitis, 2008).
According to Maronitis (2008), the consequence is that the philological type is often criticized for
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its neutrality and lack of stylistic vigour, while the literary type borders on self-assertiveness that
may even result in semantic and stylistic deviations from the original.
Maronitis (2000) considers the school type of intralingual translation, that is, the translation
practised with the aim of teaching and assessing pupils’ knowledge of Ancient Greek, to be an
aftereffect of the philological type. However, the agents, the addressees, and the result are quite
different from those of the philological type. School translation is not practised by experts but by
pupils, while the addressees are simply the teacher and other pupils. Most of the time, the result is a
clumsy adherence to the original, without the research and care exhibited in a philological transla
tion by experts, leaving school translation prone to ideological bias. Ideological bias can be found,
of course, in many genres of the interlingual translation mode as well. But in the case of school
translation, the function of the translation is purely didactic and aims at reaffirming identity; the
prevailing ideology is that the original needs to remain “unspoiled” through a counterproductive
literalness that is supposed to be paying due respect to the original “masterpiece”. To make mat
ters worse, schoolbooks and crammer books provide “ideal”, model translations which pupils
often learn off by heart. As a result, the wealth of the Ancient Greek language remains inacces
sible to learners. As regards the didactic method, this is totally teacher-centred, a problem that is
also found in the teaching of professional interlingual translation. This goes against any notion of
collective quest in the classroom, or, to use Maronitis’ words (2000), of the heuristic process of
teaching Ancient Greek through translation.
Normally, the aim of exercising intralingual translation of ancient Greek texts into SMG is
to offer SMG speakers access to a form of their language which is both related and distant. To
keep this aim active, a repurposing of the intralingual translation class is needed. The purpose of
intralingual translation can no longer be a philological interest in the grammatical particularities
of Ancient Greek, nor can one aspire to make pupils learn to actively use that variety as an addi
tional language or provide a translated version that could have the value and quality of a literary
text in the modern variety. The purpose should be to provide access to the wealth of meanings,
to the relationship between Ancient Greek and the modern variety at many levels (morphology,
semantics, pragmatics), and to its discursive richness through different genres and registers.
For such an endeavour to be successful, by now commonly accepted insights into interlingual
translation, such as, for instance, correspondence vs. equivalence, pragmatic equivalence, and
equivalence of effect, should be applied to intralingual school translation as well, if the latter is
to prove fruitful in terms of understanding and appreciating the origins of the modern variety
spoken.
In other words, the philological and the literary type of intralingual translation are but two
possible purposes for intralingual translation, which school translation need not necessarily fol
low. School translation need not aspire to producing a result in the same way that the other two
types do; it may simply be seen as a means to discover otherness, not to represent it. This is quite
liberating for school translation, as it immediately makes clear that the aim is not to emulate a
prefabricated, exemplary translation, but to learn a language passively, by learning to negotiate its
similarities and differences with the modern variety, always in relation to genre, author, and other
contextual factors. In the light of this new purpose for school translation, it seems useful to insist
on translation techniques and principles in the classroom. Translation methodology is something
that is not at all taught during school translation, probably due to the misconception that specific
and targeted methodology is only needed in interlingual translation, not in translation between
related varieties. This brings us back to the issue highlighted by Zethsen (2009), that the differ
ences between the intralingual and the interlingual mode seem to be more differences of degree
than of kind. Even if one fully accepts the ideological narrative of linguistic continuity between
354
Ancient and Modern Greek, there are differences between the varieties that may support the argu
ment that translation between them in fact resembles interlingual translation.
One intralingual translation example is the Ancient Greek aphorism Γελᾷ δ’ ὁ μωρὸς, κἄν τι μὴ
γελοῖον ᾖ (The fool laughs even when there is nothing funny, see Menander & Allinson, 1959; my
translation), where the word γελοῖον [yelíon] (funny) has survived in SMG but with a different
meaning: In SMG, the word γελοίο [yelío] means silly, ridiculous, but not funny. Interestingly,
though, in the Cypriot dialect the word γελοῖον [yelíon] has survived with both the meaning of
funny and the meaning of silly. Therefore, in SMG it needs to be changed to αστείο [astío] (funny).
The same holds for the word μωρὸς [morós] (fool), which has survived in SMG as μωρό [moró]
(baby) and thus needs to be changed to ανόητος [anóitos] (fool). In fact, a translation into SMG
which would completely reproduce not only the meaning of the original but also the humorous
tone would be a set phrase in SMG that is totally distant from the wording of the original: Χαζό
παιδί χαρά γεμάτο (A silly kid is full of joy, something like happy-go-lucky in a depreciative tone;
my translations). However, for teachers of Ancient Greek such a rendition might sound too low
a register to function as a faithful equivalent to an original that is thought too prestigious to be
toned down. It is thus very doubtful that such a leap would ever gain acceptance in the framework
of such a class, where the ideological motivation is strong, due to the fact that it actually aims at
extolling the value of the original.
Another example is the beginning of the definition of Ancient Greek tragedy by Aristotle: Ἔστιν
οὖν τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας (A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action
that is serious and also . . . complete in itself, translated by Imgram Bywater, cited in Grube,
1958). The word τελείας [telías <genitive>] (complete) has survived in SMG mainly as perfect,
impeccable, and also as complete. Therefore, it might need changing to ολοκληρωμένης [olok
liroménis], which only means complete, that is, as used in this particular context. Furthermore,
although the word μίμησις [mímisis] (imitation) has survived in SMG, it might be better translated
in this context as αναπαράσταση [anaparástasi] (representation), since the Modern Greek μίμηση
[mímisi] (imitation) is used much more in its literal sense than in its metaphorical one. However,
the word αναπαράσταση [anaparástasi] (representation) might be thought of as too explicative and
thus unable to reproduce the powerful connotations which are created today by reading a text that
is considered ancestral.
These intralingual translation examples show that several semantic and pragmatic shifts are
required in intralingual translation from Ancient Greek to SMG if the text is to make sense in the
target variety and if pupils are to understand the relationships between the two varieties. Such shifts
could also be required from an interlingual translation between any foreign language and SMG and
allow pupils to realize that the modern survival of Ancient Greek meanings does not automatically
entail “sameness”. To achieve “sameness” they need to carefully compare the varieties and nego
tiate the similarities and differences between them not only at the semantic level, but also at the
pragmatic one, in order to reproduce a text. Teaching diachronic variation in schools cannot aim
at producing philologists (researchers) or authors, but should train pupils to develop comparative
skills and understand language as a communicative tool which can take different forms depend
ing on particular historical and cultural contexts. Ultimately, it is precisely the notions of context
and situation that intralingual translation can teach in order to exemplify otherness (cf. also Berk
Albachten, 2014; Savaş, 2018). In this way, practising intralingual translation can have a much
wider scope than simply teaching the features of an older form of language. It can contribute to
the development of critical skills that go beyond language aptitude to understanding how to use
language to communicate effectively through retrieving and negotiating multiple equivalences
in relation to genre and style. In addition, if it is practised with other pupils under the teacher’s
355
Georgios Floros
guidance and without predetermined solutions, it can also help develop social skills by promoting
a collaborative meaning-making process; in short, a process that takes into consideration not only
grammatical correctness and semantic precision or faithfulness, but also factors such as genre,
ideology, and collective connotation.
Enhancing the positioning of translation in language education

In the first case study (contexts of translanguaging), a TOLC-oriented use of the intralingual
mode of translation was proposed. In this way, translation is proposed not only as a tool for
learning language but also for offering more chances to experience mediation through consider
ing the linguistic inequalities in the classroom and through broadening the linguistic resources
of pupils. Integrating a mode of translation that was not thought of as useful before offers
the possibility to expand the use of translational activities in teaching and learning a foreign
language.
In this case, language education is prompted to recognize the multifaceted nature of transla
tion itself, to discern the potential of the forms it takes, and thus to accept an even more ben
eficial role for it within education. Going back to viewing language education as a polysystem
(see Figure 20.1), this would entail that translation may occupy an even more central role within
this polysystem (see the positioning of T-TOLC as opposed to the positioning of T-PT in Figure
20.1). If translation already proves fruitful regarding its interlingual mode, the integration of yet
another mode in language education might further enhance its role and positioning, provided
that this expanded understanding of translation is indeed recognized by teachers, who are the
most important agents in language education. Undeniably, the shifting of translation from a
more peripheral position to a more central one within the polysystem of language education will
not be fulfilled by simply suggesting that it has the potential to do so. Teachers need to embrace
this possibility by actually embracing the effort implied by such possibility. In other words, it
is indeed challenging to have to deal with yet another asymmetry within an already asymmetri
cal mixed classroom consisting of various constellations of plurilingual and monolingual stu
dents (such as the ones described in Fu et al., 2019), given the various time constraints teachers
already face. For an integration of the intralingual mode of translation to make sense within the
classroom, specific training needs to be provided regarding (a) the simultaneous management of
groups of pupils working in different translation modes and (b) the ways in which the results of
interlingual translation and the results of intralingual translation will be presented to the rest
of the class respectively.
Regarding the second case (teaching diachronic variation), a functionalist take does not imply
the integration of an additional mode but the repurposing of the already practised mode. It was
suggested that the main purpose for which intralingual translation is practised at schools should
be to expose students to difference, to allow them to negotiate this difference for passive knowl
edge, and to explore the potential of that older form to express and convey meanings, ideas, and
notions, not to make students speak or write the older language form of their first language. In
this case, the shifting of intralingual translation to a more central position within the polysystem
of first language education is proposed to succeed through bringing forward a translation purpose
that is more likely to be accepted by pupils as beneficial and meaningful. Working with prefab
ricated translations or being guided to retrieve very particular equivalences that give priority to
the reproduction of the grammatical features of the original, instead of to the multiple meanings
that this original may have, often creates in pupils a counter-productive frustration about the
reason for going to all the trouble of learning a diachronically different variety. To combat this
356
frustration, and by consequence to accentuate the role of translation in the language class, the
translation from the older variety needs to highlight the relevance of that older form to the form
that is spoken and used.
The key, and at the same time perhaps the most important obstacle to this endeavour, is again
the teachers, but also the educational policy makers. This is because the proposed repurposing
of the teaching of diachronic variation is not a practical problem but touches upon ideology and
issues of identity preservation. Diachronic variation is often seen as fostering identity, and older
forms of language are thought of as having a particular value and as promoting a particular func
tion of (re-)connecting the modern world to the roots. Any attempt to place the emphasis on the
modern variety at the expense of the philological value of the original might thus be seen as
diminishing the ancestral tradition. Therefore, it is again the agents of intralingual translation that
will take the lead and eventually contribute to pushing translation to a more central position in the
educational polysystem.
Conclusions
By adopting a functionalist perspective, this chapter highlighted the possibility of intralingual
translation to occupy a more central position within the polysystem of language education, if intra
lingual translation is examined as a legitimate mode of translation next to the interlingual type,
and if the agents of educational policy and conduct accept to embrace the intralingual mode as a
feasible aim that promotes not only equality in mixed classrooms but also a more critical stance
towards ideological issues.
The ultimate aim was not only to show that intralingual translation can be examined along
the lines of the interlingual type, but also to stress the relevance of intralingual translation
for a different discipline. This is to be seen as yet another instance of how translation studies
may expand towards and inform other disciplines. In other words, an attempt was made to
showcase translation not simply as a professional prospect, but also as a generic skill – or a
specific form of literacy (Floros, 2021b) – that can be beneficial to professionals and practi
tioners of various other fields. Such fields may extend beyond language learning and educa
tion to all professional fields that encourage a comparative perspective for their purposes, thus
highlighting a possible new field of application for translation, namely translation in other
professional contexts (TOPC).
Further reading
Cook, G. (2010). Translation in language teaching: An argument for reassessment. Oxford University Press.
This book has become standard literature and is one of the most important contributions regarding the use of
translation in language education, as it reintroduces translation with a solid argumentation, after a long
period where translation had been abandoned as a learning tool.
Laviosa, S. (2014). Translation and language education: Pedagogic approaches explored. Routledge.
This book presents a translation-based pedagogy applied in real educational contexts, where translation is
used both as a distinct skill and as a means for learning and teaching a foreign language. It aims at harmo
nizing the teaching of language and translation in the same learning environment.
Xuanmin, L. (2019). What can intralingual translation do? Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies,
6(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/23306343.2019.1633008
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the affordances of intralingual translation today, reaching
from adaptation for specific audiences to shaping identity, and is thus an important source for the state of
the art on the topic.
357
Georgios Floros
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21
INTRALINGUAL AUDIOVISUAL
TRANSLATION AS A FOREIGN
LANGUAGE AID
A methodological proposal for
application at different levels
Introduction
When audiovisual translation (henceforth, AVT) is applied as a pedagogical resource, the literature
tends to refer to this practice as didactic AVT (Talaván, 2020) or DAT. This educational applica
tion of AVT needs to be understood as the active use of the different AVT modes (subtitling, dub
bing, audio description, voice-over, etc.) by the students in the foreign language learning (FLL)
setting, that is, students performing the translation for subtitling, dubbing, and so on themselves
as the focus of a lesson plan or didactic sequence or as an isolated task. These tasks can normally
be carried out in two different directions: Undertaking either an intralingual or an interlingual
translation.
AVT is a prolific field of study. Since the first monograph in 1957 by Simon Laks, research and
practice in AVT have experienced an exponential growth; in the last decades, AVT “has been, with
out a doubt, one of the most prolific areas of research in the field of Translation Studies, if not the
most prolific one” (Díaz-Cintas & Remael, 2021, p. 1). The didactic applications of AVT to FLL
found a place within the unstoppable research arena of AVT at the beginning of the 21st century,
with a series of seminal publications, such as Williams and Thorne (2000), Talaván (2006), Sokoli
(2006), and Danan (2010). Although the use of subtitles as a support had started to be researched
a couple of decades earlier (Price, 1983; Vanderplank, 1988), it was not until the second decade of
the present century when didactic AVT (which focuses on an active use of AVT as opposed to the
use of AVT/subtitles as a support for FLL) started to receive scholarly attention: Two monographs
have been written (Lertola, 2019a; Talaván, 2013), several theses have been defended, related arti
cles increasingly appear in specialised journals (Ávila-Cabrera, 2022; Bolaños-García-Escribano
& Navarrete, 2022; Correa Larios, 2022; Fernández-Costales et al., 2023; González-Vera, 2022;
Ogea Pozo, 2022; Plaza-Lara & Fernández-Costales, 2022, just to mention a few of the most
recent publications), and edited volumes on AVT have already included chapters on DAT (Incalca
terra McLoughlin, 2019; Talaván, 2020). There was also a special issue devoted to didactic AVT
(Incalcaterra McLoughlin et al., 2018) that was so positively received that the publishers decided
to edit it again, this time in book form, two years later (Incalcaterra McLoughlin et al., 2020).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-27 360

Intralingual audiovisual translation as a foreign language aid
The main benefits of the application of DAT (whatever the language combination) can be said
to derive, first and foremost, from the use of authentic video and specialised software (a subtitle
editor or a video editing programme) as basic resources, that is, audiovisual input and technol
ogy, both providing authenticity, familiarity, realism, and motivation to the educational setting.
Additionally, the inclusion of various codes (semiotic and linguistic) and channels (written and
oral), with which the learner actively interacts when performing the subtitling, dubbing, and so on,
makes didactic AVT practice especially comprehensive and multiplies its potential benefits in the
field of FLL, as will be explained in detail throughout the present chapter. Furthermore, supported
by the renewed attention and well-deserved recognition translation as a pedagogical resource in
FLL has been receiving in the past decade (Cook, 2010; González-Davies, 2020; Pintado Gutiér
rez, 2021), DAT can be counted as a form of pedagogical translation or even as a translanguaging
(understood as the use of different languages together as tools for communication within the edu
cational context) practice, depending on the number of languages involved and the methodological
approach chosen by the teacher (Wilson, 2020).
This chapter will present didactic AVT from the intralingual perspective; however, certain ref
erences to DAT in general will be made, provided that most methodological bases, approaches,
and practical applications of the various AVT modes offered herein would also be valid in the
interlingual combination.
Methodological bases
Research has provided solid evidence on the benefits of using active AVT as a didactic tool in lan
guage teaching (Incalcaterra McLoughlin et al., 2018). However, the methodological framework
for the use of subtitling, dubbing, and other AVT modes has not been fully explored yet, and few
researchers have approached the pedagogical foundations that support the introduction of AVT in
language learning (Talaván & Lertola, 2022).
Research on the educational use of AVT has reported empirical evidence on the positive out
comes of AVT in several areas of language learning, such as vocabulary retention (Danan, 2010;
Lertola, 2019b), intercultural awareness (Borghetti & Lertola, 2014), fluency (Navarrete, 2020;
Sánchez-Requena, 2017), and production skills (Ávila-Cabrera, 2021; Talaván & Ávila-Cabrera,
2015). Notwithstanding the prolific research corpus published in the field, which is leading to
the consolidation of didactic AVT (Talaván, 2020), there is a dearth of studies approaching the
methodological bases of AVT modes in FLL. So far, most studies have focused on the effects
of subtitling and dubbing on the language learning process, but the pedagogical dimension of
DAT, understood as the formulation of guidelines and best practices for teachers, translators, and
educators to design activities, teaching sequences, rubrics, and, in general, apply AVT in formal
contexts, has been mostly overlooked.
DAT: what we know from the perspective of Translation Studies (TS)

The pioneering contribution of Talaván (2013) to the field of DAT is the most relevant one con
cerning the methodological framework of active subtitling. Talaván offers a model that combines
theoretical and practical foundations for the active use of subtitling (intra- and interlingual) in
FLL. The framework is contextualised in well-established theories of second language acquisition
(SLA), such as Krashen’s (1992) affective filter, which stresses the relation between motivation
and language acquisition. If pupils suffer anxiety in the classroom, their affective filter works
as a barrier for language learning. Talaván claims that AVT is an aid that helps create a relaxed
361
atmosphere and lower the affective barrier, promoting students’ engagement and active learning.
This is of paramount importance, since affective factors contribute to successful language learn
ing, as has been consistently found in specialised literature (Dörnyei, 2018).
Talaván (2013) places active subtitling within communicative language teaching (Wilkins,
1976) and task-based learning (Nunan, 1999), which have been prominent paradigms in language
teaching since the 1970s, and argues that the application of AVT fits within the post-method era,
which is characterised by a dynamic, integrative, and eclectic approach to language teaching.
The driving principles of Talaván’s methodological proposal are the communicative value
of languages, the importance of using authentic materials in the classroom, the active role of
pupils, and the relevance of “learning to learn” and “learning by doing”. This framework takes into
account the fact that audiovisual products bring students closer to spontaneous or “real” language,
which is not always the one portrayed in textbooks.
Talaván offers a constructivist model to introduce productive subtitling in language learning
contexts, taking into account the learners’ needs and methodological issues in the teaching pro
cess. The hands-on guidelines suggested by this author’s work (Talaván, 2013) regarding teaching
sequences, activity design, the teachers’ role, corrective feedback, and evaluation rubrics have
been revised and elaborated on in several studies and applied to other DAT modes (Calduch &
Talaván, 2017; Talaván, 2019b); they have also been tested and replicated in several projects, such
as TRADILEX (Talaván & Lertola, 2022).
The second significant contribution was made by Lertola (2018), who analyses the relevance
of translation in the history of foreign language teaching, examining the role it has played from
the grammar translation method (GTM) to the communicative approach. Lertola provides new
insights by contextualising subtitling and dubbing activities in the post-method era, emphasising
their communicative value as tasks to be performed by the students, concurring with Talaván’s
(2013) conclusions. Although Lertola does not synthesise a specific framework here, she offers a
comprehensive view on the current momentum of AVT in language teaching.
Following this study, Lertola (2019a) provides a panorama of research conducted on the appli
cation of several AVT modes in FLL. Taking Talaván’s (2013) model, the lessons learned through
LeViS (2006–2008) and ClipFlair (2011–2014) – two European projects, and all the publications
to date, Lertola explores the specific gains – and also challenges – of every AVT mode, taking into
account learners’ language command, and the specific linguistic function to be pursued by the
activities being implemented in the classroom.
DAT: what we know from the perspective of language teaching

The establishing of the communicative approach as the paradigm in FLL – together with related
models and conceptions, such as communicative language teaching and the notional-functional
approach (Wilkins, 1976) and task-based learning (Nunan, 1999) – brought renewed insights
into language classrooms, such as student-centred teaching styles, a communicative view on lan
guages, the use of real and authentic materials, meaningful contents, and so on. However, the com
municative turn also meant that any classroom strategy which was not ostensibly communicative
was immediately received with suspicion: Following the so-called pendulum effect (Swan, 1985,
p. 86), which has characterised language teaching history (with one method or approach automati
cally opposing the preceding one), a tendency to avoid translation was established in foreign lan
guage teaching (Cook, 2010; Lertola, 2018). The didactic value of translation has been stigmatised
in modern didactic approaches due to the connection with the GTM and poor pedagogic strate
gies in the classroom, with translation being a proxy for teacher-centred and non-communicative
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didactic contexts (Pintado-Gutiérrez, 2021). Although the GTM may have been suitable for its
time, its overuse made the pendulum swing to the other pole, so translation was excluded from
modern FLL approaches, as discussed by Lertola:
The reasons for exclusion of translation from academic discourse can be found mainly in
socio-political factors and long-established teaching habits. The arguments against the use
of translation in second language teaching are still those which were raised at the end of the
nineteenth century as an attack on the GTM. These “widespread misconceptions” are some of
the reasons why translation has been largely ignored and often discouraged for so many years.
(Lertola, 2018, p. 195)
These “misconceptions” are the underlying cause for the scant interest in translation as a didactic
tool from the point of view of scholars and researchers working in FLL, applied linguistics, teacher
training, pedagogy, and education. As mentioned before, there is little research on the possibilities
of AVT in language teaching and learning processes from the point of view of language didactics,
with virtually no contributions analysing teachers’ perspectives – except for Alonso-Pérez and
Sánchez-Requena (2018), Fernández-Costales (2021b), and Lertola and Talaván (2022) – or edu
cational stages other than higher education (Fernández-Costales, 2021a).
Having said that, the existing research gap is quite surprising if we take into account three
elements: (1) The consistent and regular flow of evidence coming from research in TS endors
ing the benefits of using active AVT in the classroom; (2) the educational (and social) relevance
of language learning and language command today; and (3) the fact that the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages or CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001) included translation
and interpreting as assets to promote language competence – and the revisited version of 2018
includes “mediation” as a descriptor.
Didactic considerations
Higher- and lower-order skills (HOTS and LOTS)

Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy of educational objectives underlines the importance of working with
higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) and lower-order thinking skills (LOTS). The taxonomy
revised by Krathwohl (2002) classifies different types of thinking into two dimensions: Cognitive
and knowledge. The cognitive dimension organises thinking into lower-order processes – remem
bering, understanding, and applying – and higher-order processes – analysing, evaluating, and
creating, while the knowledge dimension comprises factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacog
nitive knowledge. Research on DAT confirms that using active subtitles in the classroom paves
the way for students working with HOTS and LOTS (Fernández-Costales, 2021b), as they will
have to use the language to activate several brain functions included in Bloom’s taxonomy, such
as understanding, applying, and even creating.
Basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive

academic language proficiency (CALP)
Cummins’ (1981) dichotomy of basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive
academic language proficiency (CALP) has been a groundbreaking concept in language teach
ing in the last decades, as teachers aim at fostering the acquisition of the social and the academic
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dimensions of language. The use of active subtitling or revoicing (any AVT mode related to the
production of a new audio track) can elicit language transfer and interdependence between lan
guages; in the specific case of intralingual DAT, students can recognise the differences between
everyday conversational English – BICS – and more academic language – CALP, as they work
with diverse registers and degrees of formality. Furthermore, they will be dealing with real and
authentic language, a typology which is not always found in language textbooks and related mate
rials. Also, working with videos caters for the introduction of academic concepts in subject-con
tents (non-linguistic areas); hence, students can face academic language more naturally through
subtitling or revoicing activities.
Translanguaging (code-switching)
Although the mantra 100% in the L2 has commanded language teaching since the advent of the com
municative approach, the use of the L1 and the L2 in the classroom is a widespread practice in bilingual
education. Code-switching – or translanguaging – can be defined as the “purposeful pedagogical alter
nation of languages in spoken and written, receptive and productive modes” (Hornberger & Link, 2012,
p. 262). The use of code-switching has proven to be particularly beneficial in content and language
integrated learning, where research suggests that using the L1 may raise students’ language gains in the
L2 and provide a better comprehension of non-language concepts (San Isidro & Lasagabaster, 2019).
Obviously, the use of active AVT – subtitling or revoicing – in the classroom facilitates code-switching,
as the L1 and L2 can be used to complete the activities. In the particular case of intralingual DAT tasks,
the L1 can be used by introducing subtitles as a support in the video viewing part of the task (as sug
gested in Table 21.2), promoting language transfer and metalinguistic awareness.
Task-based learning
As suggested by Talaván (2013) and Lertola (2018), DAT should be framed within the paradigm of
task-based learning (Nunan, 1999), where students should focus on the accomplishment of a specific
assignment which is connected with a situation from the “real world”. In this case, subtitling or
revoicing by the students is a practical application where they will use the language to fulfil a particu
lar task. If working with “creative AVT” (Talaván, 2019a), students may also improve their creativity
through writing alternative subtitles or a new script (to revoice) for the content of the videos.
Literacy
The use of intralingual subtitling or revoicing may promote literacy in early education (Fernández-
Costales, 2021a), where students may practise basic subtitling tasks (simple sentences and even
words) and create scripts for videos with no dialogues. This is also linked with the promotion of
information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the classroom, as most curricula of pri
mary and secondary education emphasise the need for students to develop ICT skills. Also, the use
of intralingual DAT can contribute to promoting accessibility, as reported by research (Ibáñez &
Vermeulen, 2014; Talaván & Ávila-Cabrera, 2021; Talaván et al., 2022).
Affective factors
One of the fundamental gains of using didactic AVT in the language classroom is the motivating effect
of subtitling and revoicing activities in language learning. Research in the field has reported on the
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potential of AVT activities to engage students in the language classroom (Fernández-Costales, 2021b;
Talaván & Ávila-Cabrera, 2015). The use of subtitling and revoicing may contribute to lower the
affective filter (Krashen, 1992) and facilitate language learning. Also, by using intralingual didactic
AVT we may encourage basic educational principles such as learning by doing and learning to learn.
Didactic AVT modes

Intralingual didactic AVT refers to the reformulation, paraphrasing, or repetition of the original
message into subtitles or a new oral track. Zabalbeascoa et al. (2012, p. 17), in their conceptual
framework for the ClipFlair project (Sokoli & Zabalbeascoa, 2019), speak of “repeat-rephrase-
react options” when they refer to the types of activities that could be involved in DAT tasks.
However, these possible options seemed to apply to interlingual AVT only. In the present pro
posal, we expand the methodological potential of the repeat-rephrase-react concept to intralingual
translation (see Table 21.1), providing the possibilities that emerge when students interact with
audiovisual input through didactic AVT.
Table 21.1 Chart showing intralingual didactic AVT possibilities
Repeat Rephrase React

Students can “repeat” the “Rephrase” applies especially The “react” option is more easily
original audiovisual text to subtitling (including integrated in free commentary and
verbatim, mimicking it. SDH) and voice-over, since audio description (AD), as well as in
This works only for didactic intralingual translation for creative AVT tasks (various modes
dubbing, since the other both AVT modes includes included)
modes would involve reduction and condensation Free commentary and AD: Students
rephrasing or reformulation as core strategies, so need to react to an original text
as well most messages need to creating new dialogue, either by
be rephrased in the new commenting on it or by translating
subtitled or voiced-over the visual content respectively
versions produced by the Creative AVT tasks (subtitling, SDH,
students dubbing, and voice-over): Learners
react to an original audiovisual
text by recreating it through a new
version they produce
Creative intralingual AVT tasks ask learners to produce a new version in the same language as
the original in order to create a particular effect on the receiver, normally parodic or humorous.
These activities involve a total reaction to the original by recreating it; they do not need to involve
repetition or rephrasing, and so they are cognitively more demanding for students, who need to
produce a new text. However, they are less challenging (in linguistic terms) and potentially more
motivating at the same time, since learners are free to choose their own story to tell (adapted to
their level of command of the foreign language), be it departing from the images alone and/or from
the interplay between the information conveyed by both the audio and the visual channels.
There are plenty of pedagogical possibilities involved in intralingual didactic AVT depending on the
AVT mode, not only regarding the “repeat-rephrase-react” options, but also through the particular fea
tures of each type of task. Each activity will demand different modes of action on the part of the students,
bring about diverse types of cognitive activities, and provide various degrees of motivation depending
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on the learning preferences of each individual learner. All those potential applications will be described
in detail later and specific methodological guidelines will be provided in each case, accompanied by
sample tasks (containing pre-selected video extracts) that could be used in the various combinations.
Before beginning the presentation of the various DAT modes, a sample lesson plan structure
that can be applied to both online and face-to-face settings is presented in Table 21.2 to help the
reader understand the type of lessons that are typically used in didactic AVT contexts (adapted
from Talaván, 2020).
Table 21.2 Chart showing a sample lesson plan structure for a 60-minute session using AVT
Duration Phase Description Objective
10 min Warm-up Anticipating video content, To gather the necessary

Reception and characters, and events background knowledge
production tasks
10 min Video viewing The video extract to be translated To understand the messages to be
Reception task through AVT is watched translated and to get familiar
accompanied by viewing activities with the key linguistic content
30 min Didactic AVT Getting familiar with the software To work on AV mediation skills
Reception and and with AVT (if needed) and and strategies and to develop
production task completing the corresponding AVT lexical, grammatical, and
task intercultural competence
10 min Post AVT Related production tasks to practise To make the most of the linguistic
Production tasks elements present in the video and cultural content of the
(writing/speaking and video and to complement the
mediation) previous mediation practice
Intralingual didactic subtitling

Intralingual didactic subtitling refers to the production of subtitles in the same language of the
original audio track, changing both the code (oral to written) and the channel (aural to visual)
through text inserted on the screen. To accomplish this task, learners need a subtitling editor; there
are various options available for free at the moment, but one of the most versatile and commonly
used in didactic subtitling is Aegisub, valid for both Mac and Windows. There are various options
for this type of task that can be applied depending on the focus of the task, the proficiency of the
learners, and their degree of familiarity with subtitling techniques, as reflected in Table 21.3.
Table 21.3 Chart showing didactic intralingual subtitling options
Available combinations Better for. . .
Intralingual keyword captions (fill-in- vocabulary acquisition and grammar, listening for specific
the-gaps in ready-made subtitles) information; for learners who are new to subtitling
Intralingual with pre-spotting writing and listening skills enhancement, especially for learners
starting to subtitle; less technically challenging
Intralingual writing, listening, mediation, and ICT skills; for learners
familiar with subtitling
Intralingual creative writing, listening, mediation, and ICT skills, as well as creativity
and extra motivation; for learners familiar with subtitling
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The first two options described in the chart imply the creation of a subtitles file for the students
to work with. In the case of keyword captions, the subtitles are created, and then relevant words
and phrases are omitted for the student to complete. In the pre-spotted version, the timings are pro
vided to save learners the technical effort of spotting the subtitles in temporal terms, synchronising
them with the images, so that they can just focus on producing the subtitles in linguistic terms.
It is relevant to note that when students produce intralingual subtitles, whatever the combina
tion, they face authentic audiovisual video, and they need to make sense of that complete and
realistic input by reformulating it into the subtitles they produce. To that end, they are encour
aged to condense and reduce the original text, provided that this is one of the main features
of subtitling, needed to suit the technical requirements of this AVT mode. Hence, when they
subtitle, students develop not only interpretative listening skills and selective listening, but also
writing skills, including paraphrasing and summarising, as well as coherence and cohesion, reg
ister, and style, among others, while writing their own texts in the subtitles. Furthermore, through
subtitling, learners become mediators in the sense established by the CEFR in its 2018 version,
since they develop “strategies to explain a new concept” by “adapting language” (paraphrasing)
and/or “breaking down complicated information” (Council of Europe, 2018, p. 116) because they
need to look for the most suitable phrase to convey a particular message included in the original
audiovisual text. Also, they usually enhance “strategies to simplify a text” by “streamlining a
text”, either by “highlighting key information” (what they select to create the subtitles) or by
“eliminating repetitions and digressions”, given the aforementioned reduction essence of sub
titling; additionally, learners can eliminate elements by “excluding what is not relevant for the
audience” (Council of Europe, 2018, p. 116), since omissions are also very common in subtitling,
especially when the information can be derived from the context or from the messages that are
already provided by the images.
Mediation, listening, and writing are the most obvious communicative activities that benefit
from didactic intralingual subtitling (Ávila-Cabrera & Rodríguez-Arancón, 2021; Ávila-Cabrera
& Corral Esteban, 2021; Fuentes-Luque & Campbell, 2020; Talaván et al., 2016). However,
vocabulary, grammar, intercultural skills, and pragmatic awareness can also be enhanced at all
times (Borghetti & Lertola, 2014; Castro-Moreno, 2021; Lopriore & Ceruti, 2015; Soler Pardo,
2020), provided both listening and writing cognitive efforts are made by learners, the fact that
information comes from various channels simultaneously (audio, images, and the new written
text), and that there is a need to fully understand an audiovisual text as a whole (including cultural
elements, gestures, etc.) in order to produce a correct subtitled version. Reading and speaking,
in this case, could only be enhanced in previous or subsequent tasks within the lesson plan on
didactic subtitling (warm-up, viewing – if subtitles as a support are used, or post-tasks), so they
could also be part of the benefits derived from this type of pedagogical application of AVT, as well
as collaborative learning, among other transferable skills (Barbasán & Pérez-Sabater, 2021; Ogea
Pozo, 2020).
Intralingual didactic dubbing and voice-over

Intralingual didactic dubbing and voice-over refer to the production of a new audio track in the
same language of the original audio, maintaining both the code (linguistic) and the channel (oral),
although a written script must be produced beforehand. To accomplish this task, learners need a
video editor; there are various options available for free at the moment, but one of the most ver
satile present options is the Google Chrome extension Loom, valid for both Mac and Windows.
There are various possibilities for this type of task that can be applied depending on the focus of
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the task, the proficiency of the participants, and their degree of familiarity with revoicing tech
niques, as reflected in Table 21.4. All options will be useful to enhance speaking skills (pronuncia
tion, intonation, and speed of speech) in both revoicing AVT modes, and writing skills in the case
of voice-over, since the main feature of this AVT mode is reduction, as it happened with subtitling;
this is so because in voice-over, 1–2 seconds need to be left at the beginning and at the end of each
character’s intervention, whenever possible, to allow the audience to listen to the original, which
is always heard in the background at a lower volume.
Table 21.4 Chart showing didactic intralingual dubbing and voice-over options
Available combinations Description

(Partial) Intralingual A part of the video is already revoiced as a sample or learners are asked to
dub one character only; for learners who are new to revoicing
Intralingual The whole extract needs to be revoiced; for learners familiar with revoicing
Intralingual creative The whole extract needs to be revoiced by reacting to the original, making
use of individual creativity; for learners familiar with revoicing
It is worth noting that when students produce intralingual revoicing, they face authentic
audiovisual video and need to make sense of that complete and realistic input in order to repeat
it, in the case of dubbing, or reformulate it by condensing it, in the case of voice-over. The
creative option for revoicing (be it dubbing or voice-over) would imply extra creativity but
also extra motivation. Hence, when learners revoice, they develop not only interpretative lis
tening skills and intensive listening (especially when they need to decipher the exact script for
dubbing), but also writing skills, mainly spelling in the case of dubbing, but also paraphrasing
and summarising for voice-over, as well as coherence and cohesion, register, and style, among
others, especially when they perform creative revoicing. Additionally, in voice-over and crea
tive revoicing in particular, learners become mediators, in the same terms described earlier for
subtitling following the CEFR.
Although speaking, writing, and mediation are the most obvious communicative activities
benefitting from intralingual didactic revoicing (Danan, 2010; Sánchez-Requena, 2017), vocab
ulary and grammar, as well as intercultural skills and pragmatic awareness, can also be enhanced
at all times for the very same reasons explained previously for subtitling. Reading, in this case,
could only be enhanced in previous or subsequent tasks within the lesson plan containing didac
tic revoicing and/or through the video viewing, when carried out with intralingual subtitles as
a support.
Didactic intralingual media accessibility modes: AD and SDH

Media accessibility has been receiving increasing attention over the last two decades, to the point
that it has recently begun to be integrated as part of the filmmaking process (Romero-Fresco,
2020). The relevance of this field cannot go unnoticed in FLL, especially when the application of
didactic media accessibility (DIMA) modes, such as audio description (AD) and subtitles for the
deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH), can clearly develop awareness of accessibility needs in students
and teachers (Calduch & Talaván, 2017; Talaván, 2019b; Talaván & Lertola, 2016). Didactic intra
lingual AD refers to the production of a new audio track in the same language as the original audio
track (when the original contains dialogues), changing both the code (semiotic to linguistic) and
the channel (visual to oral), although a written script must be produced beforehand. However, in
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AD, learners do not perform intralingual translation but intersemiotic translation, since AD implies
the translation of the images into words for a blind or visually impaired audience. The task can
be said to be intralingual because the source dialogues (if any) are normally in the same language
as the translation, but the translation is intersemiotic. Didactic intralingual SDH, on the other
hand, is similar to didactic subtitling, as described before, but the subtitles learners produce contain
another layer of complexity: The paralinguistic descriptions needed by the deaf and hard-of-hearing
addressees (sounds, music, mood, etc.). In terms of FLL skills enhancement, both DIMA modes
help develop creativity, cultural and pragmatic awareness, mediation skills (creating bridges of
communication for the blind and visually impaired or for the deaf and hard-of-hearing), writing
skills (coherence, cohesion, register, style, accuracy, conciseness, guiding the receiver through the
message, etc.), and lexical and grammatical precision (descriptions of objects, people and actions
in AD and SDH descriptions plus the reformulation required in subtitling). The main difference
between both media accessibility modes is that AD helps develop writing and speaking skills (the
latter in terms of pronunciation, intonation, and speed of speech), while SDH has a clear potential
to enhance listening (interpretative and selective) and writing skills, as well as vocabulary learning.
It is worth mentioning that when students produce intralingual AD and SDH, they work with
authentic audiovisual video and need to make sense of that complete and realistic input in order
to recreate it, by either producing a new script containing the translation of the images (AD) or
creating subtitles that rephrase and condense the original and are accompanied by paralinguistic
descriptions. The options for SDH are similar to the ones included in Table 21.3 for subtitling,
while AD offers the following possibilities: (Partial) intersemiotic (a section of the video is already
audio described) and intersemiotic (the whole AD needs to be carried out); Also, the video selected
can have no dialogues, little dialogue, or standard dialogue exchanges. For newbies, (partial) inter-
semiotic with no dialogues would be the best option, continuing with the other types in a scaf
folded manner. AD has been much more researched than SDH (only Talaván, 2019b, Talaván et
al., 2022, and Bolaños-García-Escribano & Ogea Pozo, 2023 to date to the authors’ knowledge),
and we have relevant recent publications that back up the specific skills outlined earlier (Lertola,
2019a; Plaza-Lara & Gonzalo Llera, 2022).
Practical applications and examples

As has already been explained, the application of DAT in FLL settings is well supported by empiri
cal evidence. Theoretical frameworks have been developed, together with methodological models
that allow teachers to introduce AVT as a teaching resource in language learning following some
basic guidelines and recommendations. Next, we offer two examples that might illustrate some of
the previous considerations. The lesson plans have been designed following the model presented
in Table 21.2.
Didactic intralingual dubbing in primary education

It is worth underlining that all AVT modes can be applied in FLL settings, irrespective of the age
group. However, recent research on the combination of subtitling and dubbing in primary educa
tion suggests that dubbing may be more engaging and attractive than subtitling for students aged
between 6 and 12 (Fernández-Costales, 2021b).
Following the available options presented in Table 21.5, this lesson plan will allow work
ing with (partial) intralingual and (creative) intralingual varieties of dubbing. Both alternatives
facilitate approaching critical elements in primary education since mimicking is a key strategy
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Table 21.5 Intralingual dubbing lesson plan (example 1)
CEFR level A1/A2
Age group Primary education (third cycle) – Ages 10–11

Video fragment Harry, Ron, and Hermione First Meet (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s
Stone) (Columbus, 2001)
Communicative functions Greetings; personal introductions
Didactic AVT mode (1) (Partial) intralingual dubbing – Mimicking
(2) Creative intralingual dubbing
Aims of the session To practise greetings and introductions
To promote participation and students’ interaction
To improve pronunciation in English
Structure Warm-up (10 minutes)
Reading task (short text on the first day of school in the UK)
Mediation task (finding differences between schools in the UK and Spain)
Viewing (2 minutes)
Watching the video where Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron
Weasley first meet
Didactic dubbing (40 minutes)
Instructions, guidelines, and software reminder
Post-AVT task (10 minutes)
Writing task (creating a dialogue between two people who meet for the
first time)
when learning a foreign language at this stage. Also, creativity should be stimulated since early
education, and students find creating alternative dialogues particularly appealing (Fernández-
Costales, 2021b; Talaván, 2020). Also, taking into account the “repeat-rephrase-react model”
(Table 21.1), students will be repeating the dialogue (by mimicking the actual words of the
characters) and they will be reacting through the creative AVT task. Bearing in mind the didactic
considerations of the methodology section, the main benefits of the current activity are pre
sented in Table 21.6.
Intralingual subtitling in secondary education

Subtitling offers a wide range of possibilities in language classes in secondary education. The les
son described in Table 21.7 has been implemented in several schools with students aged 15–16. It
focuses on intralingual subtitling activities: In the first part of the video, students fill in the gaps
of subtitles that have already been created by the teacher; next, learners work with blank subtitles
(i.e., they have to create their subtitles but a proposal of spotting/timing and suggestions of the first
letter are provided).
Working with keyword captions will promote the acquisition of new vocabulary, as has been
already reported by research (Lertola, 2019b), and students will focus on form and lexical features,
which are essential elements at this stage. Additionally, listening skills might be enhanced, and the
production of subtitles will facilitate working with grammar, syntax, and writing skills. Moreover,
students will work with mediation and ICT skills, which are critical for their personal develop
ment. The didactic potential of this proposal is summarised in Table 21.8.
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Table 21.6 Didactic potential of example 1
HOTS/LOTS Students will work with basic cognitive processes (e.g., remembering) in the
mimicking activity, while they will face a more challenging task (creating)
when producing alternative dialogues for this clip
BIC/CALP Learners’ BICS and CALP will be approached with the proposed lesson, as
they will work with “everyday English” in the dubbing activity (focused on
personal introductions), and they may elicit more academic vocabulary in the
reading and mediation tasks
Code-switching Language transfer may be stimulated if students are allowed to switch from
L2 to L1 in some activities (for instance, when communicating to create
alternative dialogues)
Task-based learning Students will liaise with a real task, as they will be introducing themselves (in
the L1 and the L2) from time to time out of the classroom. Also, the dubbing
activity is a task in itself with a visible outcome
Literacy As suggested by recent research (Fernández-Costales, 2021a), active dubbing
contributes to promoting literacy in early education. Teachers may also
consider other alternatives (for instance, using muted videos or fragments
without dialogues and ask students to describe what is happening –i.e.,
storytelling)
Affective factors Based on the available research (Talaván, 2020) and the personal experience
of the authors of the current chapter, creative dubbing –and didactic AVT
in general– is engaging and stimulating for students learning a foreign
language
Table 21.7 Intralingual subtitling lesson plan (example 2)
CEFR level B1/B2
Age group Secondary education (third cycle) – Ages 15–16

Video fragment The Social Dilemma (Orlowsky, 2020)
Communicative functions Expressing feelings and emotions
Talking about past and present situations
Didactic AVT mode Intralingual keyword subtitling advanced (L2–L2)
Aims of the session To express feelings and emotions
To talk about the influence of social networks
Structure Warm-up (10 minutes)
Reading task (short text on social networks today)
Lexical task (matching activity on feelings and emotions)
Mediation task (finding L1 equivalents for feelings and emotions)
Viewing (5 minutes)
Watching the clip The Social Dilemma, where experts discuss the side effects
of social networks
Didactic subtitling (30 minutes)
Instructions, guidelines, and software reminder
Post-AVT task (15 minutes)
Speaking task (discussing the pros and cons of social networks)
Writing task (describing their use of social networks)
371
Table 21.8 Didactic potential of example 2
HOTS/LOTS Basic cognitive processes –remembering, understanding, and applying– are triggered
with the keyword subtitling activity. Similarly, higher-order thinking skills are
activated with the production of subtitles, as learners have to analyse the oral
channel and condense the message into the written linguistic code when creating
the subtitles
BICS/CALPS BICS will be approached with the video, as students will discuss everyday
situations with their partners in the post-task activity, and they will also learn new
vocabulary. As for the CALP, this activity may be implemented in several courses
(not only in language-related subjects but also in content-areas such as social
sciences), and subject-literacy can be promoted
Code-switching As in the dubbing activity, students may use their L1 when communicating with
their partners in the AVT task. Also, there will be code-switching in the mediation
activity
Task-based learning Participants will engage in a lively debate on a key issue today – social networks.
They will also have to practise the expression of emotions and feelings, which is
a recurrent issue in everyday life. Moreover, completing the subtitling task is a
“doable” assignment with a final product (the subtitles)
Literacy Intralingual subtitling may contribute to the development of subject-specific literacy,
which is of paramount importance in bilingual education. For instance, in content
and language integrated learning (CLIL), where students learn content subjects
through an L2, subtitling may facilitate the acquisition of key vocabulary and
expressions related to non-language subjects
Affective factors Didactic AVT activities are motivating and engaging for students of all educational
stages, including secondary education (Alonso-Pérez & Sánchez-Requena, 2018)
Final remarks
This chapter has presented a panorama of the pedagogical possibilities and the potential of didac
tic intralingual AVT by providing the theoretical grounds and offering best practices in several
educational stages. The overarching goal of the authors is to contribute to the growth of DAT as a
consolidated field within AVT and TS by exploring the benefits of using active intralingual AVT
modes for language learning and discussing pedagogical possibilities and guidelines for teachers,
educators, students, and scholars.
Research in the field has consistently reported on the positive outcomes of introducing
active subtitling and dubbing in formal contexts and, more recently, scholarly attention has
been drawn to other modes such as AD, SDH, and voice-over. Although didactic intralingual
AVT modes have been somehow overlooked – when compared to interlingual ones, this chap
ter has analysed the theoretical backdrop and the methodological bases that support their use
and suitability in formal contexts (not only in university settings but also in primary and sec
ondary education).
We believe that DAT offers a wide array of possibilities for educators and language teachers,
and it also contributes to the learning process of language students, who feel engaged and moti
vated towards AVT activities. Didactic AVT is a fruitful research arena in which the intersection of
TS, applied linguistics, and pedagogy can optimise the way we learn and teach languages. Moreo
ver, in a moment where interaction with technology and audiovisual materials is a critical element
in our lives, using these resources to promote lifelong learning is a germane strategy.
372
Acknowledgements
The current chapter has been supported by the TRADILEX project sponsored by the Spanish
Government, Science and Innovation Ministry/Gobierno de España, Ministerio de Ciencia e Inno
vación (Project reference: PID2019-107362GA-I00 AEI/10.13039/501100011033).
Further reading
Lertola, J., & Talaván, N. (2022). Didactic audiovisual translation in teacher training. Revista de Lenguas
para Fines Específicos, 28(2), 133–150. https://doi.org/10.20420/rlfe.2022.555
DAT and teacher training through the TRADILEX project.
Marzà, A., Torralba, G., & Baños-Piñero, R. (2022). Audio description and plurilingual competence: New
allies in language learning? Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, 28(2), 165–180. https://doi.
org/10.20420/rlfe.2022.557
DAT focused on the enhancement of the plurilingual competence.
Nicora, F. (2022). Moving online: Using Zoom and combined audiovisual translation tasks to teach foreign
languages to children. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, 28(2), 80–100. https://doi.org/10.20420/
rlfe.2022.553
DAT applied to other less explored LE contexts: primary education.
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22
GRADED READERS AS
INSTANCES OF INTRALINGUAL
TRANSLATION
Manuel Moreno Tovar
Introduction
The interaction between language teaching and translation studies (TS) has been described as one
of “mutual alienation” (Colina, 2002, p. 1) and, more recently, as a long-standing relationship that
is going through a stage of “estrangement” (Bazani, 2019, p. 3). The view that translation (in its
interlingual sense) has no pedagogical role to play in the language classroom1 has been associated
with narrow conceptualizations of translation (Bazani, 2019, p. 14). Many readers of this volume
will agree that a truly inclusive view of translation – one that is “at ease with contemporary defi
nitions of translation in the field of TS” (Bazani, 2019, p. 14) – cannot be complete without its
intralingual dimension. Hoping to strengthen the synergies between language teaching and TS,
this chapter will present certain pedagogical materials called graded readers (GRs) and approach
them as instances of intralingual translation. It will include a comparative study of a GR in Eng
lish and its source text, as well as a paratextual study of a multilingual corpus of GRs in English,
Spanish, and German.
Intralingual translation research has been at the margins of TS for decades, so it is not surpris
ing that GRs have only recently begun to be approached as translations. This means that there are
still plenty of gaps to bridge at ground level, starting with their denomination. In a recent article
(Moreno Tovar, 2020), I used the term abridgements to refer to graded readers that are based on
literary works and do not significantly alter the main story, as opposed to originals (graded read
ers that are originally written) and adaptations, understood as graded readers that adapt the main
story to make it suitable for a new audience (e.g., fairy tales with newly written happy endings for
children). However, other classifications are possible: Wilhelmsen (2020) identifies three different
types of GRs at the beginning of her study (factual texts, original stories, and adaptations) and then
proceeds to use graded reader in the sense of adaptation.
GRs are not to be confused with the easy-readers mentioned in Zethsen’s article “Intralin
gual Translation: An Attempt at Description” (2009) and her entry in the Handbook of Transla
tion Studies (2021). While Zethsen’s easy-readers are also shortened versions of literary works,
they are aimed at children rather than language learners. Still, they share many similarities. Let
us take the four main parameters involved in intralingual translation identified by Zethsen as a
framework, that is, knowledge, time, culture, and space. Zethsen (2021, p. 137) explains that a
377 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-28

Manuel Moreno Tovar
particular intralingual translation can be referred “to one of the four main categories as regards
the primary motivation for its production, but in many cases the categories overlap, and more than
one parameter is involved”. She mentions easy-readers as examples of intralingual translations
that are primarily motivated by the parameter of knowledge, but for which the parameter of space
also plays a role. Similarly, Wilhelmsen (2020) considers knowledge as the main factor influenc
ing GRs, but notes an overlap with culture and space: The target audience lacks knowledge of the
source language and of culture-specific phenomena, and the text needs to be shortened to be made
accessible. Since Wilhelmsen does not comment on how time might be relevant for GRs, the com
parative textual study in this chapter will concentrate on that parameter. In doing so, it will attempt
to shed light on how the temporal dimension of GRs may influence our understanding of them.
Much like Wilhelmsen’s, this study will apply Toury’s methodology (1995/2012) for Descriptive
Translation Studies.
The subsequent paratextual study will explore the various terms that the editors and pub
lishers of GRs use to describe their work. Against the backdrop of Genette’s paratextual theory
(1997/1987), a distinction will be made between the categories of peritext (i.e., those elements and
materials physically attached to the text) and epitext (i.e., those materials separate from it). Given
the strict focus on self-categorization, there will be a limited application of Genette’s categories,
and the peritextual aspects covered by the analysis will be restricted to the self-descriptors in the
cover, the front matter (specifically, the title page and the copyright notice), and the blurb of the
physical books. Regarding the epitextual aspects, the focus will be on the terms with which GRs
and GR series are identified on the websites of their publishers.
This study is inspired by Delabastita’s work (2017) on a corpus of modernized versions
of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Delabastita’s corpus includes single-text editions, graphic
novels, and parallel texts meant as study aids, but no GRs. He examines how these contem
porary works categorize themselves paratextually and concludes that they do it “in the most
diverse ways” (2017, p. 208). For instance, one of the parallel-text editions describes itself
in a “bewildering plurality of competing terms” (2017, p. 206): A “modern English version”,
“edited and rendered into modern English”, “told in clear, modern English”, “full modern trans
lation”, and “modern paraphrase”. This chapter is expected to uncover a similarly diverse array
of self-descriptors for GRs, which may prompt innovative conceptualizations. Prior to that,
however, the theoretical underpinnings of GRs will be reviewed from a language teaching and
a TS perspective.
Definitions from language teaching

GRs have been repeatedly defined and redefined by scholars and language teachers. Hill once
described them as “extended texts, mostly fiction, written in language reduced in terms of struc
tures and vocabulary” (1997, p. 57). He distinguished between two types: “Simplified versions of
classics, modern novels, and fairy tales (simplifications)” and texts “written specially for a series
(simple originals)” (1997, p. 57). A few years later, however, he referred to these two forms as
“the rewrite and the simple original” and stated that the term “simplified reader” had long been
replaced “to reflect the change in practice from reducing a text to recreating it and the addition of
original writing” (Hill, 2008, p. 185). This chapter will only cover the rewriting and shortening of
(typically Western,2 canonical) literary works as a form of intralingual translation.
In 2013, Nation and Waring defined GRs as “books which are specially written within a
controlled vocabulary and use a grammatical syllabus at various levels of difficulty” (2013,
p. 8). In a later publication, however, they de-emphasized the importance of grammatical
378
Graded readers as instances of intralingual translation
syllabi, saying that these are “very rarely based on any serious linguistic analysis and tend
to be pedagogical in nature” (Nation & Waring, 2020, p. 161). Rather than lists of grammati
cal items, it is “careful vocabulary control that defines a graded reader and a graded reader
series” (Nation & Waring, 2020, p. 20), and this control is typically exerted through word
lists. Nation and Waring note that such lists must not only account for word frequency, but
also for the specific needs of language learners, which “are not the same as those of native
speakers”3 (2020, p. 19).
Most GRs are written for learners of English: There are currently about 5,000 from over 20
publishers (Nation & Waring, 2020). Hill refers to GRs as a “product of the British ELT indus
try, and almost unknown within the American TESOL4 industry” (1997, p. 57), while Nation and
Waring claim that “each major ELT publisher has at least one graded reader scheme” (2013, p. 8).
However, GRs exist in other languages: Hill (2012) describes GRs for learners of French, Ger
man, Italian, Russian, and Spanish, and Nation and Waring (2020) mention GRs in Mandarin and
Japanese. Outside English-speaking academia, GRs are increasingly being studied by scholars in
fields such as ELE (Español como Lengua Extranjera, or Spanish as a Foreign Language) and DaF
(Deutsch als Fremdsprache, or German as a Foreign Language).
Within ELT, GRs are closely associated with a comprehension-based approach to language
learning known as extensive reading. Definitions of extensive reading and the best ways to imple
ment it abound in ELT literature, with many sources referring to Day and Bamford’s top ten prin
ciples for teaching it:
1 The reading material is easy.

2 A variety of reading material on a wide range of topics must be available.
3 Learners choose what they want to read.
4 Learners read as much as possible.
5 The purpose of reading is usually related to pleasure, information, and general understanding.
6 Reading is its own reward.
7 Reading speed is usually faster rather than slower.
8 Reading is individual and silent.
9 Teachers orient and guide their students.
10 The teacher is a role model of a reader.
(Day & Bamford, 2002, pp. 137–139)
Day and Bamford had already described their ten principles of extensive reading in their 1998
book Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom. This monograph boosted the
popularity not only of extensive reading, but also of GRs themselves, reconceptualized as lan
guage learner literature. According to Day and Bamford, works for language learners deserve
as much esteem as other forms of writing, and language learner literature can be seen as “analo
gous to the terms young adult literature and children’s literature – established genres in their
own right” (Day & Bamford, 1998, p. 64, emphasis in the original). The authors elaborate as
follows:
Just as truly making love goes beyond a how-to manual like The Joy of Sex, communicating
with language learners takes place on a different plane than, let us say, conjoining content
and language. It is time, therefore, to consider language learner literature on its own merits,
as a genuine art form.
(Day & Bamford, 1998, p. 67)
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Manuel Moreno Tovar
The term language learner literature was further popularized by the Language Learner Literature
Award of the Extensive Reading Foundation. This annual award has been conferred on the best
new GRs in English since 2004, when the Extensive Reading Foundation was established by Day
and Bamford themselves (https://erfoundation.org/wordpress/about/).
In contrast with extensive reading, Italian publisher Black Cat CIDEB has popularized the
concept of expansive reading. The objectives of expansive reading include “expanding students’
learning in all kinds of directions and in all kinds of ways and expanding their cultural horizons,
as well as expanding the range of activities that teachers can do with their students” (The Black
Cat guide of graded readers, 2009, p. 7). Thus, while GRs published by Black Cat CIDEB can
still be used for individual – extensive – reading programmes, the focus is on aspects such as
cross-curricularity and interculturality. Driven by this approach, many GRs today include lengthy
introductions, dossiers about the author and the context of the text, and internet projects.
Background and evolution

Among ELT scholars, Michael West is considered “the true originator of graded readers”, as he was
“the first to produce large quantities of readers and to develop strictly controlled and well-trialled
word lists” (Nation & Waring, 2020, p. 17). In his early career as a colonial educator in Bengal,
West became a prolific writer of textbooks for Longmans (Smith, 2003, p. ix). In 1926–1927, he
published a series titled New Method Readers, which were to be accompanied by a “Companion”
and by the so-called New Method Supplementary Readers. Many of these supplementary read
ers were adapted and shortened versions of existing stories. Early examples included Robinson
Crusoe and a collection of Welsh fairy tales, while others were original stories (Nation & Waring,
2013, p. 32). Therefore, West’s New Method Supplementary Readers are widely considered the
first series of GRs, and their success laid the groundwork for many others to come.
Reid Thomas and Hill’s reviews of GRs for the ELT Journal offer an excellent overview of the
evolution of the traditional GR. For instance, in their first review (Reid Thomas & Hill, 1988),
they observe how GR covers followed dominant trends in ELT materials: “Full-page illustrations,
usually depicting characters from the story, have long since replaced a pictorial design as the back
ground for titles and authors” (p. 45). In their third review (1993), Reid Thomas and Hill note a
prodigious growth in GR production, with 14 new series published in four years. Among the new
series, there was great emphasis on GRs for beginner levels, targeted to meet the needs of specific
age groups, such as adults, and of learners from specific cultural areas. Blurbs became “almost
universal” (Reid Thomas & Hill, 1993, p. 252), mixed activities including suggestions for group
projects emerged as an alternative to long lists of comprehension questions, and the proportion of
stories with female protagonists grew across the different series.
In addition to his work with Reid Thomas, Hill’s subsequent reviews offer valuable informa
tion about the tendencies in GR production since the turn of the century. He describes the period
between 1997 and 2001 as one of “consolidation and rationalization, but also of innovation” (Hill,
2001, p. 300), which resulted in a heightened profile for GRs. However, by 2008, he is able to
describe quite the opposite: A “largely hostile environment” (Hill, 2008, p. 189) for GRs as a result
of various shifts in the cultural and educational landscape. Hill argues that the teaching profession
was “confused” about the aim of GRs and laments the status of extensive reading as an “optional
extra for a small minority” (2008, p. 186). He also mentions that school administrations were
reluctant to support the purchase of GRs, so publishers had begun to rely more and more on direct
selling to the public.
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Hill’s concerns contrast with Nation and Waring’s claim that extensive reading “boomed” in
Northeast Asia in the 2000s, with new extensive reading associations appearing in different coun
tries and “millions” of students reading extensively (2013, p. 3). However, in their recent mono
graph, Nation and Waring admit that extensive reading has not yet been “fully accepted into the
ELT family” (2020, p. 174) and that GRs do not occupy a central position in either school curricula
or bookstores. Still, they remain optimistic about the future of GRs. In his last review, Hill trusts
that extensive reading and GRs will “find their way back into the centre of language teaching”
(2012, p. 125).
Contributions from translation studies

Though most of the literature on GRs is from the field of ELT (and more specifically, by propo
nents of extensive reading), GRs have been described as intralingual translations since at least the
early 2000s. In an article which looks at the similarities and differences between interlingual and
intralingual translation, Heltai (2003, p. 166) refers to GRs as an example of a “less prototypical”
case of intralingual translation involving the use of similar codes, meaning that the language used
in GRs may not be radically different from the original compared to other types of intralingual
translation or to interlingual translation. In a more recent article in Portuguese, Becker (2015)
notes the intersemiotic character of GRs, particularly regarding their use of pictorial resources
(i.e., images and illustrations). Becker also refers to the front matter and end matter in GRs (e.g.,
introductions, exercises, and back cover information) as paratexts, and points out the following:
It is common for adapters (and even illustrators) to have their names printed visibly on the
covers, preceded by texts such as “Retold by . . .” or “Translated and adapted by . . .” or
“Text adaptation by”, in such a way that they rival the names of the authors of the original
texts on which the graded readers were based.
(Becker, 2015, p. 15, my translation)5
Another thought-provoking contribution is Skopečková’s “A Marginal Phenomenon in the Field

of Literary Translation: The (Im)possibility of ‘Translating’ Literature into a ‘Simplified’ Version”
(2013), where she states, “from the functionalist perspective it seems questionable to consider
graded readers as translation” (Skopečková, 2013, p. 250). Arguably, functionalist approaches,
generally grounded in the idea that “to translate is to produce a text in a target setting for a target
purpose and target addressees in target circumstances” (Vermeer, 1987, p. 29), are, in fact, well
suited for describing GRs as translations. It can also be argued that, unlike most literary transla
tors, authors of GRs are not “expected to transfer not only the message of the source text but also
the specific way the message is expressed in the source language” (Reiß, 1971, p. 42, as cited in
Nord, 1997/2018, p. 89, my emphasis). Indeed, GRs could be regarded as a form of functionalist
translation in which the skopos of the translatum differs from that of the source text (Reiß & Ver
meer, 2013, p. 92). Furthermore, the questions of whether GRs fulfil their “function”, or what the
specific purpose for their creation is, do not prevent us from conceptualizing them as translations.
The year 2020 saw the appearance of three studies that provide empirical data on GRs: An
article by Cândido and Evangelista (2020), which studies GRs as a form of “Sprachmittlung” or
linguistic mediation; my own research (Moreno Tovar, 2020) on translation norms and laws; and
Wilhelmsen’s study (2020) on translation shifts and strategies. Although Cândido and Evange
lista’s contribution is not as firmly situated in TS as the other two, the authors make a crucial point
regarding Jakobson’s tripartite division of translation: Besides being associated with intralingual
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Manuel Moreno Tovar
and intersemiotic translation, GRs sometimes include – bilingual or multilingual – glossaries,

which brings them closer to the category of interlingual translation. Both my paper and Wilhelm
sen’s reach conclusions that support a view of GRs as instances of intralingual translation: I sur
mise that the abridgement of literature for language learning purposes is a norm-governed activity,
just like other translation processes, and Wilhelmsen finds that GRs bear significant similarities
with other types of intralingual translation. The two following case studies will provide further
empirical basis for the conceptualization of GRs.
Textual study: selection of the texts

The selected source text (ST) is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a pivotal work of the
Western literary canon that is “often graded and abridged” (Skopečková, 2013, p. 248). Although
previous versions of the novel exist, the 1891 edition is, by far, the most widespread today, so it
is reasonable to assume that it serves as a source for most, if not all, GR versions of The Picture
of Dorian Gray.
As this chapter aims to go beyond the domains of the three leading traditional GR series (Pearson
Penguin Readers, Macmillan Readers, and Oxford’s Bookworms, as identified by Hill, 2012, p. 92),
the selected target text (TT) is a GR by Burlington Books, a publisher present in Greece, Cyprus,
and Spain. Its Readers catalogue 2022/2023 features three GR series: Burlington Original Readers
(formerly known as Burlington Readers), Burlington Activity Readers, and Burlington International
Readers. The two former series are tailored to the ESO and Bachillerato syllabus in Spain (12- to
18-year-old students) and include introductions and glossaries in Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and Gali
cian, whereas the latter is graded according to CEFR levels6 and aimed at an international readership.
Both Burlington Original Readers and Burlington International Readers have a version of The
Picture of Dorian Gray, from 2000 and 2016, respectively. Upon skimming through these GRs, it
becomes apparent that the text in the international edition is an edited version (arguably, a retransla
tion) of the intralingual translation for learners in Spain. The texts are almost identical at first sight,
and most of the editions seem to strive on a micro-textual level to enhance clarity or add emphasis
rather than to adjust the text to a different, more heterogeneous audience. Since the GRs of the Burl
ington Original Readers series contain interlingual translations into some of the languages of Spain,
which are not within the scope of this study, the monolingual international edition was selected.
Textual study: comparative analysis

Due to spatial restrictions, this analysis will exclusively cover the first chapter of the ST (the 1891 ver
sion, as published by Penguin Books in 2000; Wilde, 2000a) and the corresponding excerpt of chapter 1
(“In the Studio”) from the TT (Wilde [Baron, Trans.], 2016), included in what follows for reference.
In the summer of 1870, an artist was working in his studio in London. The artist’s name was
Basil Hallward, and he was finishing a portrait. His friend, Lord Henry Wotton, was sitting
in an armchair, watching him paint.
“That’s a marvellous portrait. I know all your paintings, but this is the best,” said Lord
Henry. “The young man in the portrait is very handsome, with his dark curly hair and bright
blue eyes.”
“Yes, he is,” Basil said. “He’s also very innocent, and he doesn’t really know anything about
life. Sometimes, I worry that Dorian Gray is too handsome and that he’ll suffer for it one day.”
“Dorian Gray? Is that his name?” Lord Henry asked, laughing.
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“Yes, it is,” Basil answered. “Dorian and I are good friends and we spend a lot of time
together. He often comes and sits with me, even when I’m not painting his portrait. When
he’s here, I paint much better than usual. He’s a very special young man.”
“That’s interesting,” said Lord Henry. “I really want to meet him.” Basil was not happy
when he heard his friend say this. Lord Henry was 40 years old, 10 years older than Basil.
He knew a lot about life, but he didn’t believe in anything and didn’t care about anyone. He
only saw the bad in everything and ridiculed the good. Nothing was important to him except
things which gave him pleasure. He spent his life going to parties and drinking.
“Henry is so cynical and he laughs at everything,” Basil thought. “It will be better if he
doesn’t meet Dorian.”
“I don’t think you’ll like Dorian,” Basil said to his friend. “He’s very different from you,
but his friendship is important to me.”
At that moment, a servant came into the studio. “Mr Gray is here, sir,” he said. “Can I ask
him to come upstairs to the studio?”
“Yes, please do,” Basil answered. He didn’t look happy, but Lord Henry laughed. “This
is a coincidence!” he thought. “Now I can meet Dorian Gray!”
“Henry, please be careful what you say to Dorian,” Basil said, seriously. “He’s only 19
years old. He’ll listen to what you say and I’m afraid you’ll have a bad influence on him.”
Lord Henry laughed again. He was enjoying the situation.
(Wilde [Baron, Trans.], 2016, pp. 8–9, emphasis in the original)
The juxtaposition of “replacing” and “replaced” segments from the ST and the TT poses the same
challenges, if not more, as it did in my previous study (Moreno Tovar, 2020). Indeed, the limita
tions of Toury’s methods (1995/2012), and more specifically, those of the coupled pair, are par
ticularly striking in intralingual translation. This is in line with Zethsen’s remark (2021, p. 139)
that, because of the purpose of simplification, certain strategies, such as additions, omissions, and
restructuring, are applied “in a much more radical way” in intralingual translation. Given that a
whole chapter of the ST (almost 5,000 words) has been condensed into a text that is more than
ten times shorter (less than 400 words), the TT could be seen as a GR that blurs the boundaries
that I once tried to establish between abridgements and adaptations. The selected examples in
Table 22.1 and Table 22.2 attest to the highly asymmetrical process of TT-ST segment alignment.
Table 22.1 Restructuring of information in GRs
Target text Source text

He’s also very innocent and He has a simple and a beautiful nature. Your aunt was quite right in
he doesn’t really know what she said of him. Don’t spoil him. Don’t try to influence him.
anything about life. Your influence would be bad.
Table 22.2 Explicitation of information in GRs

“Henry is so cynical and “. . . You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your
he laughs at everything,” cynicism is simply a pose.”
Basil thought. “Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,” cried
Lord Henry, laughing. . .
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Manuel Moreno Tovar
In Table 22.1, the segment that is assumed to have been “replaced” is in a completely different
position in the ST compared to the TT, namely, at the end of the chapter. This restructuring, paired
with the omissions, is sure to have an impact on the readers’ perception of the character of Dorian
Gray, made less complex in the TT.
The example in Table 22.2 is even less straightforward: While it remains possible to trace back
some lexical choices in the TT to the ST, this process is complicated by the extreme degree to
which information has been made explicit and digestible. Rather than stating that Basil believes
that Lord Henry is “cynical” and “laughs at everything”, the ST allows the readers to reach their
own conclusions based on the interactions between the two characters throughout the chapter.
Despite the methodological limitations, one can turn to the word level to identify transla
tions where the parameter of time plays a role. One example is the word “armchair” in the TT,
which corresponds to “divan of Persian saddle bags” in the ST. Admittedly, this is probably
due to “divan” and “saddle bags” not being included on the word list used in the production
of this GR (meaning that learners are not expected to know such words at this level of pro
ficiency). However, this translational choice may also be a way to eliminate a time-bound
orientalist reference to Victorian London and create an image that is more familiar to the
young readership.
A further example is the word “picture”, conspicuously absent in the TT excerpt, although pre
sent in the title of the GR. This word is used today to describe a visual representation of any kind,
including a painting. However, when we use “picture” to specifically refer to a visual representa
tion of a person’s face, we generally think of a photograph, which was not the case at the end of
the 19th century. Thus, it is plausible that “picture” was avoided not because it is not on the word
list, but because of a dated usage that may confuse learners. Instead, their attention is focused on
the word “portrait”, whose meaning (“a painting of a person”) is intralingually explained in the
glossary (Wilde [Baron, Trans.], 2016, p. 54).
As a third example of a translation that is partly instigated by time, let us examine Table 22.3.
The first chapter of the ST includes two references to Lord Henry smoking, but none to his fond
ness of attending social gatherings or drinking. One possible explanation is that this translational
choice alludes to Lord Henry’s inclination to life’s “vices” and aims at making them explicit from
the beginning. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the “vice” of smoking “opium-tainted”
cigarettes is thoroughly omitted in the TT. Arguably, opium is not only a controversial theme in
a GR for young language learners (unlike alcohol, apparently), but also an indicator of the time
setting of the novel.
Table 22.3 Controversial themes in GRs

He spent his life going to From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was
parties and drinking. lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry
Wotton . . .
Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement through
the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from
his heavy opium-tainted cigarette.
384
The erasure of certain time-bound references across the TT does not mean that the text becomes
atemporal: On the contrary, it is firmly anchored in time, more specifically, in 1870. This specific
ity contrasts with the ST, which never sets the story in a concrete year, but rather paints a colourful
picture of the late Victorian period. Further time-related TT additions include Basil’s and Lord
Henry’s age (30 and 40, respectively). The TT also introduces two modifications that prove dif
ficult to explain: Dorian Gray’s age goes from “over twenty” to “only 19”, and his hair is described
as “dark” rather than “gold”.
If anything, this succinct analysis has served to demonstrate two things: First, that the param
eter of time inevitably plays a role when intralingually translating a literary classic from another
era, and second, that it is possible to find subtle yet insightful textual additions and modifications if
one is able to look past the overwhelming number of omissions that naturally occur in the produc
tion of a GR translation.
Paratextual study: corpus preparation

In the preparation of the corpus for this multilingual paratextual study, the Extensive Reading
Foundation’s Graded Reader List (https://sites.google.com/site/erfgrlist/) was helpful for GR
series in English, but not in Spanish or German. When searching for GRs in these languages, it
seemed that some publishers market their simplified literature series for both L1 and L2 readers.7
Specifically:
• SM lists its series Colección Clásicos in its Catálogo Español Lengua Extranjera (SM, 2020),
but also features it on the youth literature section of its website (https://es.literaturasm.com/
grandes-clasicos-de-literatura/).
• Works in Cornelsen’s Einfach klassisch feature under “Deutsch” (German for L1 readers) and
“Deutsch als Fremdsprache” (German for L2 readers) on its website (www.cornelsen.de/suche
?query=Einfach+klassisch/).
• Beltz (www.beltz.de/service/fuer_deutschlehrer_innen/einfache_sprache.html) mentions peo
ple with a limited command of German among its readers and states that its titles correspond to
an A2/B1 level on the CEFR, but it does not place them in a grading scheme.
• Passanten (www.passanten-verlag.de/) keeps the question of its readership open by claiming
that they target everyone “who loves books but sometimes struggles to read” (my translation),8
and Spass am Lesen (https://einfachebuecher.de/) has a similar motto.
In the light of these observations, and for the purposes of this study, a GR will be defined as any
version of a literary work that:
1 is presented as primarily aimed at language learners, and

2 is part of a grading scheme (i.e., the series has more than one level).
By this definition, there are still many books that qualify as GRs, though not from the publish
ers listed before. The final corpus included 48 GRs: 31 in English, ten in Spanish, and seven in
German; the GR series are presented in Table 22.4. Remarkably, some publishers have GRs in all
three languages. Paratexts were assumed to be the same across a single GR series, and each title
was therefore considered representative of its series. However, it is important to note that paratexts
may change as new editions are released.
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Manuel Moreno Tovar
Table 22.4 GR series covered by the paratextual study
Language(s) Publisher GR series

English Burlington Books Activity Readers, International Readers, Original Readers
Collins ELT Collins English Readers
Compass Publishing Classic Readers, Young Learners Classic Readers
Express Publishing Graded Readers
Helbling Helbling Shakespeare, Readers Classics, Young Readers
Classics
Macmillan English Explorers, Readers
MM Publications Graded Readers, Primary Readers, Top Readers
Oxford University Press Bookworms Library, Classic Tales, Dominoes, Progressive
English Readers
Pearson Education Active Readers, Readers, Story Readers
Richmond Richmond Readers
Spanish Anaya Audio clásicos adaptados
Edelsa Lecturas Clásicas Graduadas
enClave-ELE Lecturas Niños
Santillana Leer en Español
SGEL Literatura Hispánica De Fácil Lectura
German Ernst Klett Deutsch – leichter lesen
English, Spanish, Black Cat CIDEB Earlyreads, Green Apple, Reading & Training; Leer y
and German aprender; Leitchtzulesen, Lesen und Üben
ELI Publishing Teen ELI Readers, Young Adult ELI Readers, Young ELI
Readers; Lecturas ELI Adolescentes, Lecturas ELI
Infantiles y Juveniles, Lecturas ELI Jóvenes y Adultos;
Erste ELI Lektüren, Erwachsene ELI Lektüren, Junge
ELI Lektüren
Egmont (Alinea) Easy Classics, Easy Readers (English), Easy Readers
(Spanish), Easy Readers (German)
Paratextual study: corpus analysis

As suspected, the corpus analysis revealed a diversity of self-descriptors across and within the
GRs, and also within the same language. In the GRs in English, “retold” was the most common
self-descriptor, followed by “adapted” and “adaptation”. Figure 22.1 shows a quantitative over
view with the most commonly used terms. It should be noted that one single GR might count
towards several categories, as each title might have multiple peritexts and epitexts (combined
here and in the other figures). It is noteworthy that only one GR described itself as a “modern
translation”: The title from the Helbling Shakespeare series, which offers lengthy annotations in
parallel to the source text. This format resembles Delabastita’s study aids (2017) rather than the
standard GR, which might be the reason why Helbling Shakespeare is not included on the Graded
Reader List.9
Descriptions of the authors of the texts – in my own terms, the intralingual translators – are
something Delabastita (2017) covered only superficially. The analysis revealed that the use of
passive constructions such as “adapted by” results in an absence of nouns referring to the role of
the authors. One notable exception is Helbling, which on its website refers to its GR authors as
“adapters”. This epitextual use corresponds to Edelsa’s peritextual use of “adaptador” in its series
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(carefully graded modern English) translation 1
abridged edition 2
(carefully) graded (story/modern English translation) 2
created for, specially-written story for, written

5
specifically for
simplified book/edition/story/text/version 8
(carefully) adapted (by), (text/easy-to-read) adaptation 15
retold (version/story) (by) 18
Figure 22.1 Paratextual self-descriptors in English
versión fiel y accesible 1
texto original abreviado 1
edición resumida 1
edición simplificada, texto simplificado 1
reducción lingüística (de) 3
adaptación (didáctica) (de), obra/versión adaptada,

6
texto (clásico) adaptado (por)
Figure 22.2 Paratextual self-descriptors in Spanish
Lecturas Clásicas Graduadas. As shown in Figure 22.2, “adaptación” and its related terms are the
most common self-descriptors across the Spanish GRs in the corpus. The small size of the sample
results in a comparatively high occurrence of the term “reducción lingüística” (meaning “linguistic
reduction” or “linguistic abridgement”), though it is only used by ELI Publishing.
In German (see Figure 22.3), the rare term “Adaption” only appeared once. The most com
monly used term was “Bearbeitung”, which can also be translated into English as “adaptation”.
Interestingly, adjectives and adverbs testifying to the high standards of both the process and the
product of the translation appear in the paratexts of all three languages, that is, “carefully”, “fiel y
accesible” (“faithful and accessible”), and “meisterhaft” (“masterfully”).
This paratextual study has demonstrated that, in all languages covered, GRs clearly tend to
refer to themselves as adaptations rather than abridgements, though it is not clear whether there is a
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Manuel Moreno Tovar
Adaption 1
(meisterhaft) gekürzt 2
Nacherzählung, nacherzählt von 2
Didaktisierung, didaktische Bearbeitung 3
(sprachlich) vereinfacht, vereinfachter Text 3
bearbeitet von, didaktische Bearbeitung,

5
Textbearbeitung
Figure 22.3 Paratextual self-descriptors in German
distinction between the two. It is also safe to state that simplified and its derivative terms, contrary
to Hill’s affirmation (2008, p. 185), are still in use. However, if we pursue our analysis beyond
mere term frequency, it becomes evident that these terms carry negative connotations to some. For
instance, the Spanish GR by Egmont (Alinea) paratextually claims that the text, although simpli
fied, retains the spirit of the original. Furthermore, aspects such as location and font size are impor
tant here. In series by both Burlington Books and Oxford University Press, the phrases “simplified
version” and “simplified edition” are less visible than other self-descriptors. This is because they
only appear in the books’ copyright notice, which may have played a role in the wording.
Conclusions
This chapter has examined GRs as a relevant research object for TS. The absence of the term
translation in most of the corpus’s titles may prompt the conclusion that the producers of GRs do
not conceive of them as translations. In this regard, a participant-based study would be more help
ful in understanding how these professionals think of their work. For instance, the term language
learner literature was similarly absent, and we know that many series editors and publishers (at
least in the Anglosphere) are aware of said term through the Language Learner Literature Award.10
This research has focused on how we as researchers can conceptualize GRs in our own specialized
terms. To this end, we might find it more productive to shift our view to self-qualifiers other than
translation.
Let us focus on terms such as adaptación didáctica and Didaktisierung, which emphasize GRs’
pedagogical purpose. This perspective is highly compatible with functionalist views of transla
tion, such as Seel’s (2015). Seel affirms that intralingual translation is pragmatic-functional in its
nature. From this point of view, we could conceptualize GRs as instances of intralingual transla
tion for language learning purposes; this would bring them closer to semiotically “distant” types
of intralingual translation, such as subtitles used in educational settings. On the other hand, the
question arises as to whether GRs are mere tools for the acquisition of language proficiency. This
388
is their typical use in extensive reading programmes, but could they pursue additional goals? It
would seem to be the case for GRs designed to be used as expansive reading materials. Besides, a
functionalist understanding could be at odds with Day and Bamford’s contention (1998, p. 67) that
GRs are “a genuine art form”.
Self-descriptors such as specially written for and created for invite associations with a user-
centred approach to translation (Suojanen et al., 2015). From this angle, GRs could be described
as instances of intralingual translation for language learners. Again, this poses an important ques
tion: Are GRs solely for language learners? Language learners are, indeed, their intended audience,
but controlled vocabulary may appeal to other groups of users who struggle to read, such as people
with cognitive disabilities and with low literacy skills. This is not to erase the specific needs of
those groups but to acknowledge that different, sometimes overlapping groups of people may well
access and use a single (user-centred) translation. The keyword here is the term accessible, which
appears in the paratext of a Spanish GR in the corpus. It is no coincidence that the production of
that GR was directed by Anula Rebollo, who has researched the applications of linguistic simplifi
cation in the teaching of ELE by means of the term “español accesible” (Anula Rebollo & Revilla
Guijarro, 2009). A stronger focus on the accessibility of GRs would not only highlight their simi
larities to adjacent forms of simplified literature, such as the readers produced by Passanten and
Spass am Lesen, but also to easy-to-read texts produced in the context of plain language initiatives.
The somewhat vague self-descriptor retold also invites reflection. Thinking of GRs as retold
rather than rewritten literature can help us understand them as the output of a complex multimodal
phenomenon that involves more than one of the three Jakobsonian types of translation (intralin
gual, intersemiotic, and sometimes also interlingual). In this light, a GR is quite an extraordinary
object of study, which can allow us to examine how those different types of translation operate in
conjunction – or even how the borders between them are fuzzier than we thought.
The preceding conclusions are complemented by the main conclusion of the textual study:
That GRs tend to be influenced by the parameter of time, as the need to diachronically update the
language of older texts is central to their production. Admittedly, knowledge still stands as the
primary factor, but in a hypothetical landscape in which more and more GRs are used for expan
sive reading, the role of culture could become more prominent. In her 2020 paper, Wilhelmsen
draws from Gottlieb’s semiotic taxonomy of translation (Gottlieb, 2018) to describe GRs as a form
of diaphasic translation, understood as a translation that is aimed at a different audience within
the same language culture. But why not also consider GRs as a form of diachronic translation?
Blurred lines and terminological overlaps complicate our perceptions of the world, but they also
open up new possibilities. In this regard, I hope that this chapter has not only helped my reader
ship to learn more about GRs, but also that it encourages the exploration of conceptualizations
that transcend the very distinction between intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation.
Notes
1 Malmkjær (2010, p. 185) observes that this is not true for all language pedagogic contexts (e.g., China),
but it is the case in those influenced by applied linguistics as developed in English-speaking countries.
2 Hill notes this bias in one of his survey reviews of GRs (1997, p. 62), where he laments that “outstanding”
GR series produced and set out in Africa were not distributed outside that continent.
3 The term native speaker is being increasingly replaced in academic circles by other terms perceived as
more appropriate, such as highly proficient L1 speaker, proposed by the organization EVE: Equal Voices
in ELT (https://twitter.com/sueleather/status/1280268312400678913).
4 The acronyms ELT and TESOL stand for English Language Teaching and Teaching English to Speakers
of Other Languages, respectively.
389
Manuel Moreno Tovar
5 In Portuguese: “É comum que adaptadores (e até ilustradores) tenham seus nomes estampados com visibi
lidade nas capas, precedidos de textos como “Retold by . . .” ou “Translated and adapted by . . .” ou “Text
adaptation by”, rivalizando com os nomes dos próprios autores dos textos originais nos quais os graded
readers se basearam”.
6 The CEFR is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, developed by the
Council of Europe. It divides language proficiency into six levels, A1 to C2 (www.coe.int/en/web/
common-european-framework-reference-languages/level-descriptions/).
7 The term L2 reader refers to a user who reads in their second language, in this case, a language learner.
8 In German: “Für alle, die Bücher lieben und denen es manchmal trotzdem schwer fällt zu lesen”.
9 It does however feature on Helbling’s readers website (www.helblingpublishing.com/int/en/readers)
along with other GR series.
10 None of the titles in the corpus were finalists or winners of the Language Literature Award. Finalist and
winning GRs may display a logo qualifying them as “language learner literature” on their covers.
Further reading
Canepari, M. (2022). A new paradigm for translators of literary and non-literary texts. Brill.
In the third chapter of this monograph, Canepari explores the intralingual translation of British literary clas
sics for specific categories of readers, including language learners.
Day, R., Bassett, J., Bowler, B., Parminter, S., Bullard, N., Furr, M., Prentice, N., Mahmood, M., Stewart, D.,
& Robb, T. (2016). Extensive reading (revised ed.). Oxford University Press.
Written by extensive reading experts, this edited volume provides a valuable insight into graded readers and
graded reader series, particularly in its second and third chapters.
Rodrigo, V. (2019). La comprensión lectora en la enseñanza del español LE/L2: de la teoría a la práctica.
Routledge.
Rodrigo conducts an illustrative analysis of graded readers for learners of Spanish as a foreign language in the
seventh chapter of this book, written fully in Spanish.
References
Primary sources
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enseñanza del español como L2. Los textos jurídicos y administrativos. In A. Vera Luján & I. Martínez
Martínez (Eds.), El español en contextos específicos: enseñanza e investigación (pp. 199–211). ASELE,
Fundación Comillas.
Bazani, A. (2019). Translation and L2 teaching’s relationship status: From former “friends” and “enemies” to
current “strangers”. In M. Koletnik & N. Frœliger (Eds.), Translation and language teaching: Continuing
the dialogue (pp. 3–22). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Becker, E. (2015). A escritura de graded readers: adaptação, princípios tradutórios e processo criativo. In L.
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Cândido, A. G., & Evangelista, M. C. R. G. (2020). Leituras facilitadas como mediação linguística no ensino/
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List of titles used in the case studies

Aesop. (2003). The fox and the dog (H. Q. Mitchell, Trans.). MM Publications.
Aesop. (2017). Der Nordwind und die Sonne (D. Guillemant, Trans.). ELI Publishing.
Aladdin and the magic lamp (J. Cadwallader, Trans.). (2012). ELI Publishing.
Anonymous. (1996). El cantar de mío cid (C. Romero Dueñas, Trans.). Edelsa.
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Andersen, H. C. (2006). The ugly duckling (R. Hobart, Trans.). Black Cat Publishing.
Austen, J. (2003). Pride and prejudice (A. Shell, Trans.). Black Cat Publishing.
Bécquer, G. A. (2002). Leyendas (C. Ruiz Ibáñez, Trans.). Anaya.
Bécquer, G. A. (2009). La corza blanca (F. Sánchez-Bordona Arizcun, Trans.). Santillana Educación.
Brothers Grimm (2019). Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten (P. Traverso, & M. Knoth, Trans.). Black Cat Publishing.
Büchner, G. (2013). Woyzeck (G. Schlusnus, Trans.). ELI Publishing.
Carroll, L. (2015). Through the looking-glass (G. Munton, Trans.). Macmillan.
Cervantes Saavedra, M. (2007). El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha 1 (B. Rodríguez Rodríguez,
Trans.). Sociedad General Española de Librería.
Christie, A. (2020). And then there were none. HarperCollins Publishers.
Conan Doyle, A. (2010). The hound of the Baskervilles. Easy Readers (Egmont).
Conan Doyle, A. (2013). The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (J. Borsbey & R. Swan, Trans.).
ELI Publishing.
Ende, M. (2021). Die unendliche Geschichte (A. Seiffarth, Trans.). Ernst Klett.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (2005). The great Gatsby (M. Tamer, Trans.). Macmillan.
García Lorca, F. (2009). La casa de Bernarda Alba (D. Carpani, Trans.). Black Cat Publishing.
Goldilocks and the three bears (S. Arengo, Trans.). (2011). Oxford University Press.
Hauff, W. (2014). Der Zwerg Nase (B. Sauser, Trans.). ELI Publishing.
Hodgson Burnett, F. (2016). Little Lord Fauntleroy (S. Sardi, Trans.). ELI Publishing.
Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1999). Der Sandmann (A. Seiffarth, Trans.). Black Cat Publishing.
Homer (2008). The Odyssey (F. Beddall, Trans.). Pearson Education.
Martín Gaite, C. (2010). Caperucita en Manhattan. Easy Readers (Egmont).
Nesbit, E. (2000). The railway children (J. Escott, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Orwell, G. (2003). 1984 (M. Dean, Trans.). Pearson Education.
Perrault, C. (2015). Little red riding hood (R. Northcott, Trans.). Helbling.
Perrault, C. (2020). Caperucita roja. enClave-ELE.
Quevedo, F. (2015). La vida del Buscón (C. Bartolomé Martínez, Trans.). ELI Publishing.
Quiroga, H. (2012). La abeja haragana (S. Cortés Ramírez, Trans.). ELI Publishing.
Saki, Chesterton, G. K., Gaskell, E., Stevenson, R. L., Trollope, A., Kipling, R., James, M. R., & Conrad, J.
(2009). Classic British short stories (P. Koster, Trans.). Compass Publishing.
Shakespeare, W. (2006). The tempest (V. Heward, Trans.). Black Cat Publishing.
Shakespeare, W. (2019). Hamlet. Helbling.
Shelley, M. (2001). Frankenstein (E. Gray, Trans.). Express Publishing.
Spyri, J. (2011). Heidi (P. Davenport, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Stevenson, R. L. (2012). Treasure island (D. A. Hill, Trans.). Helbling.
Stoker, B. (1997). Dracula (P. Davies, Trans.). Richmond Publishing.
Swift, J. (2012). Gulliver’s travels (J. Randolph Lewis, Trans.). Compass Publishing.
Twain, M. (2012). Huck Finn (H. Q. Mitchell, Trans.). MM Publications.
Valera, J. (2016). Pepita Jiménez (D. Tarradas Agea, Trans.). ELI Publishing.
Wilde, O. (2000a). The picture of Dorian Gray. Penguin Books.
Wilde, O. (2000b). The picture of Dorian Gray (V. Baron, Trans.). Burlington Books.
Wilde, O. (2001a). The happy prince (H. Q. Mitchell & M. Malkogianni, Trans.). MM Publications.
Wilde, O. (2001b). The selfish giant (M. Crook, Trans.). Pearson Education.
Wilde, O. (2007). The picture of Dorian Gray (L. A. Hill, Trans.). Oxford University Press (China).
Wilde, O. (2009a). The Canterville ghost (J. Hart, Trans.). Burlington Books.
Wilde, O. (2009b). The picture of Dorian Gray. Easy Readers (Egmont).
Wilde, O. (2016). The picture of Dorian Gray (V. Baron, Trans.). Burlington Books.
Zweig, S. (2011). Novellen. Easy Readers (Egmont).
392
PART VI
Accessibility from a practical perspective
23
INTRALINGUAL
INTERPRETATION
Simultaneous Easy Language interpreting as a
new form of simultaneous interpreting
Introduction
Easy Language interpreting (ELI) or simultaneous language simplification1 (SLS) is a relatively
new development in the fields of Interpreting Studies and Accessibility Studies alike. Similar to its
interlingual counterpart – simultaneous interpreting (SI) between two distinct languages – ELI or
SLS involves orally producing a real-time translation of a complex spoken text into a simplified or
Easy Language version of it within the same language. These methods were initially intended to
improve the accessibility of information for people with intellectual and developmental disability
(IDD), yet were subsequently proved to be effective and beneficial for people with cognitive dis
abilities at large2 (Yalon-Chamovitz et al., 2016). While the intralingual translation of written texts
into Plain Language and Easy Language has been practiced and researched for several decades
(Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020; Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021), performing this activity orally
has been reported in literature only in the past decade (Eichmeyer, 2018; Leichtfuß, 2013; Schulz
et al., 2020, Yalon-Chamovitz et al., 2016; Yalon-Chamovitz & Avidan-Ziv, 2016).
Due to the innovative nature of the field, a note must be made on the terminology selected for
this chapter. In English, the terms Easy Language interpreting and Plain Language interpreting
are often used interchangeably (Eichmeyer, 2018; Schulz et al., 2020). Previous works in Eng
lish describing the field in Israel referred to this practice as simultaneous language simplification
or real-time translation into Plain Language (Yalon-Chamovitz & Avidan-Ziv, 2016), although
in practice, the result is closer to Easy Language. The lack of unified terminology hinders both
research and potential cooperation between professionals.3
In written form, Plain Language and Easy Language can be distinguished based on their inter
nal characteristics and their target audience. Plain Language is the use of simple, everyday lan
guage designed to facilitate understanding for the general public, from professional documents for
lay readers to texts adapted for non-native speakers or readers with reduced language skills. While
some readers with disabilities may benefit from texts in Plain Language, it is not exclusively meant
as a form of accessibility but rather as a general language policy. Easy Language, on the other
hand, is explicitly aimed at providing cognitive accessibility for readers with disabilities and will
be perceived as overly simplified by the general public. Complex language is thus transformed4
to a greater degree in Easy Language. The rules of Plain Language mainly involve changes to
395 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-30

vocabulary and syntax, whereas Easy Language requires a complete restructuring of the original
text, rearranging the ideas in a way that will be most suitable for readers with disabilities, per
forming more far-reaching changes to vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, using accessible font
and layout and, most characteristically, adding symbols or pictographs to facilitate understanding
(Inclusion Europe, 2021; Uziel-Karl et al., 2011).
When the translation is performed orally, in the form of simultaneous interpretation or simplifi
cation of live speech specifically for people with disabilities, the question arises whether the result
should be termed Plain Language or Easy Language, as a text produced orally naturally cannot
contain graphics – a mandatory component of Easy Language. Furthermore, some critics suggest
that the complex, time-consuming process of rearranging the information and presenting it in a
way that will be most easily understood by people with disabilities cannot be fully implemented
when considering the time constraints of simultaneous interpreting (Maaß & Hernández Garrido,
2020). However, it can be argued that it is the designation of the target audience which is the most
important element for this definition. Insofar as form of interpreting is aimed at people with disa
bilities, it can still be labelled Easy Language regardless of how it might deviate from the standards
of written Easy Language in practice (Maaß & Hernández Garrido, 2020). Based on this logic, and
for the sake of clarity, in this chapter, we have chosen to use the term Easy Language interpreting
(ELI) to describe the practice as it is performed anywhere in the world.
To the best of our knowledge, no study to date has attempted to examine Easy Language inter
preting vis-à-vis its parallel interlingual activity, simultaneous interpreting, particularly regard
ing conference and media interpreting. Intuitively, the technique necessary for performing both
activities seems very similar: interlingual interpreters and Easy Language interpreters must be able
to listen to the original text, quickly process it, and then produce their rendition of it while still
listening to the speaker’s following utterances and remembering them (Gambier et al., 1997). The
interpretation is produced under stress with minimal chance for corrections or revisions (Pöch
hacker, 2004). For professional simultaneous interpreters, this complex skill is usually the result
of long, arduous training. And indeed, in Israel, the visible similarity between ELI and SI resulted
in the requalification of several simultaneous interpreters to perform ELI.
However, a comparison between the accepted standards of quality and good practice in inter
preting (AIIC, 1999/2016; Bühler, 1986) and the principles and practices of Easy Language inter
preting for people with cognitive disabilities (Israeli Institute for Cognitive Accessibility and
ISRAIIC Israel Interpreters, 2020; Uziel-Karl et al., 2011) reveals that paradoxically the two
tasks share many requirements while others are, in fact, at odds with each other. This poses a
potential challenge for professional simultaneous interpreters wishing to engage in this new field
of activity.
This chapter will describe the use of ELI in the world to the best of our knowledge, with an
emphasis on the training or retraining process involved. It will then analyze the standards of ELI
compared with those of interlingual simultaneous interpreting and point to the areas of similarities
as well as the main differences that may require specific attention during both training and practice.
Background
Individuals with CD may encounter several barriers when attempting to receive and understand
information. These include:
1 Literacy – adults with disabilities were found to be more likely than the general population to
perform at the lowest literacy level: 87% of those with IDD5 and almost 60% of people with
396
Intralingual interpretation
learning disabilities do not have functional reading skills (Kirsch et al., 1993). This makes their
participation in aspects of information and communication in today’s predominantly literate
society almost impossible. Attempts have been made to accommodate this need using read-
aloud software, pictograms, and alternative modalities, such as public address systems and
auditory signs.
2 Complexity – individuals with CD may experience memory and attention deficits, prob
lem-solving difficulties, and language comprehension difficulties, including understanding
inference, understanding abstract or metaphorical content, and distinguishing primary from
peripheral information. Messages with many parts, such as multi-stage instructions and com
plex structures such as conditional sentences, multiple relative clauses, and complex grammar
and syntax that require a relatively high level of understanding or problem-solving processes,
are some of the most commonly recognized accessibility barriers for people with CD. As a
result, simplification of such messages and processes is one of the most common accommo
dations, spanning both written and oral communication, administrative procedures, product
design, and even environmental layout (Yalon-Chamovitz, 2009).
3 Pace – individuals with CD often experience slow information processing and reaction times
(Abbeduto, 2003; Kail, 2000; Yalon-Chamovitz, 2009). Even when the information is provided
orally, to accommodate for the difficulty with reading, they may find the speed of regular oral
communication challenging. The pace and temporal demands are almost always indicated as
barriers to accessibility by people with intellectual disabilities themselves, as well as by their
family members and by professionals (Yalon-Chamovitz, 2009).
Additional barriers to understanding communication are expert knowledge barriers (when the text
uses expert language or deals with professional topics that are unfamiliar to laypeople), cultural
barriers (when the text presupposes cultural knowledge that the audience may be lacking), and
media barriers (when the information is provided using a means of communication that is either
entirely inaccessible for the target audience or is not their preferred means of communication)
(Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020).
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was adopted by the UN in
2006 and entered into force in 2008, is designed to serve as a human rights instrument guaran
teeing that all people with disabilities, including those with intellectual or cognitive disabilities,
receive the same basic human rights and fundamental freedoms as people without disabilities, such
as the right for self-determination, access to justice and healthcare, and protection from mistreat
ment or discrimination. Several articles in the Convention focus particularly on full participation
in all aspects of life, detailing rights such as access to information and communication and par
ticipation in cultural life, recreation, leisure, and sport (United Nations, 2006). These notions are
further supported by similar national legislation, such as the Act on Equal Opportunities of Persons
with Disabilities in Germany and the Accessibility and Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities
Regulations in Israel.
Initially implemented by way of wheelchair ramps or braille signs for people with physical and
sensory disabilities, the notion of accessibility was in recent years expanded to provide “cognitive
ramps” – means such as modification of pace, complexity, and literacy level intended to bridge a
gap in accessibility to information, processes, or environments and thus accommodate the acces
sibility needs of people with varying cognitive skills and allow them to equally participate in all
aspects of life (Yalon-Chamovitz et al., 2016). Such accommodations may include easy to read
and understand signs in parks, pre-recorded cognitively accessible tourist information, and acces
sible registration forms for sports activities.
397
Whether written or audio, these accommodations are all prepared in advance, in a lengthy pro
cess that usually involves a detailed analysis of the original text and its desired message, meticu
lous editing, and wording of the simplified, accessible message, and often a consultation with
representatives of the target audience who serve as an advisory group to guarantee understanding.
In light of this complex, multistep process, it is clear why performing it live, without the traditional
preparation process, would be considered very difficult, if not impossible.
In written form, accessible texts must also follow clear guidelines for accessible design, includ
ing matters such as font size and contrast, and must also be accompanied by symbols or picto
grams. But while guidelines for written Easy Language are quite common (Inclusion Europe offers
guidelines for Easy Language in 16 European languages!), guidelines for spoken Easy Language
are scarce. Most existing documents refer to orally provided information that is pre-recorded, such
as railway announcements or tourist information, and focus on technical issues, such as sound
quality and clear pronunciation. De facto, the rules for written Easy Language are mostly applied
in ELI, with the exception of the accompanying graphic symbols.
Overview of the current situation

To the best of our knowledge, Easy Language simultaneous interpreting is currently provided,
albeit sporadically, mostly in Israel (Yalon-Chamovitz & Avidan-Ziv, 2016) and in Germany
(Eichmeyer, 2018).
Israel
ELI (termed in Israel “simultaneous language simplification”) was first provided at the Sixth Issie
Shapiro International Conference on Disabilities in 2015. It was performed by one of the authors,
Shira Yalon-Chamovitz, the head of the Israeli Institute for Cognitive Accessibility of Agudat
Ami and Ono Academic College, who had no prior experience in simultaneous interpreting. The
interpretation was provided via a designated channel on the simultaneous interpretation earphone-
based audio system to all conference attendees, including people with significant cognitive dis
abilities (Yalon-Chamovitz & Avidan-Ziv, 2016). Soon after, the Institute formed a professional
collaboration with ISRAIIC, the Israeli branch of AIIC (Association Internationale des Interprètes
de Conférence), the oldest and largest international organization of conference interpreters. After
undergoing a short, individual training, three simultaneous interpreters joined the simultaneous
simplification team at the Institute. They provided ELI on several occasions, adopting the simul
taneous interpreting model of working in teams of two (or three for longer assignments) and
alternating every 20 minutes.
From 2016 onwards, the Institute began providing ELI at conferences on matters of disability
and accessibility organized by Access Israel, an Israeli non-profit organization whose mission is
to promote accessibility and inclusion. In April 2019, ELI was first performed on Israeli televi
sion during the election-night newscast on Israel’s main state-owned television channel Kan 11.
The interpretation was broadcast on a designated website. In the same year, ELI was provided
alongside additional modes of accessibility, such as sign-language interpreting and audio descrip
tion, during the semi-final and final of the Eurovision Song Contest held in Israel. The service was
widely publicized on social media and television before the contest and was positively received.
Cognitive accessibility was further incorporated in Israeli mainstream media during election-night
newscasts in September 2019 and in the 2020, 2021, and 2022 elections. At the beginning of the
COVID-19 pandemic, Kan 11, with the support of the Ted Arison Family Foundation, broadcast
398
the simplified evening news for 30 consecutive days between March and April 2020. Most televi
sion broadcasts with ELI are available after the event on the station’s channel on YouTube. In total,
seven Easy Language interpreters have attempted simultaneous simplification into Easy Language
in Hebrew in Israel since the establishment of the field. An accessibility specialist from the Israeli
Institute for Cognitive Accessibility accompanies all events, listens to the interpretation from the
audience, and provides the interpreters with real-time feedback and post-event comments.
Following the practice in written Easy Language, the Institute consults an advisory group of
people with CD as part of its preparation to perform ELI at major events. An assessment study was
conducted during the Issie Shapiro Conference (via observations) and afterwards (via focus groups
and interviews), revealing that using ELI enabled people with significant cognitive disabilities to
fully participate in the professional conference. Not only did the participants actively engage dur
ing the event itself, but many also demonstrated learning and retention of conference content as
far as several weeks after the conference (Yalon-Chamovitz & Avidan-Ziv, 2016). Similar focus
groups were conducted after subsequent events with matching results.
Germany
Compared with the top-down approach led by professionals, characterizing the development of
ELI in Israel, the process in Germany was more grassroots-up and stemmed from local needs.
ELI (“Leichte Sprache simultan”) was first performed in Germany in 2013 during an inclusive
theatre festival whose organizers wished to make the event more accessible for audiences with CD
(Eichmeyer, 2018; Schulz et al., 2020). The professional tasked with this innovative form of acces
sibility was Anne Leichtfuß, who specialized in accessibility in online journalism and worked in
an organization providing Easy Language services for people with Down’s syndrome but had
never performed simultaneous interpreting before. Following the successful attempt at the festival,
Leichtfuß was invited to perform ELI at a governmental conference on disabilities the same month
and went on to work at various cultural events and medical settings throughout Germany since.
She has also provided ELI at disability-related meetings in the Bundestag and is registered as an
interpreter for Easy Language in the German governmental interpreting agency.
In an attempt to recreate the work process of written Easy Language, which involves feedback
from the target audience, Anne Leichtfuß invited listeners with Down’s syndrome to participate
in events where she performed ELI, to serve as a control group and provide her with feedback on
her work.
Leichtfuß worked alone for the first two years before being joined by several colleagues she had
trained herself. In 2020 there were ten Easy Language interpreters active in Germany (Eichmeyer,
2018). By 2022, their number had decreased to eight (Leichtfuß, personal communication, 2022).
An additional difference between the situation in Israel and that in Germany pertains to the
background of the interpreters involved. While in Israel, most Easy Language interpreters are
professional simultaneous interpreters with no background in Easy Language or accessibility and,
indeed, no experience with people with disabilities, in Germany, most of those who currently work
in the field have had prior training in Easy Language (in written form) before learning ELI.
Additional initiatives
ELI has been provided in FALC (“Français Facile à Lire et à Comprendre”) by Inclusion-Asbl
Belgium since 2021. Based on the information provided on the organization’s website,6 it offers
ELI at lectures, meetings, and conferences, as well as training for Easy Language translators
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and interpreters (Abls-be, 2021). ELI was performed in English at the Disability Unite Festival,
streamed online from New York in 2020 and 2021. The interpreter was one of the authors: Shira
Yalon-Chamovitz. A program for introducing ELI is currently being developed in Spain. The spar
sity of publications on the matter and the use of different local terminology makes it challenging
to locate similar initiatives.7
Training
Training programs for Easy Language interpreters are quite rare. Anne Leichtfuß, who was the
first to provide ELI in Germany, attempted to train some of her colleagues in 2015 in a two-day
workshop, followed by a period of on-site training, where those of the participants who wished
to, joined Leichtfuß at various venues where ELI was provided to observe and practice under her
supervision until they had felt confident enough in their performance. All participants had prior
knowledge of German “Leichte Sprache” and did not need to learn the guidelines at the workshop.
Most had some experience in translation or interpreting as well. The first day of the workshop
was dedicated to theoretical issues pertaining to interpreting in general and Easy Language in par
ticular, while the second day provided opportunities to practice. Leichtfuß invited several people
with Down’s syndrome with whom she had previously worked to serve as an audience during the
second day of the workshop. They listened to the ELI by the students and provided feedback on
their performance and the level of accessibility of the interpreting. In subsequent years, Leichtfuß
organized workshops in a similar format in collaboration with German interpreting organizations
for participants whose main area of expertise was interpreting and who did not have prior knowl
edge of Easy Language. Her philosophy is that while official Easy Language guidelines, as well as
interpreting techniques, can be taught relatively quickly, it is the personal experience of accessible
communication with people who are the target audience of ELI, namely, people with cognitive
or intellectual disabilities, that is indispensable for potential participants in this type of training
(Leichtfuß, personal communication, 2022).
Similar observations were made by Israeli Easy Language interpreters who voiced their con
cern about not being familiar with their target audience. This meant they were less able to judge
the level of simplification required, the background knowledge their listeners possessed, and their
general preferences. Israeli ELI training also included a meeting with people with disabilities, as
will be detailed later. However, as some interpreters noted, a one-time meeting cannot replace
extensive, personal experiences and the insights they provide.
Out of the 20 or so participants in Leichtfuß’s first course and a similar number of participants in
the subsequent ones, only a few went on to actively work in the field (Eichmeyer, 2018, Leichtfuß,
personal communication, 2022). Leichtfuß attributes this partly to the fact that the participants in
her workshops are not officially certified in any way and because of the amount of time that must
be invested in further independent practice after the workshop. In other words, the short workshop
provides the participants with a basic understanding of the field, but as with interlingual interpreta
tion, additional practice and feedback are vital to achieving the level of proficiency needed to work
professionally. Unlike in interlingual interpretation, where the interpreters themselves are fluent in
both languages and cultures and can provide themselves with feedback on their work after review
ing their recordings, Easy Language interpreting trainees do not usually have access to a control
group of listeners with disabilities or to Easy Language specialists. Thus, they will not be able to
receive feedback and learn whether their interpretation is indeed suitable to the needs of their audi
ence. Leichtfuß’s trainees may join events where ELI is provided to practice and receive feedback,
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but traveling throughout the country at one’s own expense may be difficult and time-consuming,
particularly as most participants were already employed full-time in other organizations.
Starting in 2019, the University of Hildesheim, in cooperation with the federal association of
interpreters and translators in Germany, has offered three one-and-a-half-day workshops on ELI
for professional translators and interpreters. Participants were already familiar with the rules of
Easy Language, as it is often taught as part of master’s programs in translation in Germany (Uni
versity of Hildesheim, 2022, Schulz, personal communication, 2022). The number of participants
ranged from eight to 15. Prior experience working with people with cognitive disabilities was
advised but not mandatory. No official certification was provided to the participants, and no data
exists regarding the number of graduates who went on to work in the field. Course coordinators are
currently examining ways of including ELI in master’s programs in interpreting (Schulz, personal
communication, 2022).
In Israel, the Institute for Cognitive Accessibility first provided a short, individual ELI training
for three professional simultaneous interpreters in 2016. The ten-hour training centered on Easy
Language guidelines and a practical session with feedback from the institute’s accessibility spe
cialists. These interpreters immediately began working in the field, receiving feedback during and
after the event from accessibility experts from the Institute.
In February 2020, the Institute, in collaboration with the two now-experienced ELI inter
preters and ISRAIIC, offered a four-day workshop (cut short to two days due to the outbreak of
COVID-19) in ELI for 12 professional simultaneous interpreters. None of the participants had
prior knowledge of Easy Language. The first day was dedicated to Easy Language and com
munication barriers faced by people with CD. The training also included a meeting with people
with disabilities, as most participants had no personal experience with such communication. The
second day was devoted to practicing simplification and ELI. Participants received feedback on
their work from accessibility specialists from the Institute and the two more experienced inter
preters who were trained in 2016 and have worked since. No official certification was provided.
Shortly after the cancellation of the final two days of practice due to the outbreak of COVID-19,
the Institute was commissioned by Kan 11 television channel to provide ELI for the evening news.
ELI was provided on the news for a period of 30 days to make information about the pandemic
and the various regulations accessible to people with CD. Two of the participants in the training
were recruited to participate in the project. They performed several more simulations of ELI with
the workshop’s instructors over Zoom. No other participants in the 2020 workshop have worked
actively in the field since.
In Belgium, Inclusion-Asbl offers a two-day course in ELI which is open to Easy Language
professionals and family members of people with ID and does not require participants to have
prior experience in interpreting. However, they must first complete the organization’s course in
written translation and be familiar with the rules of FALC. Both courses are taught with the help
of people with disabilities, who serve as a control group and provide students with real-time feed
back on their work. Course participants who wish to join Inclusion-Asbl and work in the field must
pass an exam with the organization’s specialists to become certified FALC translators/interpret
ers. Additional one-day workshops are offered to active FALC translators for further practice. All
courses are taught by a FALC specialist from the Institute.
Inclusion-Asbl also offers a course for people with cognitive disabilities wishing to become
part of the organization’s control group and provide feedback on translations into FALC. This is
a one-day, free course for people over 18 years old which also involves a certification exam for
those interested in working in the field. To the best of our knowledge, this is a unique project, not
available anywhere else.
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Comparison of standards and practices in ELI and SI

ELI is perceived by many of its practitioners as a form of intralingual simultaneous interpreting
owing to the technical resemblance between the two activities. Both require one to simultaneously
listen to the original utterance, process it, and produce a new version of it while still listening to
and remembering the next utterance. In Israel, simultaneous interpreters were thus seen as ideal
candidates to perform ELI, and the training they received to do so mostly revolved around the rules
and requirements of Easy Language as if it were another foreign language the interpreters must
master. However, Easy Language guidelines encompass not only vocabulary, syntax, and gram
mar, as they would in the case of a foreign language, but also the required mode of delivery, such
as speaking pace, the structure of the interpreted message, and familiarity with the target audience
in a way that can be likened to cultural understanding. These requirements force the interpreter to
significantly deviate from their usual modus operandi. To gain further insight into the extent of the
deviation and develop a greater understanding of where the new and important practice of ELI fits
in with the general practice of simultaneous interpreting, a more in-depth analysis of the similari
ties and differences between the two activities was performed.
The following comparison was based on two types of documents containing guidelines for
professionals in both fields. The first documents are AIIC’s general Guidelines for Interpreters
(1999/2016) and a specific checklist of guidelines for interpreters for the media. AIIC’s non-
language-specific guidelines are recognized as universal standards of quality and good practice
among interpreters worldwide (Bühler, 1986; Chiaro & Nocella, 2004; Zwischenberger, 2010).
Almost all Israeli Easy Language interpreters are members of AIIC.
The second group of documents includes the Israeli handbook for Easy Language (2011), pub
lished by the Israeli Institute for Cognitive Accessibility and Israel’s Ministry for Social Services,
and a separate guideline dedicated to ELI drafted by the Institute’s Easy Language interpreters
together with ISRAIIC. It is important to note that the Easy Language guidelines refer to Hebrew
Easy Language. Other languages may have different Easy Language standards or ELI practices.
However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no official published guidelines for performing
ELI in any other language.
The comparison was performed on three levels:
Message – the main idea of what is interpreted.

Delivery – how the interpretation is performed.
Structure – the lexicogrammar that is used during the interpretation.
Message
AIIC’s Practical Guide for Conference Interpreters states that an interpreter must “communicate
the speaker’s intended messages . . . their primary loyalty is always owed to the speaker and to
the communicative intent that the speaker wishes to realize.” Similarly, Easy Language inter
preters identify the speaker’s main message and communicate it in an accessible manner. Nei
ther is allowed to express their own personal opinions instead of those of the original speaker
or otherwise deviate from the original message. However, one might claim that Easy Language
interpreters’ loyalty is equally owed to their audience and to guarantee their understanding. If in
interlingual SI, a speaker’s vague or elaborate comment will be conveyed as such in the target lan
guage, in ELI, the interpreter will clarify as needed. While the main message and communicative
intent of the original remain unchanged in ELI, as they are in SI, they are nonetheless subject to
more manipulation than is typical in interlingual SI, as will be detailed in the section on structure.
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Delivery
Regarding delivery, that is, how the message is conveyed, AIIC details six different principles:
1 Using clear speech and good pronunciation, which are easy to understand.
2 Using natural intonation resembling everyday speech. Taking long pauses to listen to the origi
nal or search for the proper term and then making up for the lost time in sharp bursts is discour
aged, alongside speaking in deadpan monotone or sing-song intonation.
3 Completing each sentence and making sense in each sentence. Even if the interpreter misheard
the original, was forced to omit information, or rephrased the original message, the result must
be a logical, coherent sentence, grammatically structured with a beginning, middle, and an end.
4 Using a professional tone, never betraying any personal reaction to the speech, be it skepticism,
disagreement, amusement, or boredom.
5 Speaking in the first person on behalf of the speaker.
6 When interpreting for the media: Using a very short “ear-voice span” is recommended, that
is, beginning the interpretation as closely as possible to the speakers and finishing in time
with them. This technique helps the audience following the interpretation to better identify the
changes of speakers in an interview or a rapid discussion.
The first four principles are likewise present in the Israeli ELI guidelines. Easy Language inter
preters are instructed to enunciate their words, speak with a natural intonation without stretching
their vowels, complete their sentences, and use a professional, respectful tone. The guidelines
particularly emphasize that Easy Language interpreters must be wary of using an infantile, patron
izing, or teacher-like tone when speaking to their adult audience with a disability.
When it comes to speaking in the first person, ELI, like interlingual simultaneous interpreting,
should also be performed in the first person. However, Easy Language interpreters must some
times step outside the first-person norm and provide their listeners with additional context and
explanations to compensate for their audience’s knowledge gap. They may have to explain official
roles, provide historical background for events, and so on. These are provided in the third person.
Additionally, when interpreting for the media, Easy Language interpreters may also need to
“frame” a particular utterance by attributing it to a specific speaker when there is a swift exchange
between speakers. Unlike their interlingual colleagues, Easy Language interpreters may not
shorten their ear-voice span and speak faster, as their listeners require longer information process
ing time. Viewers without disabilities can also take advantage of the captions appearing on the
screen to help them identify the speakers and follow the show, but listeners with disabilities are
often unable to read the captions at the pace they appear on screen or at all, nor process the infor
mation they provide fast enough. They may also find it difficult to navigate the complex structure
of a newscast and deduce the connection between its various parts. Thus, in an item on the evening
news, which may consist of a commentary from the studio, a pre-recorded video clip, and a report
from the scene in quick succession, the Easy Language interpreter will be required to explain
who the different speakers are and what their connection to the main topic of discussion is, before
reverting to the first person. For example, after the anchor describes the shortage of beds in a hos
pital and the video cuts to a soundbite of one of the patients, the interpreter may say, “here is what
the person in the hospital thinks about there not being enough beds in the hospital.” The interpreter
will then revert to the first person to relay the patient’s exact words. It should be mentioned that
this practice is not detailed in the existing ELI guidelines. It was discussed as part of the 2020 ELI
course organized by the Israeli Institute for Cognitive Accessibility and is currently practiced by
Hebrew Easy Language interpreters.
403
The question of pace is indeed where we find the most significant difference between ELI
and SI regarding delivery. While interlingual interpreters speak as fast or as slow as the original
speaker and shorten their ear-voice span when necessary for even faster delivery, Easy Lan
guage interpreters are instructed to keep their pace particularly slow at all times to facilitate
understanding for their audience, who may need longer information processing time. However,
interpreting at a slow pace, especially if the original is not only fast but also complex in terms
of the number of speakers or events happening on screen, creates a lag, or discrepancy, between
what the audience hears and what they see. This poses a problem for all viewers, but particu
larly those with disabilities. As mentioned earlier, to bridge this gap, which is a direct result of
the ELI guidelines, the interpreter must rely on providing context in reported speech instead of
continuing in the first person. The ELI requirement to speak slowly may also conflict with the
interpreter’s ability to maintain natural intonation, as interpreters are trained to keep up with
the speaker. When required to speak slowly, they occasionally play for time by stretching their
vowels. While this practice is frowned upon in simultaneous interpreting as well, it is particu
larly problematic in ELI as it hinders understanding. Nevertheless, with the exception of the
speed and the occasional use of the third person to provide context, ELI and SI are quite similar
in their delivery.
Structure
However, when looking at the requirements pertaining to the structure, meaning the lexicogram
mar used in the interpretation, we notice the biggest differences between the two activities.
According to AIIC guidelines, interlingual simultaneous interpreters are to “interpret the
original message, accurately, fully and completely.” The interpreter must “strive to convey both
the substance and the emphasis, tone, and nuance of what is said” while at the same time, “never
change or add to the speaker’s message” (AIIC, 1999/2016). However, preparing a text in Easy
Language, be it written or spoken, involves an additional stage of editing the information and
presenting it in a way that will be most accessible to people with cognitive disabilities. Many of
the rules of Easy Language prevent conveying the original message fully and completely.
ELI guidelines require that the interpreter omit all secondary information that is not immedi
ately relevant to the message or information that is difficult for people with cognitive disabilities
to understand. This may include names, ranks and titles, dates (sometimes substituted with a more
general description such as “many years ago” and sometimes omitted altogether), places (some
times substituted with a description like “in other countries” or “in the north” and sometimes omit
ted altogether), figures of all sorts (sometimes replaced with a quantifier like “many” or “fewer
than yesterday”), adjectives (especially if there are several adjectives describing the same noun),
adverbs, and pronouns (substituted with proper nouns).
Simultaneous interpreters often use the original sentence structure, with the necessary changes
due to differences between the languages, so a speaker using intricate language or long sentences
with many subordinate clauses will sound the same way in the interpretation as well. But Easy
Language interpreters may not use long sentences or complex grammatical structures: ELI guide
lines encourage them to use only simple sentences, consisting mostly of a noun, verb, and object.
Easy Language sentences must have only one main idea. If the original sentence includes clauses
and conjunctions, the Easy Language interpreter will have to split them into several short, simple
sentences.
ELI guidelines also require that the information be provided in chronological or other logi
cal order, with the most important information mentioned first. If the original message is not
404
structured this way, as is often the case, the Easy Language interpreter will have to reorder the
information and reorganize it for their audience with CD.
In Easy Language, an explanation or examples will often be necessary when introducing new or
complex terms, as the audience’s world knowledge may be lacking. For example, when discussing
a “night curfew” announced as part of COVID restrictions, an interlingual interpreter may simply
use the equivalent term in his or her language (for example, “un couvre-feu nocturne” or “otzer
leili”). In contrast, in Easy Language, the term may be phrased as “no one is allowed to leave their
home and go anywhere at night, when it is dark.” Mentioning the hours of the curfew will not be
useful for people with CD as not all of them can tell the time. In addition, people with CD may
have impaired deductive reasoning and thus tend to follow rules to the letter, so a further explana
tion such as “but if you have an emergency, for example, if there is a fire in your home or if you
are sick and need to go to the hospital, it is OK to leave your home” may be necessary to prevent
potential danger.
Finally, to guarantee understanding, the main idea or message of the text in Easy Language
needs to be repeated more than once. Particularly for a message conveyed orally. The Easy Lan
guage interpreter must therefore find a way to include a repetition of the main message in their
rendition of the text, even if the original speaker does not repeat it. This is often to the detriment
of other, less crucial information provided by the speaker. These requirements, coupled with the
slow speaking speed mentioned earlier come at the expense of a full, accurate, and complete inter
pretation. By definition, ELI cannot be full or accurate when it involves extensive omissions and
additions.
The second guideline pertaining to the structure of the interpretation in AIIC’s documents is
that the register of the interpretation is to match that of the original. AIIC interpreters are reminded
to “not distort the original by using abstruse terms or arcane expressions” and likewise not to
“lapse into a familiar tone” on formal occasions: Idioms are ideally interpreted into parallel idioms
in the target language, professional terms into equally professional terms, and flowery language
and rhetorical devices are meticulously maintained.
In comparison, Easy Language, both written and oral, uses simplified vocabulary, syntax, and
grammar. ELI vocabulary guidelines include, for example: Using simple, everyday words and
avoiding complex or professional terms which may be unfamiliar to the target audience; substi
tuting abstract terms and concepts for concrete ones; avoiding idioms, metaphors, and figures of
speech, as some listeners may understand them literally; and preferring conjugated verbs to ger
unds and infinitives. The guidelines also recommend simplifying the syntax of the original text, by
avoiding strings of adjectives or infinitives and replacing pronouns and demonstratives with proper
nouns. Finally, ELI guidelines also address the grammatical changes necessary to make a text more
easy-to-understand, such as preferring the active voice to the passive voice and avoiding condition
als. In Hebrew, special emphasis is placed on using common colloquial verb conjugations rather
than formal ones, such as using the future tense to denote imperative, and substituting future-tense
verbs in the second and third-person feminine plural with the corresponding masculine forms. Like
wise, it is recommended to avoid the inflection of nouns by adding a possessive clitic and instead
using a noun followed by a possessive pronoun.8 These complex grammatical structures are consid
ered high register or “literary language” and used in formal Hebrew (administration, media) but not
in everyday speech. Although partly substandard, the colloquial alternatives are often shorter and
easier to pronounce than the proper conjugations, making them more accessible.
While rephrasing the text according to these rules makes it simpler and easier to understand,
it also inherently means that its Easy Language rendition does not match the original in terms of
style and register.
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Thus, while the message and the delivery method in ELI and SI are quite similar, the two activi
ties are cardinally different when it comes to their lexical and syntactic features. ELI interpreters
purposely omit and add information, significantly rephrase the text, and remove most of its stylis
tic features, all of which goes against AIIC interpreting standards.
The following excerpt from the evening news in ELI, broadcasted on Israel’s Kan 11 chan
nel on 20 April 2020, illustrates some of the challenges and considerations involved in this
practice.
Original:
‫ נתניהו וגנץ נפגשים כעת ועל פי הדיווחים הם קרובים מאוד לחתימה על‬.‫ דרמטי‬,‫ ערב פוליטי‬,‫הערב שלפנינו‬
‫ הערב אנחנו כרגיל עם כל העדכונים של כתבינו ופרשנינו בשטח ובאולפן גם כמובן לענייני הקורונה‬.‫הסכם‬
(45 words) ?‫ עד כמה הצדדים קרובים לחתימה‬,‫אבל מתחילים איתך כתבנו הפוליטי מיכאל שמש‬
The evening ahead of us is a political evening, dramatic. Netanyahu and Gantz are meet
ing now [high register] and according to the reports, they are very close to signing an agree
ment. Tonight, we are, as usual, with all the updates by our reporters and commentators out
in the field and in the studio regarding everything to do with covid as well, but let us begin
with you, our political reporter, Michael Shemesh: Just how close are the parties to signing?
(78 words)
ELI:
‫ נדבר עם הכתבים‬.‫ על נתניהו וגנץ שיכול להיות שיחתמו על הסכם כדי להקים ממשלה‬.‫היום נדבר על הממשלה‬
(32 words) ?‫ עד כמה נתניהו וגנץ יכולים לחתום על הסכם היום‬,‫ מיכאל‬.‫שלנו שנמצאים במקומות שונים‬
Today we will talk about the government. About Netanyahu and Gantz who will maybe
sign an agreement to form a government. We will talk to our reporters who are in different
places. Michael, can Netanyahu and Gantz sign an agreement today? (41 words)
Although based on written Easy Language guidelines, ELI must occasionally deviate from
them to adapt to the medium and context in which it is provided. In the aforementioned example,
written Easy Language guidelines would require adding background information explaining
who are “Netanyahu” (Benjamin Netanyahu, then head of interim government) and “Gantz”
(Benny Gantz, then head of the second largest political party), and potentially even a more
detailed explanation of “sign an agreement” and “government”. However, at this point in time,
a political crisis has been unfolding in Israel for several weeks and extensively covered by the
media, including in previous ELI broadcasts. The Easy Language interpreters are working under
the assumption that viewers, even those with disabilities, would have prior contextual knowl
edge, and therefore the interpreter intentionally chooses not to include this information in her
interpretation.
Similarly, the sentence “we will talk to our reporters who are in different places” would
normally be omitted in written Easy Language, as it is irrelevant to the main idea of the politi
cal report. However, the broadcast is showing a split screen featuring the correspondents in
their various locations, forcing the Easy Language interpreter to explain the appearance of the
people on screen and their relevance. In addition, omitting the sentence would have created a
long pause that might cause confusion among viewers with disabilities and likewise hinder their
understanding.
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Table 23.1 ELI analysis
Original Simplified/EL Analysis
The evening ahead of us is a Today • Complete sentence replaced by adverb

political evening, dramatic. • Dramatic, journalistic rhetoric omitted
we will talk about the • Foreshadowing main idea
government • Simplified register
• Complicated, abstract term (politics) replaced
by simpler, concrete one (government)
Netanyahu and Gantz are about Netanyahu • Main idea only (meeting omitted, mention of
meeting now and according and Gantz who reports omitted)
to the reports, they are will maybe sign an • Compound sentence replaced by simple sentence
very close to signing the agreement • Gerund replaced by verb
agreement. • Adverbial phrase (serving as hedge) omitted
• Simplified choice of words (“will maybe”
instead of “are very close to”)
to form a government • Addition of contextual information/explanation:
The nature of the agreement to be signed
Tonight, we are, as usual, We will talk to our • Omitted peripheral information (future covid
with all the updates by our reporters who are in reports)
reporters and commentators different places. • Elaborate phrases replaced by one-word
out in the field and in the elements
studio regarding everything
to do with covid as well,
but let us begin with you, our Michael, • Rhetoric transition omitted
political reporter, Michael • title (political reporter) and last name
Shemesh: (Shemesh) omitted
Just how close are the parties Can Netanyahu and • Vague, professional term (the parties) replaced
to signing? Gantz sign an by proper names (Netanyahu and Gantz)
agreement today? • Complex phrasing (“just how close are . . . to
signing”) replaced with “can [N+G] sign”
• Implicit object (an agreement) made explicit
• Logical connection to the beginning of the
report added: All of this is happening today.
Conclusion and future perspectives

The difference between ELI and SI is not purely an academic discussion but also a practical one.
SI is performed in various settings, each with unique features and requirements. However, profes
sional interpreter training addresses each of these settings and their respective challenges so that
interpreters are well prepared and feel confident in their ability to provide good interpreting in
each field. ELI training, on the other hand, at least in Israel, is based on the assumption that the
interpreters bring their professional expertise in simultaneous interpreting into the new activity.
Conducted mostly by accessibility specialists, the training centers on Easy Language and the struc
ture of the target utterances, without realizing that the structure is also part of that same expertise
that makes interpreters into professionals.
407
The ensuing difficulty, we would like to suggest, is more personal than professional. Studies
worldwide (Bühler, 1986; Chiaro & Nocella, 2004; Zwischenberger, 2010) illustrate that most
simultaneous interpreters, regardless of whether they are members of AIIC, adhere to profes
sional standards very similar to those detailed earlier. In other words, the guidelines reflect what
interpreters perceive to be good interpreting practices. Anecdotal evidence collected in personal
conversations with simultaneous interpreters performing ELI in Israel suggests interpreters take
pride in the unique skills they painstakingly mastered: Being eloquent and articulate under pres
sure and not missing a single piece of information, be it names, dates, or adjectives. So, when
asked to perform a task, which seems very similar to SI, almost automatic, yet produces an out
come that sounds very different from what they are usually used to: Less precise, less elegant,
less “professional,” they face a predicament: They are recruited for their professionalism as inter
preters but are then required to violate some of the fundamental principles of the same profession.
This inner conflict is particularly prominent when the interpreting is carried out on a public media
channel during an event of great national importance and receives a great deal of attention. As
one of Israel’s first simultaneous interpreters to perform ELI states: “It goes against everything
I know!”
Curiously, the training programs in Germany and Belgium do not target simultaneous inter
preters specifically but rather candidates with prior experience with Easy Language. It would be
interesting to examine how these trainees are able to master the difficult skills of simultaneous
interpreting in such a short period of time, particularly compared with the lengthy training period
in traditional interpreting. The small number of training courses in the world makes it difficult to
draw conclusions on who is the perfect candidate for learning ELI at this time, but additional data
could be collected on this matter for future analysis.
Further research could also be conducted on the way professional interpreters perceive this
conflict and the ways they manage it, emotionally and professionally: Are certain standards more
difficult for them to adopt? Do they require different training from those who are not interpreters?
Such insights could benefit future Easy Language interpreters and those who train them.
Notes
1 Historically referred to in Hebrew as “pishut koli simultani” (literally, “simultaneous voice simplifica
tion”), the term is interchangeable with Easy Language interpreting.
2 Intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) is defined as a substantial limitation of intellectual, func
tioning, and adaptive behavior originating during the developmental period (AAIDD, n.d.). Cognitive
disability (CD) is a broader term that covers, in addition to IDD, a wide range of conditions (inherited,
congenital, developmental, or acquired), including neurodivergence such as autism or learning disabili
ties, brain conditions such as dementia, aphasia, and Alzheimer’s disease, brain injuries, mental health dis
abilities, cognitive changes after chemotherapy treatments (“chemo brain”), long COVID, and cognitive
impairment as a result of aging (Yalon-Chamovitz et al., 2022).
3 Research is further complicated by the fact that similar terminology may denote different things in vari
ous countries. The Norwegian term for “easy to read”, lettlest, is mostly used in reference to literature
adapted for young readers, while the Italian facile da capire (“easy to understand”) is an umbrella term for
all forms of language comprehension enhancement, including both Plain Language and Easy Language.
Similarly, In Hebrew, the verb pishut (“simplification”) describes any modification of texts to make them
easier to understand, but the noun pishut leshoni (“language simplification”) is mostly used in the field
of Accessibility Studies when referring to a text aimed at people with disabilities (Easy Language). Safa
pshuta (“simple language”) is used to denote Plain Language, whereas ivrit kala (“easy Hebrew”) is his
torically used to refer to texts adapted for Hebrew learners and not for people with disabilities. A separate
term, “pishut koli” (“voice simplification”), describes the modification of a text which is to be provided
orally, either in pre-recorded or live form, regardless of whether the result is in Easy or Plain Language.
408
4 It should be noted that a text in Plain or Easy Language can be a simplified version of an existing complex
original or be written in Plain or Easy Language from the start, without going through a formal “transla
tion” stage.
5 Kirsch et al. (1993) use the term “mental retardation”, now replaced with intellectual developmental
disability.
6 Several attempts were made to contact the organization, but further information was not obtained.
7 For this reason, a significant part of this study is based on personal communication with professionals
worldwide who practice ELI and on information obtained online.
8 In formal Hebrew, bakashati (“my request”): composed of bakasha (“request”) + ti (possessive clitic),
whereas in colloquial Hebrew, habakasha sheli: habakasha (“the request”) + sheli (“of me”).
Further reading
Nahón Guillén, M. (2022). Simultaneous simplification. Communicate: 76. AIIC. https://aiic.org/site/
webzine/issue-76/simultaneous-simplification
Uziel-Karl, S. (2022). Editorial: Simple and simplified languages. Frontiers in Communication, 4–5. https://
doi.org/10.3389.fcomm.2022.910680.
Uziel-Karl, S., & Tenne-Rinde, M. (2018). Making language accessible for people with cognitive disabili
ties: Intellectual disability as a test case. In A. Bar-On & D. Ravid (Eds.), Handbook of communication
disorders (pp. 845–860). De Gruyter. https://adaptit.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Making-language-
accessible-for-people.pdf
Yalon-Chamovitz, S., Steinberg, P., Shach, R., & Avidan-Ziv, O. (2019). Simultaneous language simplifica
tion from the perspective of people with IDD: Overcoming cognitive accessibility barriers and token
participation. SSRN. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3390380
References
AAIDD. (n.d.). Defining criteria for intellectual disability. www.aaidd.org/intellectual-disability/definition
Abbeduto, L. (Ed.). (2003). International review of research in mental retardation (Vol. 27). Academic Press.
Abls-be. (2021). Service FALC.be: le projet de service Falc.be. www.falc.be/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/
projetfinal.pdf
AIIC. (2016). Practical guide for professional conference interpreters (originally published 1999). https://
aiic.org
Bühler, H. (1986). Linguistic (semantic) and extra-linguistic (pragmatic) criteria for the evaluation of confer
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49(2), 278–293.‫ ‏‬https://doi.org/10.7202/009351ar
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ond Swiss conference on barrier-free communication (BFC 2018) Accessibility in educational settings
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School Psychology, 38(1), 51–61.‫‏‬
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https://doi.org/10.25528/043
Pöchhacker, F. (2004). Introducing interpreting studies. Routledge.‫‏‬
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https://doi.org/10.25528/043
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Uziel-Karl, S., Tenne-Rinde, M., & Yalon-Chamovitz, S. (2011). Language accessibility for people with
IDD: A guidebook. The Ministry of Welfare and Social Services. https://adaptit.co.il/wp-content/up
loads/2020/02/txtver.doc [Hebrew]
Yalon-Chamovitz, S. (2009). Invisible access needs of people with intellectual disabilities: A con
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org/10.1352/1934-9556-47.5.395
Yalon-Chamovitz, S., & Avidan-Ziv, O. (2016). Simultaneous simplification: Stretching the boundaries of
UDL. In J. E. Garnder & D. Hardin (Eds.), Networking, implementing, research, and scaling universal
design for learning (pp. 66–68). Proceedings from the 3rd Annual UDL-IRN Summit.
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cognitive accessibility: Evidence-based model and practical implications for people with intellectual and
developmental disabilities. In M. Al-Yagon & M. Margalit (Eds.), Intellectual developmental disorders:
Theory, research and implications (pp. 625–650). Keren Shalem. [Hebrew]
Yalon-Chamovitz, S., Shach, R., Avidan-Ziv, O., & Tenne, M. R. (2016). The call for cognitive ramps. Work,
53(2), 455–456. https://doi.org/10.3233/wor-152244
Zwischenberger, C. (2010). Quality criteria in simultaneous interpreting: An international vs. a national view.‫‏‬
The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 15, 127–142.
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24
RESPEAKING AS A FORM OF
Intersections between linguistics and respeaking in
the live subtitling of parliamentary debates
Introduction
The process of respeaking is primarily used in intralingual translation (although its use in interlin
gual translation is now growing)1 and was first rolled out by the BBC in 2001 and by Independent
Media Support (IMS) in 2002. In effect, respeaking is the production of live subtitles by a person
via speech recognition software. The respeaker dictates the dialogue that they hear into the speech
recognition system which then produces on-screen subtitles that can be manually revised by the
respeaker if necessary. Respeaking is now the most common method for producing live subtitles
for television programmes such as the news, sports and entertainment programmes that are broad
cast live. The grounds for considering respeaking to constitute intralingual translation rest on its
being a form of what Gottlieb (2018) describes as intersemiotic adaptational translation, wherein –
in this case – speech is converted to writing and it is not necessarily possible to reconstruct the
original text from the translated one (see Gottlieb, 2018, p. 52). Whilst originally provided for d/
Deaf, deafened and hard-of-hearing audience members, live subtitles are increasingly used by
a far wider audience. And since speech rates on television regularly reach speeds of 180 words
per minute (wpm) or more in, for example, news or current affairs programmes (Romero-Fresco,
2011, pp. 123–129), typing on regular keyboards is not an effective way of producing live subti
tles. Alternative typing solutions were sought in the 1980s to meet this challenge, including the use
of regular QWERTY keyboards with abbreviation codes and specialist velo- and stenotype key
boards (Lambourne, 2006), and in 1987 a regular velotype news subtitling service was set up for
ITV. However, the training required for such work was long, ranging from 12 months to a period
of more than two years, depending on the type of keyboard used. When it became clear in 1998
that speech recognition software could become a viable alternative method for transcribing text,
research began at SysMedia into what would be required for speech input to be used for subtitling
(Lambourne, 2006).
In this chapter we focus on the use of respeaking to produce subtitles of political discus
sions. In particular, we explore how the intralingual translation of live parliamentary debates can
be improved by integrating insights from pragmatics and corpus linguistics into the process of
respeaking. The potential value of these two areas to intralingual translation has to date been
relatively underexplored, and our use of them here is in response to Zethsen’s (2009) call for a
411 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-31

renewed focus on the microlinguistic strategies that intralingual translation necessitates. Zethsen
(2009, pp. 805–807) identifies four parameters that influence intralingual translation, these being
knowledge, time, culture and space. Knowledge refers to the comprehension capacity of the group
at whom the translation is targeted. Time refers to the propensity of diachronic change to impact on
the target group’s linguistic and cultural knowledge. Culture relates, obviously enough, to the req
uisite cultural knowledge for understanding a translated text. And space refers to the spatial con
straints that result in, for instance, the reduction of the original text. In the analysis that we provide
in this chapter, knowledge and space are the prime drivers of the intralingual translation decisions
that we made, though we suggest that text patterns can also be useful indicators for translators, as
we demonstrate through our analysis of formulaic language and the use of corpus linguistic meth
ods to discover this. Other parameters are also likely to impact on diamesic intralingual translation
(see Eugeni & Gambier, 2023 for a detailed consideration of these in relation to respeaking, subti
tling for the d/Deaf, deafened and hard-of-hearing audiences, and parliamentary reporting) and we
outline some of these in our discussion later of the features of live television subtitles.
To illustrate our argument, we use the example of a televised debate that took place in the House of
Lords, the second chamber of the UK Parliament, on Monday 26 February 2018.2 We discuss how we
might provide as similar an experience as possible to the original programme to those accessing the
programme through subtitles. This means conveying not just words spoken but associated paralinguis
tic features too (e.g., pitch, prosody, triggers of implicatures and politeness features). We aim to show
how corpus linguistic and pragmatic analysis can be used to ensure the quality of subtitles produced
via respeaking. Quality is defined here in terms of latency and accuracy (explained fully later).
The process of respeaking

The process of respeaking can be split into three key stages. First, the respeaker listens to the
broadcast content and speaks the aural content of the programme, voicing in punctuation, sound
labels (e.g., APPLAUSE) and any additional content that needs to appear in the subtitle. As they
do this, they may edit the original spoken content slightly. Next, the speech recognition software
processes the input. Finally, the recognized utterances pass through the subtitling software and
the respeaker is able to make further, slight adjustments to the subtitles as or after they appear on
screen. Whilst steps two and three are taking place, the respeaker is continuing to listen to and
respeak the content of the programme. In addition to this, the respeaker will have a block of time
before a programme begins to prepare and research its content. It is here that we suggest insights
from corpus linguistics can be particularly useful.
Some programmes made accessible through respeaking contain sections that may be scripted.
When available, and using specialist software, the respeaker will split the script into subtitles and
edit it accordingly, ready to cue out as-live, as the start of each subtitle is uttered. A good example
of this kind of programme is the news, where the main story may be scripted, whereas the follow
ing reports or interviews are more likely to be subtitled live.
Before we consider how respeakers might deal with unscripted segments of parliamentary dis
course, in the next section we outline some of the challenges in producing live subtitles.
Features of live television subtitles

Live television subtitles are marked by a number of features that extend beyond those found in
more classical intralingual translation (for which see Zethsen, 2009, for example). In the follow
ing, we summarize the most common.
412
Respeaking as a form of intralingual translation
Visual appearance
In a completely unscripted programme, two lines of respoken subtitles will scroll across the bot
tom of the television screen. Where name-straps (or Astons as they are also known, after the com
pany Aston Broadcast Systems Ltd, an early producer of character generator software) containing
text appear on screen, the respeaker will raise the position of the subtitle slightly to avoid the sub
titles obscuring this additional on-screen information. The subtitles have a black background box,
and the respeaker can alternate the font colour between white, yellow, cyan and green. A change in
colour is used to indicate a new speaker, and the respeaker will most often alternate between white
and yellow to ensure optimum legibility (Ford Williams, 2009; see also BBC, 2022); cyan and
green are used less frequently as some people might find these colours more difficult to read. The
main content of the subtitles appears as regular script, in a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters,
and only sound labels appear in capitalized form; for example, APPLAUSE, BOOS, CHEERS.
Latency
Another feature of live subtitling is the delay between a word being spoken and appearing on
screen in a subtitle. This results from the time needed for the spoken word to be heard, respoken,
recognized by the software and processed through the subtitling software and onto the screen.
Whilst Ofcom’s guidelines (2015a) suggest a maximum latency of three seconds (repeated also in
Ofcom’s most recently updated guidelines; see Ofcom, 2021), in their final report on the quality
of live subtitling in 2015 (Ofcom, 2015b), an average latency of 5.6 seconds was seen across all
the programmes sampled. In samples with only live respeaking (and no as-live cueing), latency
averaged 7–8 seconds, with peaks of 10–21 seconds possible.
Accuracy
Recognition errors are a common feature of respoken language, especially as respeakers are work
ing at speed. There are three main types of error: real-life speech errors, human–speech recogni
tion interaction errors and software-specific errors (Moores & Romero-Fresco, 2015). Errors may
occur because the respeaker has said the wrong word (real-life speech errors) or because they have
uttered the right words but have not done so in a way that will be easily processed by the speech
recognition software (human–SR interaction errors). Errors may also be produced by the subtitling
software (software-specific errors); sometimes the respeaker is able to prevent these when prepar
ing a programme, but other errors in this category are beyond their control. Due to the live nature
of respeaking, when corrections are made, they often follow a few words after the original error,
which has already appeared on screen; a respeaker will use a double dash (--) to indicate that a
corrected word/phrase follows.
During respeaking, the original content of the programme is also edited slightly. Respeakers
will subtitle the content they hear verbatim whenever they are able to; however, much depends on
the speed of the speaker(s) and the occurrence of overlapping speech between individuals. It must
be remembered that as the respeaker is voicing in every word that appears on screen, including
punctuation marks and sound labels, if they were to respeak every word spoken in the programme,
they would actually need to say more than the speaker(s) and ideally speak faster than them if
latency is to be kept to a minimum (Romero-Fresco, 2011, p. 117). For this reason, some editing
is essential and the speech rate of the respeaker is ultimately comparable to that of the original
speaker (Romero-Fresco, 2011).
413
The NER model (Romero-Fresco & Pérez, 2015) is currently used to assess the accuracy of live
subtitling. N stands for total number of words spoken, E for edition and R for recognition. Using
this model, edition (E) and recognition (R) errors are weighted and scored according to the impact
they have on audience reception and deducted from the total number of words spoken (N). From
this, an accuracy score is calculated. Any recognition/edition error that results in the audience
being misled is considered as serious and carries the highest weighting of 1. A standard recogni
tion error is one that the audience is likely to notice and be confused by; a standard edition error
usually happens when an independent idea unit is omitted. Both carry a 0.5 weighting. Finally,
minor errors may cause details to be omitted, or a slight error in accuracy (e.g., “he leave” rather
than “he leaves”); these do not have the same effect on the audience’s ability to follow the content
and are consequently weighted less, at 0.25. Accuracy of 98% is considered acceptable. In addition
to editions where content is lost, respeakers also make many correct editions, where words may
be omitted from the respoken subtitle, or paraphrased, but without any loss of information for the
audience. These editions are noted, but do not carry a penalty within the NER model.
Grammar and punctuation

As noted in Romero-Fresco (2011, p. 103), some punctuation marks used in regular writing and,
indeed, pre-recorded subtitling, are absent from respoken subtitles. A respeaker is most likely
to use sentence-end punctuation and the comma; they may also use dashes and speech marks,
although the latter may also be replaced with a comma to indicate direct speech.
It is also possible that longer sentences, made up of multiple clauses, may be split or reor
dered slightly to aid recognition; in these instances, asides or inflections may be moved. The non-
contracted form of the verb may also be more common than the contracted form during respeaking,
as recognition can be clearer.
Speech recognition vocabulary

If a word is not listed in the speech recognition word list, it cannot be recognized correctly. Only
entries that are listed can appear; any non-existing entry is likely to appear as phonetically related
words. The neologism “Brexit” provides a good example of this; without its own entry, it is likely
to appear as “breaks it”; once entered as a new entry and trained, the term “Brexit” will appear.
Macros or spoken short cuts

Some entries are more complex than others. Take the example of /reɪn/, which can be written as
rain, rein or reign. If a respeaker wanted a particular form to appear, for example, reign, they might
choose to set up a macro, or spoken short cut. Alongside the written entry reign in the vocabulary,
they would add a spoken form, most likely “reign macro”, and train it. Then, when respeaking,
they would say “reign macro” rather than “reign” for that specific spelling to appear.
Macros can also be used at the sentence level, for example in situations when formulaic speech
is used, as is common within Parliament. Here, longer phrases would be given a short macro form
for the respeaker to voice.
Word testing and training

During the preparation period, the respeaker would test any new words added to the vocabulary, to
ensure they are being recognized accurately; they would also test new words in the contexts that
414
they are likely to appear in within a programme. In doing so, the respeaker will be able to detect
many potential recognition issues and consider how to work around them.
Ultimately, whichever of these tools are used, and whatever editions the respeaker makes, clear
enunciation of all words respoken, in a way that the speech recognition software will best recog
nize, is essential for every word.
Exploring the language of parliamentary debates

To illustrate the practice of respeaking a parliamentary debate, we will take as an example a debate
that happened in the House of Lords. Here is an extract from our transcript of the debate.
Context
Monday 26 February 2018. Debate started at 2.34pm and ended Tuesday 27 February 2018
12.19am. The following transcript is from 14:44:14 to 14:45:57 (our full transcript covered from
14:44:14 to 14:59:31).
Participants
A: Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)

B: The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local
Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)
Transcript
26. A: = the: >private rented sector electrical safety working group re<ported <last year> (.hhh)
recommending >electrical safety checks<=
27. A: ((glances up briefly, quickly returns gaze to Dispatch Box))
28. A: = and now we have a >government consultation < which closes=
29. A: ((glances up briefly, quickly returns gaze to podium))
30. A: =in april with a government response to follow >but with=
31. A: ((looks forward and nods head in rhythm with speech))
32. A: = no date given=
33. A: ((returns gaze to podium))
34. A: = that is< <two years> >my lords (.hhh)=
35. A: ((gazes up, looks intently forward and shuffles from side to side))
36. A: = introducing< these checks <will save lives> (.hhh) can the >noble lord< give me an
assurance about when we can expect=
37. A: ((briefly glances down at podium then returns to intent gaze forward))
38. A: = some action from the government? >don’t wanna have to ask this question again at< this
time next year
39. A: [((shuffles backwards and resume seat))
40. B: [((stands and moves quickly forwards to podium, places speaking notes on podium, gaze
down at notebook))
41. B: my lords <I do hope not>=
415
42. B: ((leans forward, resting with arms on podium, smiles, glances from right to left across table,
returns gaze to notebook))
43. B: =(.hhh) erm: haha (hhh) erm: (.hhh)=
44. B: ((continues leaning on podium, glances left and forward slightly, still looking down, wrings
right hand up and down))
45. B: =>cou- cou- cou- could I say my lords< that it’s=
46. B: ((returns gaze to notes))
47. B: =important that some of these=
48. B: ((head remains facing notepad, lifts eyes up to look forward))
49. B: =recommendations=
50. B: ((raises eyebrows and nods head twice))
51. B: =which are-=
52. B: ((joins both hands in front of face and moves them apart in an opening motion))
53. B: =are left open >are- are- are<=
54. B: ((returns gaze to podium))
55. B: =checked upon erm for example=
56. B: ((glances up, tilts head to left))
57. B: =(.hhh) should it be a <five-year period
58. B: ((tilts head back to central, raises eyebrows, nods head))
59. =>= or a four-year period=
60. B: ((tilts head right))
61. B: =or a six-year period↑ (.)=
62. B: ((returns head to central, nods head))
63. B: =these are important questions=
64. B: ((brings head slightly up, eyes up further to look forward))
65. B: =that people >should be able< to give their views on (.hhh) also some of the:
recommendations °in the° working party are saying it should be left (0.4) to a volunteer
↑approach=
66. B: ((glance right, return to gaze forward))
67. B: =(.hhh) now we need to test °that° more widely >to see whether< that is <the=
68. B: ((glance down and right))
69. B: = appropriate way forward> (.) that=
70. B: ((returns gaze forward, nods head, return gaze down and right))
71. B: = is why we are taking ↓our time I can=
72. B: ((returns gaze forward, nods head))
73. B: = understand >the n- the< noble lord’s impatience=
The preceding transcript is based on the webcast of the debate, available at https://parliamentlive.
tv/Event/Index/50537165-632f-4576-aac7-6d63d57ae362. A slightly different transcript can be
found in Hansard (available at https://tinyurl.com/4ws2z8rd). Hansard is the name of the official
report of parliamentary proceedings in the UK. It is a substantially verbatim account of what is
said in the House of Commons and the House of Lords Chambers every day that Parliament is in
session. The terms of reference for Hansard can be found in Erskine May, a frequently updated
record of parliamentary procedure and constitutional conventions. In effect, Hansard consists of
transcripts of parliamentary debates, though it is sometimes necessary for small editorial changes
to be made in order to ensure the readability of the document (see Vice & Farrell, 2017, for an
informative and accessible history of Hansard).
416
In the next section, we consider how a linguistic analysis of the preceding extract, and of sup
plementary data from Hansard, might be used to support the respeaking of other live parliamentary
debates. We begin by considering formulaic language.
Corpus linguistics for identifying formulaic language

Corpus linguistics is a methodology that uses software to identify patterns in large databases of
language. As such, it is ideally placed to support the preparatory work that respeakers engage in
before beginning to subtitle a programme. For instance, parliamentary debates contain numerous
instances of formulaic language. Some of these are easily observable, for example the formula
tion used by members to ask a question: “My Lords, I beg leave to ask the question standing in
my name on the order paper.” However, corpus linguistic methods can also be used to identify
sequences, known as n-grams, that are not so obviously foregrounded. N-grams are sequences
of words that appear a specified number of times in the data. N stands for any number; hence a
4-gram is a four-word sequence, a 3-gram a three-word sequence, and so on. The number of times
that a sequence needs to be repeated in order to be of interest is determined by the analyst. Identify
ing n-grams may offer an insight into fixed phrases in the data that might then be set up either as
macros or as shortcut keys in order to speed up the process of respeaking. To test this, we used two
samples of Hansard to extract n-grams. The first of these was the data illustrated by the preceding
extract (Corpus A). This was selected on the basis of its containing a range of subjectively inter
esting linguistic features that would need to be taken account of when producing subtitles. The
second was the transcript of the entire Lords Chamber debate from Monday 26 February 2018,
from which the sample for qualitative analysis was taken (Corpus B). These two corpora allowed
us insights into (i) the local textual features of the sample for qualitative analysis and (ii) potential
fixed phrases in parliamentary discourse generally (with a focus on Lords debates).3
We used AntConc 3.5.7 (Anthony, 2018) to extract n-grams. There were three problems in
determining the size of n-gram to extract. These were:
i Short n-gram sequences can result in so much data that it ceases to have practical value; for
example, in extracting 2-grams, even setting a minimum frequency of ten results in 985 from
Corpus B. There are too many results here to consider setting these as macros/shortcut keys.
ii Short n-gram sequences are unlikely to save time if used as macros. For example, the most
frequent 2-gram in Corpus B is of the. There would be no time saved for the respeaker by using
this as a macro as opposed to simply speaking the words.
iii Long n-gram sequences can extend beyond the boundaries of a syntactic unit. Syntactically
incomplete units may be difficult for the respeaker to identify as a candidate sequence for
replacement by a macro, especially during the cognitively demanding process of respeaking.
Consequently, we extracted n-grams of the following sizes:
Corpus A
• 3-grams: minimum frequency = 5
417
Corpus B
The results from the n-gram search were as follows:
Corpus A
3-grams
Total no. of n-gram types: 7
Total no. of n-gram tokens: 52
Table 24.1 3-grams in Corpus A
Rank Freq. Range
1 9 1 the noble lord

2 8 1 bourne of aberystwyth
3 8 1 lord bourne of
4 8 1 lord o shaughnessy
5 7 1 aberystwyth my lords
6 7 1 of aberystwyth my
7 5 1 my lords i
4-grams
Rank Freq. Range
1 8 1 lord bourne of aberystwyth

2 7 1 bourne of aberystwyth my
3 7 1 of aberystwyth my lords
5-grams
Rank Freq. Range
1 7 1 bourne of aberystwyth my lords

2 7 1 lord bourne of aberystwyth my
418
Corpus B
3-grams
Table 24.4 3-grams in Corpus B
Rank Freq. Range
1 179 1 the noble lord

2 138 1 european union withdrawal
3 137 1 union withdrawal bill
4 134 1 noble lord lord
5 133 1 the european union
6 93 1 my noble friend
7 93 1 the noble baroness
8 87 1 the prime minister
9 78 1 the noble and
10 75 1 noble and learned
11 71 1 and learned lord
12 66 1 bill european union
13 66 1 withdrawal bill european
14 64 1 my lords i
15 61 1 of the european
16 60 1 the government x
17 59 1 government x s
18 52 1 with the eu
19 51 1 noble baroness lady
20 50 1 by the noble
21 50 1 i do not
22 50 1 of the charter
4-grams
Rank Freq. Range
1 137 1 european union withdrawal bill

2 133 1 the noble lord lord
3 73 1 the noble and learned
4 71 1 noble and learned lord
5 66 1 bill european union withdrawal
6 66 1 union withdrawal bill european
7 66 1 withdrawal bill european union
8 57 1 the government x s
9 51 1 the noble baroness lady
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5-grams
Rank Freq. Range
1 71 1 the noble and learned lord

2 66 1 bill european union withdrawal bill
3 66 1 european union withdrawal bill european
4 66 1 union withdrawal bill european union
5 66 1 withdrawal bill european union withdrawal
We excluded personal names since these would likely be dealt with by the respeaker as part of the
general preparatory process for respeaking. We also disregarded n-grams that spanned a syntactic
boundary (e.g., bill european union withdrawal) in favour of those that constituted complete syn
tactic units (e.g., european union withdrawal bill), since we suspected that complete units would be
easier for respeakers to recognize in a live subtitling scenario. The following, then, are candidates
for use as macros/shortcut keys:
Corpus A
• the noble lord
• my lords i
Corpus B
• the noble lord

• the european union
• my noble friend
• the noble baroness
• the prime minister
• noble and learned
• my lords i
• european union withdrawal bill
• the noble and learned
• noble and learned lord
• the noble and learned lord
In discourse types where formulaic language is prevalent, such as parliamentary discourse,

knowledge of such formulations could potentially be used to save time during the respeaking
process. This may be of particular value for live respeaking, where common lexical patterns
can be inserted using a macro or spoken shortcut. Using such shortcuts may give the respeaker
more time to process the ongoing dialogue. In the case of Corpus A, there are two potential
shortcuts to be made by using n-grams. These are the noble lord (9 instances) and my lords i
(5 instances).
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The importance of pragmatics

Having considered what the corpus linguistic methodology might uncover about patterns in parliamen
tary discourse, we now consider the importance of pragmatics in respeaking. To this end, we comment
later on some of the key pragmatic issues in the data sample, focusing particularly on implicature and
politeness. The aim behind this analysis is to identify those features of dialogue that are likely to trigger
inferential processes in those accessing the original audio. This is with a view to incorporating some of
these features into live respeaking, thereby improving the pragmatic quality of the subtitles produced.
In everyday conversation we rarely say exactly what we mean. If asked whether we enjoyed a meal
and we didn’t, we might instead praise the atmosphere of the restaurant. In trying to avoid answering
an uncomfortable question, we might instead change the topic of conversation. Interpreting people’s
conversation relies on some fundamental assumptions about what we do when we converse. These
are summarized by Grice (1975) as a series of maxims (Grice expresses these as imperatives though
they are not instructions for conversation and are better thought of as a series of expectations). The
Gricean maxims form what Grice called the Co-operative Principle and are as follows:
• Maxim of quality: Do not say that which you believe to be false.

• Maxim of quantity: Do not say too much or too little.
• Maxim of relation: Be relevant.
• Maxim of manner: Be clear.
If we choose not to follow the Gricean maxims, we have three options. These are:
1 Violate the maxims.

2 Flout the maxims.
3 Infringe the maxims.
Violating a maxim involves deliberately breaking it in such a way as for the hearer not to realize
that it has been broken. Consider, for example, US President Bill Clinton’s famous 1998 claim,
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman [Monica Lewinsky]”. In Gricean terms this con
stitutes a violation of the maxim of quality since Clinton knew his claim to be false. Similarly, a
politician who answers a direct yes/no question by saying, “That’s a fascinating question” is vio
lating the maxim of relation, since they are deliberately choosing to make an irrelevant statement.
Infringing a maxim involves breaking a maxim but being unaware of having broken it. For
example, a high stress situation may cause a speaker to stumble over their words (thereby infring
ing the maxim of manner) or to repeat a particular phrase (e.g., “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t”, thereby
infringing the maxim of quantity).
Flouting a maxim involves deliberately breaking it, as is the case with violating maxims. The
difference in the case of flouting is that the speaker intends the hearer to recognize that the maxim
has been broken and to infer some additional meaning from this.4
The importance of accuracy in respeaking is highlighted in the following example from our data.
In the original transcription in Hansard, speaker A’s words (highlighted here in bold) were reported
as follows:
36. A: = instituting< these checks <will save lives> (.hhh) can the >noble lord< give me an assurance
about when we can expect=
38. A: = some action from the government? > and will I have to ask this question again< this time next year?
421
Asking whether it will be necessary to ask the question again in 12 months’ time is not pertinent
to the topic of the speaker’s actual question (i.e., “When will the government take action?”). In this
respect, the speaker is breaking the maxim of relation. However, this is clearly not a violation of
the maxim since it is obvious that it is being broken. It must, then, be an intentional breakage on
the part of the speaker and therefore must constitute a flout. And flouts invite the hearer to search
for additional meaning beyond that which has been uttered. In the case of the preceding example,
it is likely that the implicated meaning (the implicature in Gricean terms) is “I do not believe
the government is going to take action”. However, careful analysis of the actual recording of the
debate reveals that the rendering of the bold line above in Hansard is erroneous. What speaker
A actually says is “don’t wanna have to ask this question again this time next year”. This has an
effect on the implicature generated, as well as affecting the face threat (Brown & Levinson, 1987;
Goffman, 1967) inherent in speaker A’s remark. This is an issue of politeness.
Many instances of failing to observe Grice’s Co-operative Principle are a result of a desire
not to be impolite. Most contemporary theories of linguistic politeness are based on the con
cept of face, and while contemporary work in politeness studies has significantly extended the
insights of one of the most famous accounts of linguistic politeness, Brown and Levinson’s
(1987) study, here we use Brown and Levinson’s original classification system because of its
heuristic value. In their classic conception of politeness, Brown and Levinson explain that peo
ple are assumed to have both a positive face and a negative face. Positive face is one’s desire to
be liked and approved of. Negative face is one’s desire to be unimpeded. Any utterance which
threatens either positive or negative face is known as a face threatening act (FTA). Linguistic
politeness is the means by which speakers mitigate FTAs; that is, politeness offers a way of
reducing FTAs so that they are less likely to be considered as such by the hearer. Mitigating
FTAs is key to speakers achieving their conversational goals. By contrast, exacerbating FTAs
via impoliteness can cause face damage.
Mitigation strategies are based around what Brown and Levinson (1987) refer to as five super-
strategies for politeness. These are:
i Perform the FTA bald, i.e., using no mitigation strategies (“Your breath smells.”).
ii Perform the FTA on record using positive politeness (“Would you like a mint? They make your
breath smell great.”).
iii Perform the FTA on record using negative politeness (“You probably didn’t get a chance
for anything other than coffee at lunchtime. Would you like a mint to take the taste
away?”).
iv Perform the FTA off record, i.e., in such a way as to make it possible to deny have performed an
FTA at all, if the hearer is upset by your utterance (“I hate the fact that at conferences people’s
breath always smells of stale coffee!”).
v Don’t perform the FTA at all.
Strategies for mitigation include, respectively:
i Perform the FTA in accordance with the Gricean maxims.

ii Claim common ground; offer; promise; be optimistic; assume or assert reciprocity.
iii Question, hedge, be pessimistic; minimise the imposition; apologise.
iv Generate conversational implicatures; be vague; be ambiguous.
v Assume that the FTA is too potentially face-damaging to be performed.
(Brown & Levinson, 1987, p. 69, pp. 103–227)
422
As an example, another extract from our data:
36. A: = instituting< these checks <will save lives> (.hhh) can the >noble
lord< give me an assurance about when we can expect=
38. A: = some action from the government? >
Requesting information constitutes a threat to negative face since it requires the hearer to
engage with their interlocutor when they may not wish to. In the context of Parliament, of course,
such engagement is to be expected. Nonetheless, conventional rules of conduct (and, in the case
of parliamentary debates, specific rules) require such requests to be expressed politely. In lin
guistic terms, mitigation is required in order to reduce the face threat. In the preceding example,
this is achieved via indirectness. Note, for example, the use of an interrogative as opposed to an
imperative (compare “Tell me when we can expect action!”). Additionally, we can observe that the
interrogative is even more indirect that it need be (compare “When can we expect action?”), since
the question is actually about whether the hearer can give an assurance rather than a request for
specific information with regard to time. The mitigation strategy is further supported by the use of
a conventional honorific (“the noble lord”) in third-person reference.
Now, returning to the issue of Hansard’s erroneous rendering of what Lord Kennedy says in
line 38 (transcribed as “will I have to ask this question again this time next year”), as we pointed
out earlier, asking whether it will be necessary to ask the question again in 12 months’ time is not
pertinent to the topic of the speaker’s actual question. In this respect, Lord Kennedy flouts the
maxim of relation, with the consequent implicature that he does not believe the government will
take action. In terms of impoliteness, this suggests a condescending view of the government – and
condescension is one of the strategies for impoliteness listed by Culpeper (1996; see also Cul
peper, 2011).
The accurate transcription of Lord Kennedy’s speech (“don’t wanna have to ask this question
again this time next year”) has a different pragmatic effect. In this rendering, he does not ask a
question but makes a statement. This is already more direct than the Hansard rendering. Further
more, this is no longer a flout of the maxim of relation but of the maxim of quantity; that is, Lord
Kennedy says more than he actually needs to say. The implicature in this case is different, sug
gesting an increased level of anger and possibly even a veiled threat. In effect this changes the
impoliteness strategy from “condescend” to “threaten” (Culpeper, 1996), potentially affecting the
perceived level of impoliteness.
Our analysis of politeness reveals the importance of accurate respeaking, given the potential for
inaccuracies to result in alternative implicatures and levels of face threat. For example, retaining
FTA-mitigating features in subtitles is important in order to avoid casting the speaker as more/less
polite than they originally were.
Respeaking in practice
So far, we have considered how insights from linguistic analysis might support the practice of
respeaking. Of course, actually producing live subtitles via respeaking is another matter. To dem
onstrate the complexities of this, and to consider the extent to which it is possible to incorporate
the kinds of insights discussed before, one of the authors of this chapter (Zoe Moores) undertook to
respeak the debate discussed earlier. The full version of this lasts 15 minutes and 17 seconds. In what
follows, we describe the process of respeaking and reflect on the decisions made during that process.
423
The subtitles in the sample were created using the inbuilt notepad in the Dragon Professional
Individual 15 speech recognition software package. A new voice model was created for the sam
ple, and macros for key commands and punctuation were trained into the software. Colours were
not marked during the sample, as subtitling software or a specialized keyboard would have been
needed for this.
Genre-specific preparation
Before the sample clip was respoken, three sections of sessions from the House of Lords in the
week prior to Monday 26th February were respoken. The start of each session was selected, and
committee and sub-committee sessions were avoided, so that the content and structure would
resemble that of the sample clip. Each section lasted between 10 and 25 minutes. The purpose of
these preparatory clips was for the respeaker to gain familiarity with the procedures, processes and
conventions that exist within (in this case) the House of Lords, and identify patterns of language
use that they will need to deal with when respeaking. Gaining experience of respeaking a genre
offline before “going live” is common practice.
Each clip was reviewed, the language used in the clip was noted and adjustments were made to
the respeaker’s voice model.
Terms of address
One marked feature of language used within the House of Lords is the way in which the members
address and refer to each other. The n-gram analysis outlined earlier revealed the frequent use
of many terms of address, including “the noble lord”, “my noble friend”, “the noble baroness”
and “the noble and learned lord”. These are certainly phrases that the respeaker will need to be
prepared for and be able to respeak with ease and accuracy. In this study, practice of the phrases
revealed good recognition for the most part; when spoken quickly, “my noble lord” was occasion
ally recognized as “my normal lord”, so a Dragon entry was created to ensure accurate recognition:
Macros could also be used to ensure correct recognition; if this route were taken, macros
would ideally be needed to capture the combinations of “noble” and “noble and learned”, people
named (Lord, Lady, Baroness, friend) and their respective pronouns (the, my). In this instance, the
respeaker preferred the decision to pre-empt the misrecognition of noble as normal, and respeak
the address in full; with more familiarity of the patterns of parliamentary debate, macros might
provide a smoother solution; a combination could also be used, with some forms respoken through
macros and others in full.
Terms of reference
When asking questions of other members of the House, the third- rather than second-person is
used: “Can I ask the minister, is he confident that there are sufficient and competent people to carry
out these checks . . .?”
Table 24.7 Dragon entry for “noble lord”
Written form Spoken form

noble lord normal lord
424
Similarly, during the practice sessions it was noted that members frequently referred to “this
place” and “that place”, meaning the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Both phrases
draw on common deictic words (this, that, he, she) yet use them in a nuanced way. Since these
phrases fell into the 2-gram range they were not noted in the n-gram analysis. Whilst no macro or
alternative spoken form would be needed, the respeaker would need to be aware of the usage and
ensure that, whilst working at speed, this convention is followed, without reverting to “you”, for
example, and that these words are respoken clearly for accurate recognition.
Macros
A number of possible sound labels were identified as relevant for the content of parliamentary
debates; a macro was created for each:
Table 24.8 Macros for sound labels
APPLAUSE applause macro

BOOS boo macro
CHEERS cheer macro
LAUGH laugh macro
MURMURS murmur macro
THEY TALK OVER EACH OTHER talk macro
“Hear, hear” was a phrase commonly echoed in the chamber. When first respoken, it appeared
as “here, here”, so a macro was created:
Table 24.9 Macro for the phrase “Hear, hear”

Hear, hear. here macro
Two instances of long formulaic phrases were also noted during preparation. When a member
has listed a question, they will first “beg leave to ask the question standing in (their) name on the
order paper”; often, this is followed by them “draw(ing) attention to (their) interest as declared in
the register”. In both cases, the use of a macro allows the respeaker to guarantee the production of
an accurate sentence and pause for breath while the speaker continues.
Titles
Many references are made to people, departments, groups and bills and the respeaker should be
able to capture these in the subtitles with accurate capitalization, that is, the “Ministry of Housing,
Communities and Local Government”.
Table 24.10 Macros for formulaic phrases
I beg leave to ask the question standing in my name on the order paper beg macro
I draw attention to my interest as declared in the register attention macro
425
Initially, these titles were entered as new written forms in the speech recognition vocabulary;
macros could also be used for this purpose. Clusters such as this are very important to the respeaker
but were not highlighted in the n-gram analysis for two reasons: Firstly, although a common fea
ture of parliamentary language, it does not necessarily follow that a single title would be repeated
multiple times and therefore might not feature in the analysis; secondly, the n-gram analysis does
not note features of punctuation or capitalization, which would be of interest to the respeaker.
Data-specific preparation
In addition to becoming familiar with the genre of Parliament as a whole, preparation is also needed
before each session as different topics will be discussed and different members of Parliament will speak.
The Lords Business provides a list of each question that will be asked, along with the member
who is asking it, in advance of the session. An example can be seen in Figure 24.1:
Monday 23 February 2018 at 2.30pm
*Oral Questions, 30 minutes
*Baroness Benjamin to ask her Majesty’s Government what plans they have for publicising
a detailed evaluation of stage one of the National Child Obesity Strategy; and when a
publication timetable for stage two will be produced.
*Lord Kennedy of Southwark to ask her Majesty’s Government what representations they
have received, if any, opposing electrical safety checks in the private rented sector. [1]
*Baroness Thornton to ask her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to reduce
waiting lists for consultant-led NHS treatment; and to what timetable they intend to carry out
such plans.
*Baroness Rawlings to ask her Majesty’s Government what progress they have made in
establishing the Northern Forest.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill Committee (day 2) [Lord Callahan] 12th Report from
the Delegated Powers Committee, 9th Report from the Constitution Committee
Figure 24.1 Lords Business, Monday 23 February 2018 (https://lordsbusiness.parliament.uk/?business

PaperDate=2018-02-23§ionId=38)
426
This provides the respeaker with enough information to research the content of the programme.
Knowing that the topics of discussion were housing, electrical appliances and consultant-led treat
ment, a range of websites were also referred to.5 Relevant vocabulary was trained into Dragon,
with a mixture of spoken forms and macros, including:
Table 24.11 Dragon entries for key words

British Property Federation British Property Federation
consultant-led consultant led
Electrical Safety First Electrical Safety First
Housing and Planning Act 2016 Housing and Planning Act 2016
Residual Current Device Residual Current Device
National Landlords Association National Landlords Association
CAMS cams macro
house house macro
As will be seen in the following section, the sample passage had a high speech rate, and,
although trained, not all these phrases were recognized accurately. The use of more macros would
have been beneficial. Regarding the acronym CAMS, in fact two different organizations exist:
Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) and Child and Adolescent
Mental Health Services (CAHMS); this was missed during preparation and the incorrect spelling
was entered as the written form. This highlights the need for thorough preparation and sufficient
time to be able to achieve this.
Finally, names were checked to ensure they would appear correctly in context; new entries
needed to be created for the following to ensure correct recognition:
Table 24.12 Recognition of names in Dragon
Desired form Actual form (1st attempt)
Baroness Jolly Baroness Jolley

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Lord Roberts of planned no candid no
Lord Reid of Cardowan Lord Reed of Cardoen
Reflections on respeaking
The fast-paced exchange of questions in the House of Lords averages at 175 wpm. During the
clip, the respeaker spoke at an average of 155 wpm and the average subtitle speed was 152 wpm.
From listening to the recording, it is clear that the respeaker actually spoke at a faster rate and
intended the subtitles to be denser than the ones displayed on screen. Unfortunately, due to glitches
with the speech recognition software, not all the words that were respoken were processed. In
the subtitles that appeared, 13.04% of the original content was edited out. There were a total 241
correct editions, where the respeaker edited the content without causing a loss of information
for the audience. There were 89 recognition errors in total, of which 13 were standard, causing
some confusion to the audience, 74 were minor and would not affect comprehension and two
were serious, causing the audience to be misinformed. There were 51 edition errors; four were
serious, which would have caused the audience to be misinformed, six were standard, meaning
427
that an independent idea unit was lost, and 41 were minor, meaning that a dependent idea – the
who, where, why and how – was lost. Seven corrections were made in total. The NER accuracy
rating for the clip was 98.13%, meaning that it was an acceptable standard for television subtitles;
achieving 98.5% accuracy would have made it “good”. The average latency for the clip was 3.16
seconds, with a low of zero seconds (as a macro was used) and a high of 8.43 seconds.
The coherence and content of the original was maintained in the respoken subtitles to a
large extent. Of the original words spoken 13% were edited out, yet the high number of cor
rect editions reveal that this was not at the audience’s expense and that good editing strategies
were in place. For the most part, the words edited out were stumbles, hesitations or repetitions,
addresses such as My Lords, and conjunctions and connectives (and, so, because), and discourse
markers such as well. On other occasions, the respeaker respoke these, so the flavour of the pas
sage remained. On occasions, there is evidence of the structure of the sentence being modified
slightly to allow for smoother respeaking, but, again, the sense and feel of the original remains
as shown in Example 1.
Table 24.13 Example 1: Modifications in sentence structure to allow for smoother respeaking
Original Respoken
because otherwise there is a feeling, I think, Otherwise, there is a feeling of total isolation,
of total isolation for those poor people. I think, for those poor people.
Concerning accuracy, there was a large number of errors within the sample and of minor recog
nition errors in particular, which is indicative both of the speed of the clip, the dense content and
the fact that the respeaker was not respeaking (Parliament) regularly at the time. Although these
would have had a minor impact on the audience, being able to avoid these would certainly improve
the quality of the sample. The “--” was used on a number of occasions to correct errors. Technical
issues meant that a number of sentences respoken accurately by the respeaker were not picked up
or dictated by Dragon, and this accounted for a number of the standard recognition errors. The seri
ous recognition errors often occurred during fairly fast passages. Clearer enunciation would have
prevented them, as Example 2 shows:
Table 24.14 Example 2: Serious recognition error
Original Respoken
and I share the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy’s and they show the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy’s
frustration over the delay when they are frustration with the delay, when they are
introduced, will that cover white goods introduced, will that cover white goods
supplied by landlords? supplied by landlords?
There were four serious edition errors, which mostly occurred as a result of the fast pace. Two
related to dates, as in Example 3:
Table 24.15 Example 3: Serious edition error related to dates
Original Respoken
But with no date given. with two years given.
428
The other two were linked to content words, as shown in Examples 4 and 5:
Table 24.16 Example 4: Serious edition error related to a content word
Original Respoken
halting the growth in the waiting list forcing a growth in the waiting list
Table 24.17 Example 5: Another serious edition error related to a content word
Original Respoken
that something was gonna be They said something would be
addressed in the near future. introduced in the near future.
Although these were minor points within the debate, they nevertheless led to the audience being
misinformed and care must be taken to avoid this.
Whilst editing out necessary content does make the transcription less complete, it can also have
a positive role, as it allows the respeaker to match the pace of the speakers and reduce latency;
edition can also be used to avoid potential errors. In Example 6, for instance, a reference is made
to the name of a person/company that has made an appliance recall consideration. The respeaker is
unsure of the name, and therefore respeaks it in the passive, avoiding a potential error:
Table 24.18 Example 6: Rephrasing of a name for more accurate recognition
Respoken
My Lords, my noble friend will be aware that response has been issued to a product
recall consideration and has created an Office for Product Safety and Standards.
In row 2 of Example 7, the respeaker choses to edit out a comment made, so that latency can
be lowered:
Table 24.19 Example 7: Using editing to reduce latency
Original Respoken
That is why we are taking our time. That is why we are taking our time.
I can understand the, the noble Lord’s impatience, but I understand the noble Lord’s impatience.
it is important that we get this right, my Lords.
My lords, my Lords, can the minister tell me what the Can the Minister tell me what the position is
position is about these appliances? Because that’s about these appliances because that is what is
what has really caused every one of these terrible really causing everyone of these terrible fires
fires we’ve had. that we have had.
The respeaker has also taken steps to ensure correct recognition at key points in the debate; for
example, when a reference is made to Grenfell, the respeaker voices in “Grenfell Tower”, to ensure
accuracy and clarity.
429
The content of Example 8 of the sample was discussed earlier with reference to its pragmatic content:
Table 24.20 Example 8: Respeaking pragmatic content
Original Respoken
Instituting these checks will save lives. These checks will save lives.
Can the noble Lord give me an assurance about Can the noble Lord give me an assurance
when we can expect some action from the about when we will have action from the
government? government.
And will I have to ask this question again this Or, when I asked question at you?
time next year?
My Lords, I do hope not. My Lords, I do hope not.
LAUGHTER
Row 3 of Example 8 is a question which flouts the maxim of relation and implies that the
speaker does not think that the government will take action (N.B. The error in the original Han
sard transcript was not picked up until after the respeaking had been completed). Unfortunately,
in the respoken transcript, this utterance is not captured. Although the respeaker did respeak, “Or
will I ask this question next year?”, but the sentence was not rendered accurately by Dragon, as
it was not enunciated clearly enough at speed. If we consider what was respoken, the implicature
was captured by the respeaker, albeit in an edited form. The respeaker went on to insert a macro
(LAUGHTER) to highlight the effect of this statement. The video in Figure 24.2 reveals that row
3 disappeared from the subtitle video extremely quickly, so it is likely the respeaker was unable to
spot, and therefore correct, the error.
Figure 24.2 Respeaking via Dragon voice recognition software (note that row 3 of Example 8 has disap
peared very quickly and so does not show up as a subtitle)
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Conclusion
In this chapter we have aimed to outline the key factors involved in the production of live
subtitles via the process of respeaking. In particular, we have demonstrated how this works
through discussion of a respoken segment of a parliamentary debate held in the House of
Lords. We have shown how using insights from linguistic analysis can support this highly
specialized form of intralingual translation, and have aimed to integrate this into the general
recommendations for practice to be found in this chapter. Of course, much more could be
done to develop the practices described here. However, it is important to be aware of the
ramifications of any new initiative. For example, one easy recommendation to make might
be to use the font colour to indicate party affiliation, where blue indicates Conservative, red
Labour, yellow Liberal Democrats, and green the Green Party. However, since colour indi
cates a change in speaker, as noted earlier, adding a secondary layer of meaning may cause
confusion for subtitlers and audience members alike and may have unintended consequences;
people who are colour blind, for example, have difficulty distinguishing between red and
green (Ford Williams, 2009, p. 18), so access may actually be reduced. Other markers of
party affiliation, however, perhaps through the use of labels or Astons (graphic overlays in the
lower third of the screen; the name derives from Aston Broadcast Systems), would certainly
be helpful. What is certain is that, with all the subjectivity and inferences that it might contain,
it is vital that political content is captured accurately. Any access provider, whether respeaker,
subtitler or interpreter, must be closely attuned to precisely how they deliver the content they
are working with.
Notes
1 The ILSA (Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access) and SMART (Shaping Multilingual Access through
Respeaking Technology) projects provide two examples of research into this expanding area of respeak
ing. ILSA is an Erasmus+ project, 2018-1-DE01-KA203-00. SMART is an ESRC-funded project, ES/
T002530/1. More information can be found at ilsaproject.eu and smartproject.surrey.ac.uk.
2 The analysis in this chapter was originally presented as part of McIntyre et al.’s (2018) report to the House
of Lords on improving the speed and quality of live parliamentary subtitling.
3 The ideal situation would have been to extract n-grams from the entirety of Hansard. However, this was
not at the time possible due to constraints related to the size of the dataset and its organization (N.B. the
AHRC-funded Hansard at Huddersfield project is likely to be able to facilitate this in the near future; see
Jeffries et al., forthcoming for details of this project).
4 This is particularly important in Parliament, given the strictness of the rules governing what can and
can’t be said in the Commons and the Lords. Because of this, indirect meaning plays a significant role
in parliamentary debates. For example, on 1 April 1981, Dennis Skinner (the then Labour MP for Bol
sover) said in a Commons debate to David Alton (the then Liberal MP for Liverpool Edge Hill), “The
hon. Member for Edge Hill seems a bit upset about my saying that he was not there half the time. Will
he settle for my agreeing that he was there the other half? That is an advance” (Hansard Commons
Debate, 1 April 1981).
5 Electrical safety checks: www.gov.uk/government/news/new-tougher-electrical-safety-standards-to-pro
tect-private-tenants; https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach
ment_data/file/682100/Consultation_on_PRS_Electrical_Safety.pdf; https://www.electricalsafetyfirst.
org.uk/guidance/advice-for-you/tenants/;https://landlords.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/electrical-safety;
https://landlords.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/have-your-say-electrical-safety-requirements-landlords;
Waiting list for consultant-led NHS treatment: www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/appointment-booking/Pages/
nhs-waiting-times.aspx; www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/rtt-waiting-times/; www.
england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/rtt-waiting-times/rtt-data-2017-18/
431
Further reading
Moores, Z. (2022). Training professional respeakers to subtitle live events in the UK: A participative model
for access and inclusion [PhD thesis, University of Roehampton]. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.
do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.874897
This thesis explores the practice and reception of intralingual respeaking at live events.
Romero-Fresco, P. (2016). Accessing communication: The quality of live subtitles in the UK. Language and
Communication, 49, 56–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.06.001
This article analyses the Ofcom study into the accuracy, delay, speed and edition rate of 78,000 live subti
tles from 300 programmes broadcast on UK television.
Romero-Fresco, P., & Eugeni, C. (2020). Live subtitling through respeaking. In Ł. Bogucki & M. Deckert
(Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of audiovisual translation and media accessibility (pp. 269–295). Springer.
This chapter provides an overview of respeaking and the development of current professional standards
and outlines current teaching and research in this domain.
References
Anthony, L. (2018). AntConc 3.5.7. Waseda University. Retrieved February 14, 2023, from www.laurencean
thony.net/software
BBC. (2022). Subtitle guidelines, v1.2.1. Retrieved February 14, 2023 from www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/
forproducts/guides/subtitles/
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University
Press.
Culpeper, J. (1996). Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 25, 349–367. https://doi.
org/10.1016/0378-2166(95)00014-3
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge University Press.
Eugeni, C., & Gambier, Y. (2023). La traduction intralinguistique: les défis de la diamésie. Editura Politehnica.
FordWilliams, G. (2009). Online subtitling editorial guidelines, v1.1, 5th January 2009, bbc.co.uk. Retrieved Febru
ary 14, 2023, from https://nanopdf.com/download/bbccouk-online-subtitling-editorial-guidelines-v11_pdf
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays in face-to-face behavior. Aldine Publishing Company.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech
acts (pp. 41–58). Academic.
Hansard Commons Debate. (1981, April 1). Saving for things done under a licence. Hansard, Vol. 2,
Col. 448. Retrieved February 14, 2023, from https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1981-04-01/
debates/8fb8590a-1625-48b4-b5b2-ee7dbace08e2/Clause15; www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/futuremedia/ac
cessibility/subtitling_guides/online_sub_editorial_guidelines_vs1_1.pdf
Jeffries, L., Stradling, F., Lünen, A. von, & Sanjurjo Gonzalez, H. (forthcoming). Hansard at Huddersfield:
Streamlined corpus methods and interactive visualisations to pursue research aims beyond corpus lin
guistics. In M. Korhonen, H. Kotze, & J. Tyrkkö (Eds.), Exploring language and society with big data:
Parliamentary discourse across time and space. John Benjamins.
Lambourne, A. (2006). Subtitle respeaking: A new skill for a new age. inTRAlinea, Special Issue: Respeaking.
www.intralinea.org/specials/article/Subtitle_respeaking
McIntyre, D., Moores, Z., & Price, H. (2018). Respeaking parliament: Using insights from linguistics to
improve the speed and quality of live parliamentary subtitles. Institute for Applied Linguistics, University
of Huddersfield.
Moores, Z., & Romero-Fresco, P. (2015, June 12). The language of respeaking: A classification of errors [Con
ference presentation]. In 5th international symposium on accessibility and live subtitling, Rome, Italy.
Ofcom. (2015a, May 15). Ofcom’s code on television access services 2015, Annex 4, paragraph A4.18. Re
trieved February 14, 2023, from www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/40273/tv-access-ser
vices-2015.pdf
Ofcom. (2015b, November 27). Measuring live subtitling quality: Results from the fourth sampling exercise.
Retrieved February 14, 2023, from www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/41114/qos_4th_re
port.pdf
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Ofcom. (2021). Ofcom’s guidelines on the provision of television access services. Retrieved February 14,
2023, from www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/212776/provision-of-tv-access-services-
guidelines.pdf
Romero-Fresco, P. (2011). Subtitling through speech recognition: Respeaking. St Jerome Publishing.
Romero-Fresco, P., & Pérez, J. M. (2015). Accuracy rate in live subtitling: The NER Model. In R. B. Piñero &
J. D. Cintas (Eds.), Audiovisual translation in a global context (pp. 28–50). Palgrave Macmillan.
Vice, J., & Farrell, D. (2017). The history of Hansard. House of Lords.
Zethsen, K. K. (2009). Intralingual translation: An attempt at description. Meta. Journal des traducteurs/Meta
Translators’ Journal, 54(4), 795–812. https://doi.org/10.7202/038904ar
433
25
AND MEDIA ACCESSIBILITY
AT A CROSSROADS
A museum project
Introduction
There is no doubt that translation has crossed traditional borderlines, such as those presented in
the widely known classification by Jakobson (1959). While intersemiotic translation has been the
focus of considerable in-depth research, paving the way for media accessibility (Greco, 2018;
Romero-Fresco, 2018), intralingual translation still lacks this wealth of knowledge and research.
This probably explains why one can still hear translators confessing that they are not translators
per se, because they carry out subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing or audiodescription in
their own language, or because they implement Plain or Easy Language.
The case study for this chapter investigates the interplay between intralingual translation
and media accessibility. It was carried out in a museum in Bragança (northeast of Portugal),
the Museu do Abade de Baçal (Abbot of Baçal Museum). We were asked to “simplify” 17
texts that would be interpretive documents for each of the museum rooms, and thus to provide
an accessible resource aimed primarily at people with intellectual impairment, although the
resource could also cater for the needs and interests of many other groups: People with com
munication impairments (Greco, 2018), children, older people, people with lower literacy
or simply with less experience in museums, people with hearing impairments, or migrants
speaking Portuguese either as their mother tongue (e.g., from Portuguese-speaking African
countries, who have creole as their mother tongue and Portuguese as their language of instruc
tion) or as a foreign language. These were the different groups we sought to test after the
“simplification” process in the Portuguese texts.
This chapter therefore includes a section on audiovisual translation (AVT) and media acces
sibility, with a reflection on intralingual translation, followed by considerations on museum acces
sibility. In the final section of this chapter, we will present the project, introducing the museum, its
accessibility conditions, the methodology used and the stages of the work. We will also describe
the intralingual strategies we used in the simplification of the museum texts, analysing one text
in particular, report on the visitor questionnaire and briefly discuss the results. Finally, we present
our concluding remarks.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-32 434

Intralingual translation and media accessibility at crossroads
Audiovisual translation and media accessibility

As a discipline, AVT was for many years dominated by Translation Studies, which enveloped it in
“the Cinderella mantle” (Díaz Cintas, 2004). An example of this slow acknowledgment is pointed
out by Chaume (2018, p. 41): 1957 was the year when the first monograph on AVT was presented
by Simon Laks, who defended AVT as a field of study. Three years later, Babel (the International
Journal of Translation published by the International Federation of Translators) published the first
specialized issue partially devoted to AVT, that is, volume 6, issue 3. It was only in the 1990s that
AVT entered academia and gradually became an autonomous discipline. For Gottlieb (1992), this
heralded the golden age of AVT when it entered academia as “a new university discipline” no longer
relegated to the fringes of translation studies. Progress was somewhat sluggish but the new millen
nium marked a new era for AVT, especially with the exponential development of technology and the
increase of media consumption through numerous platforms. As Díaz Cintas (2004, p. 24) puts it,
“Within this theoretical framework, translation . . . ceases to be a Cinderella of academia, and trans
lated works shake off the mantle of a secondary, deficient product”. Later, the same author would
maintain that such a mantle had “(partially) evaporated” and was then (and now) “a resolute and
prominent area of academic research” (Díaz Cintas, 2009, p. 1). The metaphor of Cinderella is also
used by Bączkowska (2015, p. 221) who states that AVT is “no longer the Cinderella of Translation
Studies but a full-blown research field in its own right”. A sign of this new status was the launching
of the first journal dedicated solely to AVT – the Journal of Audiovisual Translation (JAT).
In three decades, “AVT has certainly gained the right to constitute a legitimate and independent
field of studies, matching the status of any other area of studies in translation and interpreting”
(Chaume, 2018, p. 41). As a result, from the 21st century onwards, AVT has come of age, forming
a distinct area of research within Translation Studies, and thus “deserve[s] a separate room . . . in
the translation studies (TS) building” (Romero-Fresco, 2018, p. 188).
Throughout this period, AVT evolved from focusing mainly on subtitling, dubbing and voice-over
(its more traditional and mainstream modes) to encompassing a myriad of other more challenging
modes (cf. Gambier, 2003), such as audiodescription (AD), subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
(SDH), and surtitling or respeaking. In the course of its recognition as a discipline, AVT researchers
and practitioners have often used Jakobson’s classic three-fold classification of translation to justify the
uniqueness of their object of study and area of application, especially in the aforementioned challeng
ing modes. Jakobson’s three types of translation “showed the extremely wide scope of reformulating
meaning into different forms and for different receivers” (Whyatt, 2017, p. 176). It is then understand
able that interlingual translation as translation proper “attracted most interest within translation studies”
(Whyatt, 2017, p. 176). However, intralingual translation and intersemiotic translation were certainly a
different matter: The former being regarded as rewording, reformulation or paraphrasing and the latter
as a transmutation, that is, the interpretation of verbal signs by means of non-verbal signs. These epi
thets have hindered the development and the status of these two translation types.
In line with recent developments in AVT, the name “media accessibility” (MA) was coined to
emphasize the particularities of the developing modes focusing on making cultural venues acces
sible to people with sensory impairments. Its growth also followed the paradigmatic changes that
occurred in the area and are clarified by Greco in his various publications (2018, pp. 211–214).
MA has then shifted from
1 a “particularist account”, merely focused on people with impairments, to a more “universalist

account”, where anyone with communication impairments may benefit from accessible modes.
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2 a “reactive approach”, where people react to what they are given, to a “pro-active approach”, in
which people become involved.
3 and a “maker-centred to a user-centred” perspective.
These changes imply that accessibility created within AVT cannot be seen as merely directed
at people with impairments, but rather addresses itself to anyone who at a certain moment may
have communicative impairments. This notion of accessibility is presented as “an instrument for
the human rights of all” (Greco & Jankowska, 2020, p. 62). As a result, users are expected to
intervene and participate in the whole process of creation, becoming yet another actor – leading
to creative collaboration, such as Romero-Fresco’s accessible filmmaking (2013, 2019).
An accessibility revolution has taken place (Greco, 2018), giving visibility to these issues not
only in various social contexts, but also in research: “From transportation studies to human com
puter interaction, from geography to engineering, from design to sustainability studies, from trans
lation studies to cultural heritage, from education to tourism studies” (Greco, 2018, p. 209). In
line with this revolution, Neves’s (2018) universal access translation should be mentioned, which
“bring[s] together translation, interpretation and accessibility, as a form of transcreation and trans-
adaptation”. Accessibility and translation go hand in hand; one complements the other since the
translation process makes multimedia and artistic products accessible for people with differing
abilities. As such, Rizzo (2020, p. 2) sustains that translation is in itself a creative force, because it
nourishes accessibility-oriented institutions and has become the driver of the spread of
accessibility practices applied to the fostering and reassessment of cultural heritage, film
making, TV programmes, museum exhibitions, theatre and the stage, web videos and perfor
mances, and all the multifaceted forms and types of aesthetic discourse.
On the other hand, Rizzo (2019, p. 94) argues that accessibility should not only be considered as
a social potential that favours and stimulates knowledge dissemination, while assembling
all citizens of the world (e.g., museums as spaces of social and multicultural encounters),
and, on the other hand, as a universal concept in relation to its analogies with translation and
interpreting processes as mechanisms of universal communication.
Thus, translators must become universal access mediators, experts in intersemiotic, multimodal
and intralingual translation, able to create a variety of resources that will enhance meaningful,
holistic and multisensory experiences, such as subtitling, and including SDH, AD, and Easy and
Plain Language.
This universalist approach to MA “concerns access to media and non-media objects, services
and environments through media solutions, for any person who cannot or would not be able to,
either partially or completely, access them in their original form” (Greco & Jankowska, 2020,
p. 64). By moving away from specific categories, Greco and Jankowska (2020, pp. 67–72) propose
an initial classification of MA modalities based on various criteria, the primary one being access.
In their classification, the authors also take into consideration three approaches: Jakobson’s clas
sical triad (1959); Pöchhacker’s (2003) distinction between interpreting and translation; and the
taxonomy of four semiotic channels involved in the audiovisual text – the verbal and non-verbal
visual channels and the verbal and non-verbal audio channels.
The authors suggest two main categories: Translation-based and non-translation-based modes.
The first category includes audiodescription, audio narration, dubbing, enriched subtitling,
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extended audiodescription, live audiodescription, live subtitling, sign language interpreting, sub
titling, transcripts and voice-over, whereas the second category encompasses audio introduction,
audio subtitling, clean audio, speech rate conversion, screen reading and tactile reproductions.
Interestingly, there is no reference to Plain or Easy Language in either of the two categories,
which seems paradoxical considering that these language varieties represent a means to include
people with communication impairments and are characterized by reduced lexical complexity
and enhanced comprehensibility and readability when compared to standard language or expert,
technical language.
Despite Greco and Jankowska’s (2020) broad understanding of MA, not including Easy and
Plain Language as translation-based modes may be indicative of the traditional focus on interlin
gual translation. As mentioned earlier, intralingual translation has been conventionally reduced to
translation within the same language, and is thus “perceived as being more peripheral in transla
tion studies” (Zethsen, 2009, p. 797). The marginality of intralingual translation also derives from
the fact that there has not yet been “a detailed, empirically-based attempt to describe the general
characteristics of intralingual translation and the strategies employed or compare it with interlin
gual translation” (Zethsen, 2009, p. 796), when other mechanisms of transfer are essentially the
same: There is a source text and a target text.
Intralingual translation does not have “a unified definition” (Whyatt, 2017, p. 178): It may
be rewording and paraphrasing, as Jakobson upheld, or “expressing the same meaning in differ
ent forms of the same language” (Whyatt, 2017, p. 178), so as to also include adaptation, a term
usually applied to Plain and Easy Language translations. Although intralingual translation may
deal with the same-speech community that shares the same national language, the truth is that the
communicative purposes are very diverse, even within the same community, thus communica
tion difficulties and impairments arise that must be dealt with (cf. Whyatt, 2017, p. 183). Nisbeth
Jensen (2015) is cited by Whyatt (2017, p. 183) to emphasize the fact that “intralingual translation
competence is needed to produce comprehensible texts” (Whyatt, 2017, p. 183) so that knowledge
and communication barriers may be overcome.
All in all, intralingual translation is “a highly diverse set of practices that often requires a very
specific set of skills” (Moreno Tovar, 2021).1
Museum accessibility
From the 1980s onwards, accessibility became a hot topic, accompanied by a timely paradigm
shift: Moving from the medical model to the biopsychosocial, more commonly known as the
social model. What started as a mere concern regarding access for wheelchair users in a public
building developed into the spread of accessibility in all dimensions of social life, cultural venues
included, such as galleries and museums; historical, archaeological and religious sites; the cinema;
the theatre; the stadium; the church and the graveyard (i.e., weddings and funerals, respectively),
for all people with impairments – physical, sensory and intellectual.
Dodd and Sandell (1998) identify a number of barriers to social inclusion encountered in muse
ums, such as accessibility to information; physical, cultural, emotional, financial, intellectual and
sensory exclusion; and exclusion from decision-making. On the other side of the Atlantic, Sas
saki (2005), a Brazilian scholar, approaches accessibility from a broader perspective, referring to
architectural, communicational, methodological, instrumental, programmatic and attitudinal access.
Despite their different approaches, we can draw parallels between Dood and Sandell’s and Sassaki’s
approaches: Physical access and architecture are both concerned with making buildings physically
accessible to people with reduced mobility, such as wheelchair users, families with children, older
437
people, people with obesity and pregnant women, among others. Information access equates with
access to communication: Whether institutions reach their audiences and interact with them at vari
ous levels, be it in written or interpersonal communication or digitally. Cultural access may match
Sassaki’s concept of instrumental access leading to the elimination of barriers in a wide range of
cultural and leisure activities, from school to daily routines, cultural venues and sports. Another
possible parallel is related to emotional and attitudinal access, due to the need to change people’s
attitudes towards disability and impairment, to sensitize them to functional diversity and tolerance
and ultimately to turn the museum environment into a welcoming place with open-minded staff.
The other obstacles recognized by Dodd and Sandell (1998) include particularly important
aspects for the purpose of this project: Sensory access, whereby museums prepare their exhibi
tions, events and facilities for people with visual and hearing impairments; intellectual access,
guaranteed by providing texts in Plain or Easy Language for people with intellectual impair
ment, learning difficulties, low literacy or little experience in visiting museums; and access to the
decision-making process, which refers to the museums consulting visitors about their exhibitions
and activities and welcoming their input (e.g., by means of questionnaires, as in the case of this
project). Equally important is financial access related to the affordability of the entrance fee, the
cafeteria and the shop for families or people on low incomes.
As Sassaki (2005) advocates, inclusion requires educating social systems for all these barriers
to be removed, in a relentless process that ensures people feel welcomed in any venue regardless
of their individual differences. Overcoming the aforementioned obstacles implies a quantum leap
in people’s and institutions’ mindset and providing financial resources that may cater not only for
specific needs but also benefit the wider population.
Both the UK and the USA have made great strides in improving museum accessibility, as have
some European countries, such as Spain and Italy. Portugal, however, has lagged behind. Despite
the growing number of initiatives in improving accessibility, Portugal has not yet made significant
headway in terms of museum accessibility. There are, nevertheless, two outstanding examples
of Portuguese museums that have increased museum accessibility: the Museum of the Commu
nity of Batalha (Museu da Comunidade Concelhia da Batalha) and the National Museum of Tile
(Museum Nacional do Azulejo).
Museums must embrace the idea that providing a number of resources traditionally considered
to be for people with an impairment is at the same time highly enriching for all visitors. If a cul
tural venue combines a variety of texts, for instance shorter and longer, in Plain Language and in
Easy language, in foreign languages, with videos with SDH or AD or Portuguese SL, as well as
touch materials, such as replicas, maquettes and high relief, then this enhances the experience for
all visitors because museums will rely on appealing to all the senses, not just sight, thus providing
a more meaningful and holistic multisensory experience.
Plain and Easy Languages

Plain and Easy Languages aim to enhance inclusion, especially in terms of communication inclu
sion; they “can be considered language varieties of different national languages with reduced
linguistic complexity, which aim to improve readability and comprehensibility of texts” (Hansen-
Schirra & Maaß, 2020, p. 17). Although Easy Language has been traditionally directed to peo
ple with intellectual impairments, its “simplicity and uniformity have a stigmatisation effect”,
thus Plain Language offers an alternative with “less stigmatising linguistic structures and layout
options” (Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020, p. 17). According to these authors, there is a continuum
from Easy Language to more technical language, as can be seen in Figure 25.1.
438
Figure 25.1 Language varieties continuum (Hansen-Schirra & Maaß, 2020, p. 18)
The ISO/IEC DIS 23859-1 defines Easy Language as a “language variety in which a set of rec
ommendations regarding wording, structure, design, and evaluation are applied to make informa
tion accessible to persons with reading comprehension difficulties for any reason”. Furthermore,
“A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the
intended audience can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that informa
tion” (PLAIN, s.d.).
Numerous documents describe how to create or translate texts into Easy Language or Plain
Language. For instance, the Australian Centre for Inclusive Design puts forth each variety’s dis
tinctive list of features, summarized in Table 25.1.
Table 25.1 Differences between Easy and Plain Language (Centre for Inclusive Design, 2020, p. 14)
Easy Language: Plain Language:

short sentences; simple, everyday words; short sentences; short paragraphs; simple,
key information; explains hard words; everyday words, avoiding jargon; clear
dot points; clear sections and headings; sections of text; headings which are easy to
images to support each point; lots of understand; adequate white space
white space; large text size
Easy Language may be directed primarily at people with cognitive and intellectual impair
ments, but also at people with hearing impairments, children, the elderly, migrants and people with
low(er) literacy, whereas the intended audience for Plain Language are people with a literacy level
equivalent to secondary school.
A museum project
The museum project for our case study was conducted in the Museum of the Abbot of Baçal
(MAB), located in Bragança, in the northeast of Portugal. The museum opened in 1915 as a
regional museum with valuable collections in arts and crafts, archaeology, numismatics, religious
paintings, statues and silverware, and Portuguese painting. These objects were collected either
by the Abbot who gave his name to the museum or subsequently through the patronage of and
bequests by the museum’s friends.
The building was originally the Episcopal Palace of the Bragança-Miranda Diocese of the
Catholic Church and was later transformed and used to house various local services, such as the
439
National Guard, the City Library and the District Archive. When the museum opened, it took over
the former palace and made use of two floors and the garden, which had been the former vegetable
garden for the bishops. With two major renovation initiatives, it became what it is now: A museum
with a large entrance, 15 rooms, one of which is used for temporary exhibitions, museum reserves
and the garden. Despite these renovations, the museum is still not easily accessible.
Accessibility at MAB has been targeted by three different studies: The first by Lira (1997), the
second by Martins (2014) and the last by the General Direction of Cultural Heritage (conducted
in 2018), which is yet to be published (Património Cultural, 2022). Lira (1997) gathered informa
tion on various aspects without presenting a clear framework for improvement. For example, he
stated that the museum did not offer a brochure about the museum, but, on the other hand, it did
have a map of the museum and clear pricing at the entrance. He also made general criticism about
the lighting and the position of some of the objects that affected people with physical impairment
and pointed out that the collection labels, which were then only in Portuguese (nowadays also in
English), were fading.
In 2011, following Lira’s initial diagnosis, Martins (2014, pp. 397–401) conducted an analysis
of the accessibility conditions at MAB, based on Colwell and Mendes (2004, pp. 87–103). This
diagnosis is divided into two main areas: Access to the museum and the museum itself. For the
access to the museum, the following points are included: Surrounding space, museum entrance
and information on the museum, for example access to the museum includes the museum’s vis
ibility from the outside, whereas the museum itself encompasses the entrance hall, access to exhi
bition areas, the exhibition, the collections, the shop, the cafeteria, the auditorium and the garden.
The drawback of the diagnosis grid is that it is based on a simple yes/no question and offers no
suggestions for solutions, something that was overcome in the later matrix created by the General
Direction of Cultural Heritage.
Generally speaking, it is easy to reach the museum and it is well identified from the outside.
However, the biggest flaws are the narrow pavements and the absence of a museum car park. The
entrance through the garden requires all visitors to overcome a very uneven path on wobbly stones,
and for a wheelchair user there is the added challenge of having to negotiate a flight of stairs. In
2011, the museum still lacked brochures in foreign languages and in braille or in large print and
there was no tactile map of the museum, such as the one offered in the Batalha Museum. The light
ing is still an issue to this day, as well as the total absence of resting places throughout the museum
rooms. In terms of materials for people with visual impairment, there is no multisensory tour with
tactile flooring, replicas or maquettes (although in recent dedicated visits2 the director allowed a
few pieces to be touched), no customized information either with AD or in braille or large print.
As for people with hearing and intellectual impairment, the museum also lacks information in
Portuguese Sign Language and, when it comes to people with intellectual impairment, there is no
information in Easy Language (be it text or audio).
The study conducted in 2018 by the General Direction of Cultural Heritage was halted before
completion, according to information obtained from official sources. Despite the fact that their
matrix3 was indeed applied to the museum, for logistic reasons the report has not been published.
The added value of this matrix lies not only in the areas covered by the accessibility assessment,
but also in the fact that it measures accessibility for each area in terms of a percentage.
Context and methodology

The MAB is centrally managed by the General Direction of Cultural Heritage in Portugal, region
ally by the North Regional Direction of Culture and locally by its director. The director contacted
440
the team in late 2020 with the request to “simplify” the texts that had been previously written by
specialists for each of the 15 rooms, as well as the information on the museum, its building, the
biographies of two of its former directors and a nearby historical building called Domus Munici
palis – a total of 17 texts and 6,602 words in their original versions. The ultimate goal was for the
texts to be placed on the wall in each of the rooms and the remaining ones to be provided on paper.
In our initial briefing, we also discussed the ideal target audience, which was a somewhat fuzzy
idea of “general visitors”. Over time, we realized the museum’s “general visitors” were understood
as educated citizens with ample and thorough knowledge of history, archaeology and art, which in
itself contrasted sharply with the whole process of “simplifying” texts.
This project was conducted as a result of the collaboration between the Polytechnic Institute
of Bragança (IPB) and MAB. It followed on from the three-month summer school “Verão com
Ciência 2020” [Summer with Science] sponsored by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and
Technology. After this programme ended, various other stages in the project were developed and
the final version of the texts is currently undergoing an ultimate editing stage by the museum’s
new director.4
The simplification process went through six stages which we will briefly describe. Two master
students, involved in the “Summer with Science” programme, were in charge of the first stage in
adapting the texts, after which the lead researcher suggested further changes. At the end of this,
a collective version was sent to the director, with whom we later met online and thoroughly dis
cussed each of the texts.
As a result of an extensive and demanding process of negotiation, we presented another version
of the texts to be further discussed, which integrated many of the changes suggested by the director
at the first meeting and also suggested new ones. A second meeting was held where further changes
were debated and another version obtained.
These meetings were of the utmost importance since it was then that the team truly understood
what “simplification” meant to the director, which previous knowledge he expected visitors to
the museum to possess and how he ultimately feared losing face when “making the texts far too
simple and basic”. However, this seeming obstacle was overcome by constantly highlighting the
advantages for the museum to offer such texts to visitors initially in Portuguese, and later in for
eign languages, namely English and Spanish.
After this, we engaged in the validation stages, which we will describe in detail later. Once the
tests were concluded and the results of the questionnaires analysed, we made further changes to
the texts and are currently expecting to confer with the new director to wrap up the whole process.
Concerning methodology, we followed a user-centric iterative design process (in line with ISO/
IEC DIS 23859-1)5 with different stages for both creation and translation (often also called adapta
tion). Table 25.2 summarizes the steps for the translation of texts into easy-to-understand language.
Description of the corpus

The corpus is composed of 17 texts that will be described according to external criteria, that is, the
initial number of words and sentences and final number of words and sentences, the addition of
explanations at the end of the text and their readability level.
As we can observe in Table 25.3, the length of the texts varies between 104 and 1,122 words.
The word count of the longest text (T 1) was reduced and its number of sentences increased with
five explanations added at the end of the text. At the other extreme, the word count of the shortest
text (T 14) was actually increased, as was the number of sentences, and it included two explana
tions at the end.
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Table 25.2 Details on the translation process
Translaton of the museum’s wall texts

provide information about each of the 13 rooms of MAB, available
aim
to all visitors
content description of each room and some of its objects
function contextualisation/ mediation
Project brief and
final target "all" visitors
development plan format placed on the wall (and also on paper in foreign languages)
linguistic features highly technical and complex
length between 104 and 1122
inclusion of support texts no, but a glossary included
text type informative and technical
authorship several authors
topic many (from history to archaeology, to painting)
length between 104 and 1122
Analysis of the target text complexity highly complex
design no design
content description of each room and some of its objects
vocabulary highly technical
structure in paragraphs
Identficaton of target overall simplification and explanation of technical terms and
needs
audiences unusual cultural references
main topic many (from history to archaeology, to painting)
Basic structure and secondary topics depends on each room
organizaton vocabulary highly technical
multimodal elements none for the time being (later audio narrations)
Text draf (see examples provided)
Assessment of the text (validation groups − questionnaires)
Inclusion of the feedback
and producton of the final (not yet)
text
Table 25.3 Corpus of texts

Original version Final version Differences
Explanations
Text (end of text)
no. words no. sentences no. words no. sentences no. words +/ no. sentences +/
1 Building 1122 23 958 38 164 - 15 + 5 (42 w)
2 MAB 537 14 477 21 60 - 7 + 1 (5 w)
3 Territory Room 401 6 381 15 20 - 9 + 5 (55 w)
4 Abbot’s Room 1 291 8 306 13 15 + 5 + 1 (19 w)

5 Abbot’s Room 2 222 6 212 9 10 - 3 + 1 (11 w)
6 Room of the Pre-Roman Archaeology 745 22 773 30 28 + 8 + 10 (71 w)
7 Romanization Room 407 12 371 16 36 - 4 + 3 (19 w)
8 Chapel 298 8 340 13 42 + 5 + 3 (33 w)

9 Numismatics Room 130 5 135 5 5 + 0 =
10 Sá Vargas’ Room 304 6 317 15 13 + 9 + 5 (35 w)

11 Room of Sacred Painting and Sculpture 360 9 368 18 8 + 9 + 2 (11 w)
12 Room of Religious Silverware 196 5 259 8 63 + 3 + 10 (86 w)
13 Diocese Room 422 10 513 18 91 + 8 + 9 (78 w)
14 Room of the Writing Table 104 4 168 6 64 + 2 + 2 (18 w)
15 Ceramics Room 139 4 156 6 17 + 2 +
16 Painting Room 317 8 354 15 37 + 7 +
17 Domus Municipalis 378 9 404 19 26 + 17 + 4 (58 w)

Total 6373 159 6492 265 699 113
Average 375 9 382 16 41 7 3 (33 w)
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Generally speaking, in the original versions, there was a smaller number of sentences,
because of their complex syntax. Notice, for instance, that in the text for the Territory Room
(T 3), we added nine sentences to the original six, and the same occurred in the text for the
Room of Sacred Painting and Sculpture (T 11), which increased from nine sentences to 18.
Interestingly, only one text – T 9 for the Numismatics Room – maintained the same number
of sentences, with a minor increase in its word count – from 130 to 135 – and no explanations
were added.
Another point to stress is that, in the simplified versions, the word count increased, not only due
to the added explanations at the end, but also because of the syntax. For example, a reduced rela
tive clause or an appositive clause are best made explicit and changed into a (full) relative clause
or another type of subordinate clause, since this strategy enhances comprehensibility. These and
other examples will be presented in the following section.
Overall, the main difficulties in these texts were brought about by the lexical, terminological
and syntactic complexity, inherent to the language of the experts in history, archaeology and arts
studies who wrote the texts.
In order to ascertain the level of comprehensibility of our corpus, we resorted to the website
Legibilidade.com that tests and analyses Portuguese language text readability. This website
uses English-based indexes that are then applied to Portuguese texts, namely the Flesch Read
ing Ease and Gulpease Index, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, the Gunning Fog Index, the
Automated Readability Index and the Coleman-Liau Index. These indexes are metrics that
were developed to assess the difficulty reading level of a text and are based on two variables:
Length of the sentences (the longer they are, the harder it will be to understand them) and the
length of the words (the higher the percentage of difficult words, the harder it is to grasp the
text). The former is measured through the average number of words per sentence, while the
latter mixes various methods, such as the number of letters or syllables in a word and its fre
quency of use.
Legibilidade calculates the readability of texts, based on the number of letters, syllables, sen
tences and complex sentences, and applies the aforementioned indexes that were adapted to the
Portuguese language by a group of Brazilian researchers (Moreno et al., 2022). It uses the scale
zero to 20, and the higher the number, the lower the readability of the text. However, there can
be texts with a level higher than 20 (as can be seen in Table 25.4), and a lower number does not
necessarily mean a text is easy to read.
Nonetheless, it must be stressed that these indexes focus solely on form and not on con
tent. For instance, a text may be highly complex in its content but have a high readability level,
because it is compact and uses fairly short sentences. This is why this assessment strategy must
be complemented with human assessment, as the one we conducted with the validations.
Table 25.4 shows the difference in legibility from the initial to the final version. Among the
initial versions, the lowest level texts, which amount to the most comprehensible, were T 4 and
T 14 with a readability level of 13 (i.e., average readability; understood by university students),
whereas the highest, or the least comprehensible, was T 3 with a readability level of 23 (i.e., low
readability; extremely difficult text). All in all, the 17 texts in their original versions had an average
of level 16.3 in terms of readability, which means an average readability that can be understood by
university students at the end of their graduation. After the simplification process, we managed to
achieve an average readability level of 11.7.
After the simplification process, the readability level decreased considerably – between
nine and 16. However, in some texts where we repeated the most difficult words for the sake
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Table 25.4 Readability level of the original and final texts
Final legibility
Text Original legibility
(with explanations)
1 Building 17 11
2 MAB 16 11
3 Territory Room 22 14
4 Abbot’s Room 1 13 9
5 Abbot’s Room 2 14 11
6 Room of the Pre-Roman Archaeology 15 13
7 Romanization Room 16 13
8 Chapel 16 10
9 Numismatics Room 14 9
10 Sá Vargas’ Room 18 12
11 Room of Sacred Painting and Sculpture 18 11
12 Room of Religious Silverware 16 16
13 Diocese Room 19 13
14 Room of the Writing Table 13 12
15 Ceramics Room 16 12
16 Painting Room 16 11
17 Domus Municipalis 18 11
of explanation, the Legibilidade platform considered the text equally less comprehensible,
so there is a visible difference between the readability with and without explanations. For
example, T 12 has a readability level of 16 with explanations, whereas without explanations it
decreases to 12.
Intralingual strategies
In this subsection, we seek to list the strategies we identified and group them into lexi
cal, syntactic, textual, pragmatic, discursive and visual, which were based on ISO/IEC DIS
23859–1, but also included criteria that were relevant for our project and the Portuguese
language.
In terms of lexical criteria, the ISO includes the following suggestions: Using frequent and
common words that occur in everyday language; explaining unknown vocabulary or abstract,
technical, complex, ambiguous and vague words; avoiding synonyms for the same concept; avoid
ing metaphors unless they are needed for abstract concepts; using vocabulary that is suitable for
the target reader, without resorting to childish language to address adults; avoiding derived or
444
foreign words; opting for the most recent spelling without using old-fashioned forms; and avoid
ing Roman numbers or adding the corresponding Arabic numerals.
As far as syntactic criteria are concerned, it is important to avoid long and complex sentences,
shorten paragraphs, vary the length of the sentences, prefer a verbal style rather than a nominal
style, keep negation markers to a minimum, prefer the active voice over the passive voice and try
to include one idea per sentence.
Concerning textual criteria, some of the main points include choosing the appropriate mode of
communication (oral, written, etc.); addressing the user directly; organizing the text with a short
summary at the beginning, subheadings, marginal notes and numbers or bullet points; and high
lighting important information.
The pragmatic criteria encompass taking into account the target groups and the target situation,
including accessible content that should be retrievable, perceptible, comprehensible, linkable and
acceptable, and action-enabling information and acceptability.
For discursive aspects, the following are included: Intertextuality should not be presup
posed; online intertextuality can be provided in the form of hyperlinks; previous knowledge
should be wisely considered, as well as knowledge users may have about the text type and its
conventions.
Finally, visual criteria must not be overlooked: Increased font size and line spacing to improve
visual perception; sans serif fonts, wide margins and consistent format; bold for highlighting
important information; visible explanations by using indentations or bold; avoidance of columns;
and use of images with direct meaning and not simply to embellish a text.
Table 25.5 presents the analysis we conducted on one of the texts in our corpus, taking the ear
lier explained criteria. The selected text focuses on the building where the museum is set.
As far as this specific text is concerned, it was originally highly complex with a length that
is totally inappropriate for general visitors to museums. Therefore, we had to omit several sen
tences altogether, including a quotation with old Portuguese spelling, and increase the number of
sentences per paragraph to enhance understanding. For the same reason, five explanations were
added for the terms that could not be omitted. As a result, the text’s readability level changed
from 17 to 11.
Validation stage
The simplified texts were assessed by a number of different groups, who all spoke Portuguese,
either as their mother tongue (though from different varieties) or as a foreign language, but they
belonged to different age groups and were with and without impairment.
We organized six visits to the museum for different groups over a four-month period: Teenag
ers, IPB students who speak Brazilian Portuguese; IPB African students who speak Portuguese
but also their local creole language (often their mother tongue); older adults (as in senior citizens);
migrants from East Timor, China and Venezuela; and people with intellectual impairment. Most
visits mingled people from the different groups, with the exception of the older adults and the
people with intellectual impairment who conducted their visits separately.
The visits were autonomous: Visitors were given the texts on paper for each of the rooms, the
only exception being people with intellectual impairment to whom we read the texts out loud.
All visitors were asked to make their visit using the simplified texts and to identify any issues
that might be problematic or unclear. At the end of the visit, they were asked to answer an online
questionnaire that consisted of 36 questions, 22 closed questions (with one answer or multiple
ones) and 14 open. The questionnaire was designed to retrieve information on sociodemographic
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Table 25.5 Linguistic and formal criteria for the translation of the texts
446
Table 25.5 (Continued)
data (7 questions), language profile (7 questions), visitors’ cultural habits (9 questions) and issues
connected with MAB and its texts (12 questions).
We received 47 answers to our questionnaire, although not everyone who visited the museum
actually answered. The respondents’ ages ranged from 13 to 90 years and 53.2% were males.
56.4% of the visitors were Portuguese, while the remaining came from East Timor, Angola, Brazil,
Venezuela, Cape Vert and Guinea. 80.4% of the respondents identified Portuguese as their mother
tongue, with the remaining languages being different creoles from Portuguese-speaking African
countries, Spanish and Tetum. In terms of their professions, respondents were essentially students
(41.3%) and retired people (36.9%), the remaining encompassing civil servants (6.6%), translators
(2.2%), gerontologists (2.2%), construction workers (2.2%), unemployed (2.2%) and 6.4% gave
no answer. In terms of their qualifications, 34.1% had completed secondary school and 29.8%
basic school, followed by 25.5% with a bachelor’s degree, 6.4% master’s degree, 2.1% doctorate
degree and 2.1% presented no answer. 74% reported not having a disability, whereas 13% stated
having visual impairment, 6.5% intellectual, 4.3% physical and 2.2% cognitive.
Regarding respondents’ cultural habits, 55.3% stated they visit museums – 46.4% only go once
a year, 42.9% up to five times a year and 10.7% once a month. 17.8% stated they always read
the information provided by the museums, 48.9% read it frequently, 24.4% rarely read it and
8.9% never read any information. In terms of the information offered by museums, we provided
the following choices: Museum brochures, labels, wall texts, exhibition texts, videos, exhibition
catalogues, museum books and an open option for visitors to include another possibility. For this
question, visitors could choose various options, and the three items that they mostly read were wall
information (81.6%), followed by museum brochures (65.8%) and labels (63.2%). For those who
don’t read information in museums, we asked them to explain why in an open question and, among
the reasons given, their answers focused on the fact that texts were rather long and in small print.
Regarding the texts provided for MAB, 68.9% stated they read either all or almost all of the
texts provided. Only 51% remembered one of the 17 texts. These respondents recognized this was
essentially for positive reasons, choosing multiple answers from the options provided: On the one
hand, it helped understand the meaning of the room (71.4%), it was easy to understand (39.3%) and
it contained original information (25%); but, on the other hand, it was hard to understand (14.3%).
The other respondents who did not remember any text chose the following reasons among the
options provided: The texts were long (70.6%), complex (47.1%) and not very interesting (5.9%).
The respondents were also asked to present their general opinion about these texts. Among their
responses the following reasons were given:
• Long [texts], but informative and useful, despite the fact that it was confusing to find the room
because its name was not mentioned (Respondent 2 – 16 years old, male).
• They were long and quite clear but the first ones were long (Respondent 6 – 18 years old,
female).
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• They are texts that help to understand the works, quite didactic, even if using less common words
they still helped me to better understand the works (Respondent 13 – 23 years old, female).
• The texts should be more succinct and organized in bullet points (Respondent 19 – 76 years old,
female).
• Long and difficult (Respondents 18, 20, 26, 27, 30, 47 – 36 years old, female; 34 years old, female;
38 years old, male; 49 years old, male; 66 years old, male; 84 years old, male, respectively).
In the penultimate section, we asked visitors to provide comments about the texts, and only 33
respondents out of the 47 provided responses. A selection of the answers are as follows:
• The text about the building would be easier to read and memorize if it was organised under
headings and written in larger font. This opinion applies for all the texts (Respondent 19 – 76
years old, female).
• The texts helped a lot in understanding the the contents of the room (Respondent 4 – 15 years
old, male).
• Well organized and very informative (Respondent 7 – 21 years old, male).
• Texts that were well explained, with relevant information for the understanding of each room
(Respondent 10 – 27 years old, female).
• They contextualize and create interest in the works (Respondent 12 – 22 years old, male).
• The texts are important for the visitors, and enable them to know the museum better (Respond
ent 23 – 22 years old, male).
• And what I most liked is the vocabulary [explained] at the end of each text (Respondent 25 – 20
years old, female).
• The texts lack numbers; the texts don’t include the number of the rooms (Respondent 33 – 70
years old, female).
• Despite being a bit long, they were explicit, but the number of the rooms was lacking, in my
opinion (Respondent 35 – 69 years old, female).
• In some parts, the text has confusing sentences and they don’t match with the order of the works
in the rooms (Respondent 17 – 36 years old, female).
• Explanatory and very good for the contextualization of the exhibition. I just found the descrip
tion about the structure and architecture of the museum a little difficult to imagine without a
visual reference (Respondent 14 – 25 years old, male).
Finally, they were asked to make suggestions to the museum, so as to improve future visits. Among
the answers given, the visitors suggested that the museum should offer audioguides, videos and
generally more audiovisual interactivity. In terms of the rooms, they recommended that the rooms
be numbered, the lighting improved and chairs or benches provided. As for information, they con
sidered it was important to have a map highlighting the spatial orientation through the rooms, as
well as larger labels (both in terms of overall size and font size), with stronger contrast and in two
foreign languages. The information about the history of the museum and the building should be
divided and given in several rooms, instead of in one fell swoop at the beginning.
Discussion of the data

The accessibility conditions of MAB are still insufficient in certain aspects, particularly in terms of
sensory and intellectual access. For this reason, in 2020, we were approached by the director of the
museum to “simplify” a number of texts that focused on each of the 15 rooms in the museum, on
448
the history of the museum and of the building and the biographies of two former directors. Despite
this straightforward intention, the director had no clear notion of what “simplifying” meant and
especially what Plain Language entailed, whereas the research team did. Throughout the process,
the director showed discomfort and reacted negatively to the changes we suggested. During the
discussions, we attempted to clarify the aims of Plain Language, how it came across in a text and
its advantages for a wide range of visitors. In the first meeting, the director refused to accept cer
tain changes, claiming it would retrieve the intended content and abridge the content so drastically
it would be too little. We managed to overcome some of these obstacles, but even so, as it was
obvious from the responses to our questionnaire, the texts are still long and complex.
The underlying reason for this reaction was fear of appearing to dumb down the language in the
eyes of other directors and (semi)specialist visitors, who are a residual percentage of the visitors.
Despite his good intents, the director had never fully grasped that Plain Language would simplify
the syntax, imposing an Subject Verb Object (SVO) structure, thus eliminating highly complex
sentences, or that it would have to remove highly technical language regarding architecture, sculp
ture or painting, replacing them with simpler synonyms or ultimately eliminating them. He had
not anticipated that there would be the need to include explanations that he initially regarded as
condescending but at the end acknowledged as beneficial.
At the end of this process, both parts recognize that the major shortcoming of this project was
the idyllic idea that the original texts were suitable for being turned into wall texts. Had the length
of the wall texts been decided at the start of the project, we would have had fewer problems in
abridging the original texts. Believing that the texts written by specialists could be given to any
visitor with just a slight tweaking was naïve and unrealistic and both the director and the research
team’s responsibility. The best course of action would have been to identify the main ideas con
veyed by the original texts and create new ones, bearing in mind where they would be placed and
the number of words they could include. The original texts were clearly highly technical and com
plex as seen in “Description of the corpus” subsection, thus their readability ranged from 13 to 23.
When it comes to the visitors and validators of the simplified texts, there are several con
clusions to be reached. Firstly, most of them enjoyed the information in some of the texts, but
always pointed out that they were long, some more than others, and still rather complex. The
explanations provided were greatly appreciated and the overall impression was that the texts
achieved their purpose: To mediate, to contextualize and to explain the museum, the rooms and
some objects. What was interesting about our visitors’ answers was that they made a number of
very useful suggestions not only for improving the texts but also for enhancing the museum’s
accessibility. One suggested that the text about the history of the museum should be divided into
various rooms and a part be given in each room (as if it were a treasure hunt of the museum’s
history), so that it would be less tiring and more stimulating and interactive. Interactivity was
identified as lacking by several visitors: The museum had no audioguides (or similar), videos
or other means to improve enjoyment. Besides this, they provided a few practical recommenda
tions: The texts about the rooms should identify the number of the room, which should also be
placed at the entrance, on the wall; texts could be organized in bullet points and have headings
so that reading could be smoother; font should be larger both in the texts and the labels, the lat
ter should also be translated into foreign languages. Lastly, they also commented on the lack of
lighting and of resting places.
Notwithstanding, there are two groups that should be highlighted: On the one hand, the visi
tors with intellectual impairment found the texts extremely long and difficult, which is more than
understandable given that they were not the original addressees and, on the other, the older adults
were highly critical and spared no criticism for what they regarded as wrong and outdated.
449
In a nutshell, neither the format nor the purpose of the original texts were cut out to be placed on
the wall. Although the methodology used could have been different, the research team fulfilled the
initial aim which was to simplify the original texts as much as possible. This much was confirmed
by most visitors: They found the texts enjoyable, informative and useful, despite some issues that
remained unresolved.
Conclusion
Intralingual translation has been overlooked for decades not only in Translation Studies, but also
within AVT. Despite the development of accessibility modes in AVT and the birth of MA, the
truth remains that intralingual accessible modes have not yet received full attention. If, on the one
hand, SDH and AD, whether or not in the same language, have come to be accepted and included
in translation-based modalities (cf. Greco & Jankowska, 2020), on the other hand, Easy and Plain
Languages have not been fully acknowledged and introduced in these modalities.
These language varieties can play a relevant role in museum access and other cultural venues,
particularly for people with intellectual impairment, as well as a variety of other visitors from chil
dren to people with lower literacy and migrants. Consequently, they provide a resource of the utmost
importance for museum accessibility and to overcome a number of barriers visitors may encounter
(cf. Dodd & Sandell, 1998; Sassaki, 2005), not to mention in various other areas of social life.
The project developed at the museum of the Abbot of Baçal, in Bragança, aimed at simplifying
a set of texts that were to be placed on the walls of each of the museum rooms. In Museum Project
we characterized the corpus in terms of number of words, sentences, explanations and readability
levels, described the methodology used and the simplification process followed, and analysed the
changes that occurred in the chosen text, as well as the responses obtained from the questionnaire
conducted with the visitors who were asked to validate the final wall texts.
Although the research team’s purpose was to enhance information and intellectual access at
MAB, it also encouraged access in the decision-making, since the visitors were given a voice to
participate in improving the accessibility of a local museum, where they live(d). As Greco (2018,
p. 213) purports, there is no accessibility without participation. Despite our project’s shortcom
ings, it enabled the research team to achieve a learning curve that will guide our future accessibil
ity endeavours, be it in Plain or in Easy Language.
Notes
1 Quote retrieved from EST’s 10th Congress Booklet with the description of the panel themes.
2 The visits were conducted within the Accessible Film Festival organized annually by the Polytechnic Insti
tute of Bragança (cf. https://festivalcinemacessivel.ipb.pt/edicao-atual).
3 It includes the assessment of Building, Location, Exhibitions – permanent and temporary, Communication,
Security Consulting, Training, Employment, Assessment and Management.
4 A new director was nominated on 1 November 2022. As such, changes from the new management are
expected to the final version of the texts.
5 That is, “Information technology – User interfaces – Part 1: Guidance on making written text easy to read
and easy to understand” (under development – preview used).
Further reading
Bailey, E. (1990). The Plain English approach to business writing. Oxford University Press.
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Carlucci, L., & Seibel, C. (2020). El discurso especializado en el museo inclusivo: lectura fácil versus au
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de comunicación: de la teoría a la práctica/Translation and media accessibility: From theory to practice.
MonTI, 12, 262–294.
Cutts, M. (2020). Oxford guide to Plain English. Oxford University Press.
Freyhoff, G., Hess, G., Kerr, L., Menzel, E., Tronbacke, B., & van der Veken, K. (1998). Make it simple.
European guidelines for the production of easy-to-read information for people with learning disability for
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Gambier, Y. (2021). Multimodalité, traduction et traduction audiovisuelle. Journal of French Language Re
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García Muñoz, O. (2012). Lectura fácil: métodos de redacción y evaluación. Real Patronato sobre
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Inclusion Europe (2009). Information for all European standards for making information easy to read and
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síveis. Ministério da Cultura. Secretaria do Audiovisual.
Perego, E. (2020a). Accessible communication: A cross-country journey. Frank & Timme.
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rgd.ca/database/files/library/RGD_AccessAbility2_Handbook_2021_09_28.pdf
Taylor, C., & Perego, E. (2021). New approaches to accessibility and audio description in museum environ
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files/un_disability-inclusive_communication_guidelines.pdf
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26
TRANSLATION INTO EASY
LANGUAGE
The unexplored case of podcasts
Elisa Perego
Introduction
Translation can take many forms; it is a flexible concept and a flexible process. The fact that
translation is not restricted to the transfer of a message from one language to another can be traced
back to antiquity (Munday, 2016), and this view on translation was re-established in the 1960s by
Jakobson’s position on translation. Jakobson’s renowned semiotics-based translation tripartition
(1959) paved the way for the exploration and the inclusion of new forms of translation into the
area of Translation Studies. According to the Russian-born American linguist, a verbal sign can
be interpreted intralingually, interlingually, and intersemiotically. In the former case, the changes
take place within the same language. Interlingual translation replaces a verbal sign with another
sign belonging to a different language. Intersemiotic translation involves the replacement of verbal
signs with non-verbal signs.
Audio description (AD) for people who are blind or visually impaired is a reversed type of
intersemiotic translation conceived primarily for audiences who need visual elements to be con
veyed verbally and processed aurally. In audio described products, an oral track, which has been
prepared following established rules (Remael et al., 2015),1 describes the relevant visual details
of the source text, and this enables people who are visually impaired to access it, understand it
more easily, and thereby appreciate it. The translation of a source text into a target text in a differ
ent language is itself a way to overcome language barriers and ensure accessibility to a different
language and a different culture, while same-language translation is an established service for the
deaf and hard-of-hearing audience (SDH). Conversely, the adaptation of a source text into a text
in the same language that is easier to understand is a type of intralingual translation mainly meant
for users with intellectual and cognitive difficulties. Language and content simplification can in
fact support persons who require a reduced level of complexity to access messages to fully or
better participate in society and to profit from communicative inclusion (Bernabé & Orero, 2019;
Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021; Maaβ, 2020; Perego, 2020a). AD, SDH, and translation into Easy
Language are all referred to as accessible and inclusive types of translation. The need to produce
texts that prevent communicative exclusion has become crucial to ensure the human rights of per
sons with disabilities, and it has become the engine of several recent EU-funded research projects.
In this chapter, I will illustrate two projects I was directly involved in that are particularly sig
nificant in the field of accessibility and inclusion and that are closely associated to the delivery of
453 DOI: 10.4324/9781003188872-33

Elisa Perego
oral content; I will provide an overview of simplification as a form of intralingual translation, and
I will advance the proposal of making podcasts accessible through intralingual translation for the
benefit of users who prefer to listen rather than to read (e.g., ILSM, 1998). To do so, I will first
outline the main features of podcasts as a new media and then I will offer a structural description
and linguistic analysis of the Jane Fonda episode of the American series She’s So Cool by Adrianne
White. Finally, I will tackle the uncharted theme of podcast intralingual translation and provide
examples, a working and transferable template, and a reflection on the best practices to implement
when trying to adapt this emergent medium for new audiences.
Accessible translation
Whenever accessibility is addressed within translation studies, it is most often linked to audio
visual translation in its media accessibility varieties: Audio description for the blind and visually
impaired audiences and subtitling for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, all of which is con
nected to persons with disabilities (Neves, 2022). However, same-language translation from a
standard language variety to an Easy Language variety (see following section) can fall into this
category, too.
A recently concluded project that has been conceived on this very premise is the three-year
Easy Access for Social Inclusion Training (EASIT) project. Launched in 2018, it was financed by
the European Union under the Erasmus+ Programme, Key Action 2 – Cooperation for Innovation
and the Exchange of Good Practices, Strategic Partnership. The project was coordinated by Anna
Matamala and focused on translating already existing multimodal texts (ADs, subtitles, and web
news) into easy-to-understand (E2U) multimodal texts (ADs, subtitles, and web news) – as well as
preparing them from scratch. Both translation and creation are crucial processes in making this type
of semiotically complex content accessible to a growing sector of the audience, which includes
disadvantaged users as well as potentially large groups of secondary users such as language learn
ers and poorly literate audiences. The main objective of the project was to prepare specific course
materials that enable AD, subtitle, and web news professionals to include new intralingual transla
tion skills into their portfolio. The project’s rationale is that professionals working in the audio
visual sector can learn language simplification strategies to implement them in their texts, and
so expand their potential audiences. The project also evaluated how such additional skills could
be added to already existing profiles developed as part of other projects in the field of accessible
translation, such as ADLAB PRO (on audio description) and ILSA (on subtitling); thus proposing
a highly innovative aspect of applied research as it proposed to merge already established skills
with new ones, thereby improving the employability of professionals (Matamala & Orero, 2018,
p. 69). Technically, the EASIT consortium collaborated to design a comprehensive and coherent
curriculum to train experts in Easy Language by defining specific learning outcomes and a clear
course structure, attributing European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTF) credits
to each activity in order for them to be easily recognized in formal education systems, and pos
sibly in European certification procedures, so as to guarantee the project sustainability and impact.
The multilingual2 educational resources that have been produced allow both for self-learning and
for their inclusion in different existing educational settings (EASIT, 2021). The overall course is
structured into six units: (1) Media accessibility, (2) Easy-to-understand language (E2U), (3) E2U
and subtitling, (4) E2U and audio description, (5) E2U and audiovisual journalism and (6) The
profession. Each unit is broken down into several topics (elements) that enable trainees to focus
on specific aspects of each unit. Further down in the third level, elements comprise various items
which cover one or more of the learning outcomes. This results in a very finely grained structure
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that enables trainers and trainees to select the items they really need according to their background
and learning specificities. So, for example, Unit 2 includes five elements: (1) Understanding E2U,
(2) Legislation, standards and guidelines, (3) Processes, (4) The language of E2U, and (5) Visual
presentation. Element (4) includes five items: (1) Textual aspects of E2U, (2) Lexical aspects of
E2U, (3) Pragmatic aspects of E2U, (4) Syntactic aspects of E2U, and (5) Discourse aspects of
E2U. In Unit 4, devoted to E2U and audio description, great attention has been given among other
things to voice-related aspects that can enhance the comprehensibility of texts delivered vocally.
This is an aspect that links EASIT to the project ADLAB PRO entirely devoted to audio descrip
tion. The ADLAB PRO project (Audio Description: A Laboratory for the Development of a New
Professional Profile, 2016–2019), that I coordinated, was financed by the European Union under
the Erasmus+ Programme, Key Action 2 – Strategic Partnerships.
ADLAB PRO concentrated on catering for the provision of free and fully customizable train
ing materials for the formation of audio describers. This filled an awkward educational and pro
fessional gap and at the same time enhanced the awareness towards a job that was still not fully
recognized in Europe, as well as granting a long-term impact on a wide spectrum of potential ben
eficiaries, including both the blind and the visually impaired communities as well as a wide array
of persons with varied needs (Starr, 2022). The ADLAB PRO materials (ADLAB PRO, 2019) are
made up of six modules divided into units that can be selected and matched according to the needs
and existing educational or professional background of the trainees. The six modules include (1)
General introduction, (2) Screen AD, (3) AD of live events, (4) (Semi) live AD and recorded AD
for static arts and environments, (5) Additional services, and (6) Additional technical issues, devel
opments and change – each further structured internally.
Simplification as a form of intralingual translation

The expression “easy to understand” (abbreviated as E2U) has been crucial in the EASIT project,
which revisited this concept (e.g., Bernabé & Orero, 2019; ILSMH, 1998) to make it a central
notion in its theoretical background. E2U refers to a language variety that embraces a blend of fea
tures belonging to both Easy and Plain Language (EL and PL) to refer to a usable and comprehen
sible language variety that falls in between a continuum where EL and PL stand at the two ends. In
a nutshell, both Easy and Plain Language “aim at text understandability and intelligibility via more
or less substantial interventions on lexicon, sentence structure, text and content organization, and
page layout”. It is sometimes easier to detect similarities rather than differences between these two
varieties. However, EL and PL “differ considerably in terms of levels of simplification (with the
former representing the maximal language and content simplification form) and target audience”
(Perego, 2020b, p. 234). The convenience of such a hybrid variety is that it avoids the acceptability
issues normally linked to Easy Language, which can be perceived as too simple and therefore be
stigmatized along with its users, and it also avoids the possible complexities that Plain Language
can present, being quite close to standard language (Maaβ, 2020; Perego, 2020a).
Language simplification is crucial to reach accessible communication, which in turn is decisive
in several inclusive social contexts. It can prevent communication exclusion and grant content vul
garization as well as be an effective means for language comprehension, retention, acquisition, and
learning (Bhatia, 1983). Caring for the delivery of comprehensible messages is therefore beneficial
to a wide array of audiences, including people with cognitive or learning difficulties, prelingual
hearing impairment, aphasia, different types of dementia, autism spectrum disorders, and multiple
co-occurring disabilities, as well as people suffering from literacy deficits – such as migrants,
language learners, tourists, etc. – and simply nonexperts (Perego, 2020a, 2020b). Currently, in
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Europe there is no consistent text practice to ease these groups of users, with some European
countries being at the very forefront and others still trying to draw near (Lindholm & Vanhatalo,
2021), based on the awareness that a stronger focus on accessible communication would result in
a better functioning and a more effective society. The consequences of unintelligible content can
in fact affect negatively both the system and a person’s life, while clear communication is known
to save time, money, and lives and also to greatly improve the overall quality of life and mental
health of many people.
There are general and language-specific guidelines created intentionally with the aim of mak
ing content accessible to struggling audiences or to non-specialists (Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021;
Maaβ, 2020; Perego, 2020a). EL, PL and E2U texts can be created from scratch by profession
als or adapted (translated intralingually) from an existing text (a source text) based on specific
principles. Either way, text professionals have to think about their target group and the main aim
of their publication, but also organize content clearly and logically, prioritize information, have
the draft read by end-users, fine-tune it, and check it again with a reader group before use (these
last stages are referred to as “validation”; ILSMH, 1998; García Muñoz, 2012, p. 25; see the EU
project TRAIN2VALIDATE entirely focused on validation). The production and the adaptation
processes share procedural similarities, even though the latter is considered especially difficult by
some professionals because it implies a relationship between two texts, the source (standard), and
the target (simplified) texts (García Muñoz, 2012, p. 24). In this respect, the adaptation will imply
the production of a new text in the same language that should maintain balance and fidelity with
regards to the source text in terms of meaning and style or flavour. Such balance is the result of
the adapter’s ability to analyse the source text thoroughly and identify its genre, main subject, and
global tone and to maintain each of them in the target text with acceptable approximation (García
Muñoz, 2012, p. 24). This process is nothing but a translation process – and in fact it obeys its
basic principles (Jakobson, 1959; Munday, 2016). It should be noted however that professionals
can decide to produce a new personal version which is just roughly based on the source content,
a practice that somehow exceeds the still flexible boundaries of translation and could rather be
considered a summarization activity (ILSMH, 1998).
Whatever process is followed, making a text simpler in form (lexicon and grammar) and con
tent (subject matter) means manipulating it and bringing it “within the area of language already
assumed to be known to the proposed audience” (Bhatia, 1983, p. 42). Making it easier, on the
other hand, involves techniques helping the text user to better access and consume it, for example
by implementing strategies that guide them through the text and help them plan and implement
their text-consumption strategies (e.g., layout and text organization). Whether and how it is possi
ble to translate a podcast into Easy Language will be the focus of the following sections. Podcasts
have in fact not yet been considered by media accessibility studies in spite of the considerable
importance they have acquired as purveyors of content.
Podcasts as emergent media

Although their rise in popularity is recent, nowadays podcasts are pervasive (Sawyer, 2020; Staff,
2019). We all know them, and we all have listened to one at least once. However, literature on the
linguistic nature of podcasts is currently lacking. Studies in the field tend to focus on podcasts’ ori
gins, their comparison with radio content, their mapping in terms of typology, or the best practical
ways to script them well and engage listeners (Berry, 2016, 2020; Bond, 2021; Ciccarelli, 2021;
Leonard, 2017; Lindgren, 2016; Lupo, 2019; Markman & Sawyer, 2014; Sawyer, 2020; Staff,
2019). To know what we are talking about, an overview of these aspects is essential.
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Origins and definition

Although their origins can be traced back to the 1990s and the spread of home Internet connec
tions, the term “podcast”, a portmanteau or blend of the words “iPod” and “broadcasting”, was
coined in 2004 (Hammersley, 2004) to refer to original audio content available serially in the
form of different-length and different-type episodes that can be downloaded from the Internet (vs.
distributed from a broadcaster) and reproduced at will, thus liberating both the listeners and the
producers from time and place. The technical features of podcasts have determined a new selec
tive and voluntary way of consuming online content that characterizes this “emergent, and often
amateur, medium” (Berry, 2016) and its increasing popularity in everyday life (Lupo, 2019; The
Nielsen Company, 2021). Such popularity is also linked to the spread of Smartphones and the
resulting increased mobility of (Western) people, who have more and more been relying on on-
demand content (Atzori, 2017; Markman & Sawyer, 2014, p. 21).
Types
It is not easy to classify and identify typologies when it comes to mapping podcasts. A myriad of
labels and taxonomies exist based on the type of content they deliver (e.g., fiction vs. nonfiction),
on the scope and communicative purpose they have (podcasts can inform, entertain, educate, or
blend purposes), and on the interactive mode chosen to handle a topic (this involves different
degrees of planning, with scripted vs. non-scripted podcast texts, the latter comprising for instance
monologues by the podcaster or conversations in the form of dialogues between hosts, debates
with guests and opinion leaders, interviews or roundtable discussions, panels, etc.). This is why
we can come across several complex descriptive labels that combine reference to content-, scope-,
and/or mode-related information in order to be as explicit as possible as to what a prospective lis
tener is to expect, and help them to search, find, and select what they are looking for. Even though
being able to group content based on conventional and recognized features could contribute to giv
ing podcast types legitimacy (Biber, 1988; Swales, 1990), we are still dealing with unsystematic
labelling systems. These can comprise more (e.g., Leonard, 2017) or fewer (e.g., Berry, 2020; Cic
carelli, 2021) podcast types3 whose labels show different degrees of explicitness and of hybridiza
tion in terms of types or genres. So, if we read “scripted fiction podcast” (Ciccarelli, 2021), this
gives us information on the mode and on the content of the podcast, on its planned script and on
the fact that it delivers a story, normally in the form of an audio drama, unfolding through a cast
of voice actors and sound effects designed to immerse the listener in the narrative. In podcasting,
fiction is a relatively new format that was pioneered by popular shows such as Welcome to Night
Vale and Homecoming,4 and it is often regarded as a separate category to account for invented or
untrue creative content (Ciccarelli, 2021). The label “nonfiction narrative story-telling” (Leonard,
2017), on the other hand, is quite redundant, offering information on the factual nature of the con
tent (nonfiction) and on the mode of delivery: Narratives or storytelling podcasts are story-driven
shows relying on heavy editing and displaying structured and planned content and language. Inter
views, also referred to as conversations, include people talking to each other; they are normally
made up of one host, with either a single guest interviewee or multiple guests throughout the
course of the show (Ciccarelli, 2021). This podcast type provides listeners with different view
points mainly through unplanned speech. Overall, the scope and communicative purpose of the
podcast is not always made available, but a threefold structure label (SCOPE-CONTENT-MODE)
could be useful to make the most relevant features readily available (e.g., “Informative nonfiction
narrative podcast” or “Entertaining investigative panel”).
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Format
Format (or internal structure) refers to the way content is organized or how material within a show
is arranged. Although formats can vary, they enable podcast creators to better plan their content
and listeners to know what to expect (Bond, 2021). Structurally, podcasts tend to include (but are
not restricted to) specific “moves” (or text components, Bhatia, 1993) in a specific order. All pod
casts contain at least an introduction (INTRO) and an ender (OUTRO), as well as a SEGMENT,
that is the content element, or core, of the podcast. Depending on their type, podcasts can include
an opening slogan or production elements such as a billboard and rundown, which are short text
elements listing the content to follow and encouraging listeners to stay with the host for the entire
podcast. Serial podcasts, whose episodes are linked and best consumed in a specific order, offer a
summary, if previous episodes or content need to be explained, and they always introduce the new
episode. Teasers, another frequent production element, offer just a little information to get listen
ers excited about units of content that will appear later in the show, or teasing the next show at
the end of a current show. Finally, transition elements, usually in the form of music clips or sound
effects, typically carry the listener from one piece to another and separate portions of content, and
salutations and acknowledgements, with or without a final theme song, normally close an episode.
The orality and listenability of podcasts

Podcasts are auditory media closely linked to the listening process, whose content is perceived through
a single sense and delivered through verbal and non-verbal meaning-making signs (e.g., monologues,
dialogues or polylogues, as well as music, silence, sound effects). Their appeal in a multimodal soci
ety succeeds based on the imaginative power of spoken language, on the narrative dimension which
ensures intimacy and freedom, on the strong emotional reactions that podcasts generate, and on their
ability to level out social discrimination, especially if compared to television and cinema products
(Lupo, 2019, pp. 109–113). The total lack of visuals in fact enables listeners to focus on the voice and
the emotions conveyed by the story, and not to be distracted by elements that could make them miss
important parts of the narration. Voice plays a central role (Anolli, 2012, pp. 160–161; Lavinio, 2004,
p. 80; Perrotta, 2017; see Kozloff, 2000 for the role of voice in films): It conveys “warmth, empathy,
personality” and provides listeners with company (Lindgren, 2016, p. 37), which is an effective antidote
to the condition of solitude of modern life (Lindgren, 2016). The oral nature of podcasts varies depend
ing on the podcast type and can range from spontaneous to seemingly natural depending on the level
of editing the script has undergone. However, irrespective of their typically planned or “prefabricated”
(Baños-Piñero & Chaume, 2009) nature – to borrow a term from film language studies – the language
of podcasts tends to share features of fictional dialogue and broadcast language (e.g., Vagle, 1991),
including a balanced combination of elements used in spoken and in written texts that contributes to
its specificity and listenability. Listenability is a decisive feature of all aural media which measures
the “quality of discourse that eases the cognitive burden that aural processing imposes” (Rubin, 2012,
p. 176). Listening is an active process and a complex ability involving working memory, vocabulary,
attention, and neural processing (Beck, 2015). That can be facilitated at least by some strategies includ
ing the use of an oral-based language style, signpost language guiding listeners through the audio text,
a coherent text structure, a wise choice of (clear yet engaging) words, and the skilled use of most voice
potentials: Strong prosodic stress or over-articulation can be exploited for instance to manage emphasis
and direct the attention of the listener but also to favour “acoustic segmentation and lexical access”
(Bernabé & Orero, 2019, p. 66). Using pauses in strategic spots and breathing properly is also condu
cive to listenability as calibrating the pace of the narration and setting the right tone for each podcast,
which will enhance its positive perception.
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A linguistic close-up and a simplification proposal of

She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda
Source text analysis

She’s So Cool is an empowerment nonfiction narrative podcast for entrepreneurs hosted by Adri
enne White, podcast strategist and business consultant, launched in January 2019 and designed to
give women the tools they need to better understand their challenges and to enhance their quality
of life. The 2019 episode on Jane Fonda will be my case study. It depicts the struggles and suc
cesses of the well-known actress, author, activist, fashion model, and fitness guru Jane Fonda, and
it outlines her family history, her relationships, her activism, and her journey to finding happiness.
For this study, I selected a nonfiction narrative podcast (1) because of its informative yet informal
and entertaining content, which makes it a podcast type that can easily engage listeners (including
disadvantaged listeners) that wish to access true stories of others; (2) because of the strong presence
in the market of this genre in several languages, which makes it representative of a widespread genre
and ensures that reflections on its simplification can be applied irrespective of the source language;
and (3) because of the highly planned nature of the script, which makes it easier to create a possible
replicable – yet flexible – simplification template. Furthermore, this episode includes a varied array
of listener-engaging strategies that typically characterize the language of most podcasts, which I
thought would be useful to analyse with simplification in mind. The general choice of focusing
on podcasts is instead linked to the need to make new media accessible to people with cognitive
and intellectual disabilities who could not access authentic cultural content without simplification.
Informal focus groups conducted in a local division of Anffas ONLUS, the National Association of
Families of Persons with Intellectual and/or Relational Disabilities, has in fact shown a considerable
interest by end-users in this type of product. An interest that might be reconducted to the fact that not
all end-users process written language easily and they might prefer to access content aurally.
The macrostructure of the Jane Fonda episode is conventional (INTRO/SEGMENT/OUTRO)
with an elaborate internal organization (Table 26.1) linked to the richness of the content, which
Table 26.1 Format and internal organization of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda
INTRO Salutation
Presentation
• Host
• Target audience
• Podcast
Content warning
Episode summary
CORE or SEGMENT Introduction
Opening questions
Personal anecdotes
Recommendations
Content proper
Rationale
Teases
OUTRO Thanks
Closing remarks
Credits
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Elisa Perego
is conveyed in approximately 20 minutes (146 wpm), and to the type of target audience, that is,
mainly educated Western women with a strong sense of individual and collective awareness. The
INTRO includes an informal salutation, the presentation of the host, of the listeners, and of the
podcast, a content warning to notify reference to a possibly difficult or taboo topic, and a brief
summary of the episode. The SEGMENT of the script, which is the longest section of the podcast
(3,177 words), provides mainly content information. This is usually the most creative, varied, and
unpredictable section of a podcast, where the host can organize content depending on the story,
their presentation preferences, and market considerations. The OUTRO includes a set of conven
tional closing moves such as thanks, closing remarks, and credits.
The lexical density and therefore the informativity of the script is high, with sentences that can
include a large number of lexical words (in bold in the examples) (e.g., these topics include sexual
abuse suicide and eating disorders, 77.78%). This is compensated by an overall limited lexical
variation and by passages with a substantial presence of listener engaging expressions rich in pro
nominal forms, auxiliaries, and other grammatical items (e.g., do you strive for perfection?: 40%;
or no release date has been shared but I will keep you posted on that: 35.71%) as well as stance
expressions (I wish I wasn’t like that: 16.67%; or I wish I was braver than what I am: 22.22%).
The limited lexical variation comes with a large number of repeats and frequent words. Table 26.3
shows that the first 30 words for frequency are all grammatical (with the exception of the personal
noun Jane, which counts 60 occurrences in the whole script), which is typical of a spoken register.
On the lexical level, although the majority of the words are short (with an average length of
4.28 letters, as per Table 26.3), long letter words do occur in the podcast, with 98 nine-letter words,
43 ten-letter words, 35 eleven-letter words, 15 twelve-letter words, 13 thirteen-letter words, and
only 1 fourteen-letter word. Long letter words in English are normally rare and not native words
(i.e., Latinae terms or borrowings), and they are words that tend to be less easily retained. The
long-letter words detected in the script do not occur frequently, but they are either closely related
to the content of the text, giving it its specificity and determining its style (e.g., encouragement,
expectations, objectifying, etc.) or are morphologically complex stance words (e.g., unfortunately,
unforgivable, interesting, etc.) used by the narrator to position herself in relation to the narration
in terms of evaluation.
Table 26.2 Main figures of the script of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda. Figures have
been calculated based on WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012)
Length in minutes 23.21 minutes

Characters 15,482
Tokens 3,386
Types 965
T/T Ratio, Standardized TTR, SD 27.82%, 40.67%, 44.58
Mean word length (SD) 4.28 (2.31)
Sentences 194
Mean in words (SD) 14.95 (8.95)
Lexical density 47.28%
Gunning Fog Index 10.83
Passive voice 17.53% approx.
Words per minute 145.88
Characters per minute 667.04
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Table 26.3 Frequency list of the script of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda
N Word Freq. %
1 TO 113 3.24
2 SHE 108 3.09
3 HER 106 3.04
4 THE 96 2.75
5 AND 90 2.58
6 I 82 2.35
7 OF 69 1.98
8 A 69 1.98
9 THAT 62 1.78
10 JANE 60 1.72
11 WAS 56 1.60
12 YOU 51 1.46
13 IN 49 1.40
14 FOR 43 1.23
15 WITH 38 1.09
16 S 35 1.00
17 THIS 34 0.97
18 IS 31 0.89
19 IT 26 0.74
20 HAD 24 0.69
21 BE 23 0.66
22 # 22 0.63
23 ON 21 0.60
24 ABOUT 21 0.60
25 AS 20 0.57
26 LIFE 19 0.54
27 SO 18 0.52
28 LIKE 18 0.52
29 ARE 18 0.52
30 THEY 17 0.49
Stylewise, we can observe the presence of a female narrator (podcast host Adrienne White) and
a widespread use of I-language (I think . . . ; As a fitness instructor, I love this fun fact . . .). The
first-person pronoun “I” is the sixth most frequent word in the text (with 82 occurrences; see also
“we” N = 15 and “my” N = 13). The top left collocate of “I” is “that”, and its top right collocate is
“think”, which suggest the close involvement of the narrator in the text and the required involve
ment of the listener. Furthermore, the verbs that often pair with “I” are stative verbs expressing
desire such as “wanna”, “love”, and “wish”. On the other hand, the direct involvement of the audi
ence and the creation of expectations (On this episode, you will learn about . . .) is expressed using
the second person pronoun “you” (N = 51) and the modal auxiliary “will” expressing an intention
link to the moment of speaking and the decision to fulfil it (Lewis, 1994, p. 21).
The central topic of the episode is the multifaceted life of Jane Fonda, who is referred to either
with the first name “Jane” (N = 60), or with the third person singular pronoun “she” (N = 108).
The full name “Jane Fonda” occurs only seven times at the beginning of the narration, where the
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scene is set, and twice when specific works are mentioned (such as the Jane Fonda workout video
and the Jane Fonda in Five Acts).
The overall qualitative analysis of the podcast shows that the core section especially is imbued
with well-designed listener engagement strategies (Broersma, 2019; Wolvin, 2010). This is not
surprising as capturing attention, delivering value, and making sure the audience remains until
the end of the episode is a primary concern of any podcast host and producer. In fact, only highly
engaged listeners will be exposed to all the key messages of the podcast, which is a good strategy
to get more recommendations, grow one’s show, and improve monetization (Land, 2022). In “Jane
Fonda”, the major listener engagement strategies include a short introduction to the episode and a
series of opening questions addressed to the listener. These direct questions are meant to involve
the listeners quickly, prepare them for the main topics covered in the text, attract their attention,
build interest, and create immediate engagement:
Do you strive for perfection? Have you ever felt like you aren’t good enough? Do you some
times feel empty or anxious? Or have you ever wished your body looked different? These
are all things Jane has struggled with. I’m here to share her story so we can learn and benefit
from her experiences and wisdom.
A similar aim is achieved thanks to varied hints at personal anecdotes: Sharing personal experience
and giving people the impression that you’re talking directly to them helps podcast providers to
create emotional connection with the listener who will be more likely to recommend the podcast.
This speaker-listener connection is maintained throughout the segment also via the expressions
of personal stance that verbalize overtly the personal attitude and the feelings or evaluation of
the podcast host. These are mainly expressed through value-laden lexical choices (I’m thankful
to Jane . . . ; I love this because . . . ; I’m super excited that . . . , I can’t wait to see . . .), detailed
recommendations (If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Jane in “Feminists, What Were They Thinking”
on Netflix), and relating host and listener to create a virtual yet strong bond (If you are like me . . .
; As a perfectionist myself . . .).
Relating to a coming event (The “Women’s March” of 2019 is happening) and having a clear
call to action (To find a march near you, visit womensmarch.com or you can find the link in the
show notes) that does not interrupt the storytelling, making sure it blends with the rest of the epi
sode, is a further strategy to build authentic podcast listener engagement – though the ability to
make the call to action hard to miss, but at the same time natural and the perfect thing to say at that
moment in your episode, is very challenging (Land, 2022).
Currently there is no listenability measure that we can resort to. However, the script’s read
ability5 calculated via the Gunning Fog Index6 (= 10.83) points to a text of average complexity,
also in terms of listenability: The podcast is in fact delivered in General American, an accent
that is widely recognized worldwide (other less widespread varieties of English might impede or
compromise its intelligibility). According to the National Center for Voice and Speech, the speech
rate is regular (146 wpm/11 cps),7 between the average conversation rate for US speakers (about
150 wpm) and that for radio presenters or podcasters (up to 160 wpm) but slow if compared to the
average speech rate of, for example, TED Talks (173 wpm, ranging from 154 to 201) or commen
tators (from 250 to even 400 wpm) (Barnard, 2018b).
Wisely planned verbal pauses break up the content and give emphasis to key points (Jane was not
trying to be defined by men, yet a lot of people were defining her, and all of them [LONG PAUSE]
were men), slow down the speaking rate (Barnard, 2018a), increase clarity and overall listenability,
462
and give the listener time to absorb the messages – which should be stressed in an EL translation
of the podcast. Overall, varying the rate through the speech is essential to make it more interesting
and engaging – which happens rarely in the podcast in question. Words are articulated clearly, and
sometimes even emphasized through paralanguage. Emphasis on a few selected key words through
intensified stressed sounds, as in the case of a longer open back rounded vowel in the word strong: /
strɒ:ŋ/ (This show is for listeners who want to learn about strong and influential women) or a longer
bilabial nasal /m/ in the adverbial intensifier many: /ˈm:ɛni/ (She has lived a full life with many differ
ent personas), or a blend of both lexical and paralinguistic strategies as in the case of the repetition of
the adverb and its stressed version in the first occurrence (she said it was really, really hard, but . . .).
Target text creation: the intralingual translation process

Almost any text can be simplified. Intralingual translation into EL, PL, or E2U can imply more or
less substantial rewriting depending on the level of simplification and comprehensibility we wish
to achieve, the nature of the source text, and the target audience. Simplification can occur through
addition, omission, or reformulation. Dosing these strategies adequately is central when the source
text is delivered through one channel. In a podcast, the catchy nature of the text must be retained,
and its length cannot be extended. Podcasts are designed to respect the limited attention span and
desire for instant gratification of their intended, often-multitasking, listeners while simultaneously
educating them by providing new information. Achieving the same aims with an Easy Language
podcast that lasts approximately the same time as the source text (or preferably less, not to overtax
the end-user) is therefore a challenging objective for the Easy Language translator.
There is not one unique way to proceed and there are no specific guidelines for podcast sim
plification.8 Following existing recommendations for written language can help, but a substantial
selection of the content and a great attention to listenability will be essential. So, choosing standard
language varieties (but also a slow speech rate and a large amount of pauses) will ensure enhanced
content accessibility to language learners, non-native English speakers, low-literacy audiences,
audiences with poor phonological awareness or dialect sensitivity, and so on. Some individuals
with dyslexia, for instance, find it difficult to recognize voices of multiple talkers (Long et al.,
2016). In an Anglophone context, Received Pronunciation or General American should be pre
ferred. Regarding structural and content-related choices, we saw that podcasts tend to have a
macrostructure (INTRO, SEGMENT, and OUTRO) that is often replicated and that can be per
sonalized to include a much more elaborate deep structure. The INTRO and the OUTRO sections
are the most predictable and routinized elements in podcasts, and therefore the ones that can be
simplified most effectively and whose simplification patterns are more easily transferrable and
require only minor adjustments. Their communicative function is easy to identify, and it can be
maintained without over-elaborating the target text (Table 26.4).
In the case of Jane Fonda’s INTRO, the source simple and direct opening salutation can remain
the same in an Easy English version. The source text host presentation resorts to a standard formula,
enriched by captivating descriptive adjectives that define the scope of the podcast (“a female empow
erment podcast”). However, although the use of a complex noun group pre-modified by nouns func
tioning as adjectives can work well and be catchy in the original version, it could be too demanding
for an Easy English version (its Gunning Fog Index is 21.6). There are several strategies that can be
used to enhance understanding. These include substituting the two noun modifiers with a simpler
adjective (“an inspiring podcast”, Gunning Fog Index: 14.53; or “a stimulating podcast”, Gunning
Fog Index: 14.53) or rewriting it using a relative clause: “This is a podcast that can inspire you”
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Table 26.4 Original and Easy English versions of the INTRO of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda
Source text: podcast script Target text: simplified proposal

Salutation Hi! Hi!
1) 1)
I’m Adrienne, the host of She’s So Cool, I’m Adrienne.
a female empowerment podcast. This podcast can inspire you.
2) 2)
This show is for listeners who want This podcast is for curious women.
Presentation to learn about strong and influential
women.
1) Host
2) Target 3) 3)
3) Podcast Welcome to She’s So Cool where you’ll This podcast is called She’s So Cool.
hear the life stories of female change- You will learn the stories of important
makers each week. Each woman’s story women.
will inspire you to embrace who you You will learn
are, love yourself fiercely and pursue to love yourself.
your dreams.
Before I get started, I wanna let you Please listen to this warning.
know that this episode includes topics A warning
that might be difficult for some listeners. is an important piece of advice.
These topics include sexual abuse, The podcast talks about
suicide and eating disorders. Please, - sex,
Content warning check the show notes for resources - violence,
about these topics, if you or someone - eating problems.
you know needs help or support. If you wish,
listen to the podcast
with someone you trust.
On this episode you will learn about the This episode is on Jane Fonda.
struggles and successes of Jane Fonda, Jane Fonda is and actress.
who has held many different roles Jane Fonda did many things in her life.
Episode summary
throughout her life. She is living proof The life of Jane Fonda
that we can overcome our challenges has been difficult.
and become better versions of ourselves
(Gunning Fog Index: 3.2). The readability indexes confirm that nominal groups are more difficult to
process than relative clauses, which should be kept in mind when writing in Easy English.
If we move to the presentation of the target audience, its EL version can be reduced consider
ably if we use a simple target-defining structure: X is for Y and try to encapsulate the nature of
the prospective podcast listener into a simple adjective. In this case, “curious” seems to reflect
well enough the idea of wanting to learn that is expressed in the original text. This simplification
strategy is based on the compression of ideas into a single word. Using one word instead of a
longer phrase necessarily comes with the loss of concepts. However, explaining all the concepts
and nuances included in the source text is not the aim of Easy Language and would clash with a
podcast’s time and usability constraints.
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The presentation of the podcast and its scope can be reduced to very direct formulae: “This
podcast is about” and “you will learn”. In the latter case, using the common verb “to learn” can
stimulate a listening predisposition and the preparation for a list of items. Here, as in other parts of
the text, relative clauses have been avoided. So instead of reformulating the complex noun phrase
and idea of “female change-makers” and the reference to inspirational women we can learn from
with a relative clause (“You will learn the stories [LONG PAUSE] of women who changed the
world”), we decided to compress it even further: “You will learn the stories of important women”.
Warnings, that is, notices that precede potentially sensitive content, are important to flag the
contents of the material that follows so listeners can prepare themselves to adequately engage
or, if necessary, disengage for their own wellbeing. In the Easy English proposal of the episode,
I decided to gently attract the attention of the listener and appeal to him/her with the discourse
marker and polite speech-act formula “please”, which is typical of the spoken language (Biber
et al., 1999, p. 140, p. 1098), and to use the imperative mood for advising the listener – using a
particularly engaging tone of voice: “Please, listen to this warning”.
Finally, the episode summary can be of great help to some listeners with cognitive or intellec
tual difficulties, because it prepares them for the longer text to come. Selecting only the most rel
evant information units will not overload the listener, and delivering them aurally ensures proper
segmentation and adequate pauses.
As illustrated in Table 26.5, the intralingual translation strategies that have been implemented
contribute substantially to reducing complexity by lowering the word count, the number of long
words, and the average sentence length and possible variability, and by increasing the number of
sentences – thus adhering to the principle that each sentence should include only one concept or
idea (e.g., ILSMH, 1998). As a result, the Gunning Fog Index of the simplified proposal decreases
dramatically even though the lexical density remains similar.
Based on my translation proposal, the simplified INTRO section could be turned into a flex
ible, reusable, and customizable template (Table 26.6), where slots – in square brackets – can be
selected and filled in depending on the podcast type, scope, and content:
A very similar process could be applied to the OUTRO section, equally formatted. Things are
more complex when we deal with the SEGMENT of the podcast in terms of quantity and type of
content conveyed, as well as the style used to convey it. We will focus on a short excerpt on Jane
Fonda’s eating disorders (108 words; average sentence length 21.6; lexical density: 51.85%; Gun
ning Fog Index: 12.71).
Trying to maintain all the information units whilst simplifying the lexicon and syntax would
be easy but unrealistic, especially if this strategy is applied to the whole podcast SEGMENT. The
Table 26.5 Main figures regarding the original and Easy English INTRO of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda
Source text Target text
Word count 158 94

Sentence count 8 15
Complex words 14 4
Syllable count 220 129
Average sentence length (SD) 16.75 (4.78) 6.47 (1.95)
Gunning Fog 11.23 4.21
Lexical density 52.3% 53.19%
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Elisa Perego
Table 26.6 Customizable template for Easy Language podcast INTROs
Salutation Hi!
Presentation
1) Host I am [HOST NAME]
This is my/a [POSCAST TYPE]
2) Target This podcast is [TARGET]
3) Podcast This podcast is called [PODCAST NAME]
In this podcast you will learn
- [TOPIC 1]
- [TOPIC 2]
- [ETC.]
Please listen to this warning.
INTRO
A warning is an important piece of advice.

This podcast talks about
- [SENSITIVE CONTENT 1]
Content warning
- [ETC.]
If you wish,
listen to the podcast
with someone you trust.
This episode is on [MAIN TOPIC]
It will deal with
Episode summary - [TOPIC 1]
- [TOPIC 2]
- [ETC.]
Table 26.7 Original and Easy English versions of a SEGMENT excerpt of She’s So Cool: Jane Fonda
Source text: podcast script Target text: simplified proposal

While in boarding school, Jane began When Jane was a child,
binging and purging with her roommate. she had problems with food.
They learned about this from Roman History These problems are called “eating-disorders”.
and did not realize how dangerous and Sometimes, Jane ate a lot of food.
addictive this behavior would be. Jane’s Then Jane vomited.
disordered eating lasted for about 25 years, it So, she did not put on weight.
began her sophomore year and lasted through This disorder is called “bulimia”.
two whole marriages, and two children Sometimes, Jane did not eat anything.
into her early forties. She was alternatively This disorder is called “anorexia”.
bulimic and anorexic, she said that she Jane had problems with food for 25 years.
would maybe eat one soft boiled egg and Often, she ate just an egg or so per day.
some spinach per day. Jane took control of One day, Jane decided to change.
her body by going cold turkey, she said it She got well.
was really really hard, but she got over the To get well was very difficult.
addiction, which changed her perception of
herself.
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idea should rather be to rewrite a simpler and shorter text to be delivered at a slower pace than the
original podcast. This implies achieving an optimum balance between what is added and what is
left out. In the attempt to do so (Table 26.7), the translator can reduce specific concepts to broader,
general ideas (boarding school > being a child), substitute at least part of the jargon related to
eating disorders with common explanations (to binge > to eat a lot of food), remove redundant or
over-specific terms and concepts. Identifying the really salient information and reorganizing it in
the target text is part of this easifying intralingual translation process.
The intralingual translation proposal of this excerpt results in a text that should be easy to
understand (Table 26.8) and which shares the same features that we observed earlier, thus confirm
ing that the implementation of the same strategies can assure comparable results.
Table 26.8 Main figures regarding the original and Easy English SEGMENT excerpt of She’s So Cool: Jane
Fonda
Source text Target text
Word count 108 81

Sentence count 5 13
Complex words 11 9
Syllable count 161 109
Average sentence length (SD) 21.6 (6.58) 6.23 (2.2)
Gunning Fog 12.71 6.94
Lexical density 51.85% 62.96%
From a broader perspective, where a complete podcast script is translated, more selection will
be in order. Delivering less information in a coherent and linear manner will be beneficial: Too
many details and explanations can be difficult to process and retain. This is why a thorough quanti
tative and qualitative source text analysis should be performed as a first working phase guiding the
translation choices. Selecting and prioritizing the information to convey is in fact more challeng
ing and decisive than performing a straightforward and mechanical lexical or syntactic simplifica
tion process. In fact, not all long words are difficult, low-frequency, or specialized words – cf. the
10-letter word “everything”, with a frequency of 17,554 in the BNC or the 11-letter word “infor
mation” with a frequency of 37,862 in the BNC. Furthermore, following most guidelines, we can
easily envisage transforming morphologically complex words including a negative prefix (un- but
also dis- or im- as in the cases of “unfortunately”, “unofficially”, “unforgivable”, “unnecessary”,
“discouraged”, “impossible”) into simpler multi-word expressions (e.g., “impossible”: Not pos
sible, or very difficult), relative clauses in the active voice (e.g., “unforgivable”: That you cannot
forgive), or very simple sentence (“unfortunately”: It is sad that). However, local interventions on
the text will be worthwhile only if paired with a broader perspective based on major text reformu
lations that are linked to the processing skills and attention span of disadvantaged listeners.
Conclusions
The role of intralingual translation in the form of same-language simplification is increasingly
being recognized in most European countries given its cognitive and social benefits (Lindholm &
Vanhatalo, 2021; Maaβ, 2020). The fields of application of same-language simplification, espe
cially in the form of translating into Easy Language, normally include public administration and
justice, followed by the fields of media and journalism, education, and finally culture and literature
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Elisa Perego
(EASIT, 2019). Podcasting belongs to this latter realm, but to my knowledge the intralingual
translation of a podcast has never been explored. In this chapter, I analysed linguistically a podcast
script and I investigated the possible implementation and impact of simplification in an episode
(“Jane Fonda”) of the American nonfiction narrative podcast She’s So Cool by Adrienne White
(2019). The source text analysis enabled me to detect the most salient linguistic specificities and
structural features of the podcast (including its INTRO-SEGMENT-OUTRO macrostructure), to
advance a threefold-structure labelling system for the definition of podcast types based on scope,
content, and mode and to reflect on the power of voice to implement the listenability of this
emergent aural medium. The intralingual translation of “Jane Fonda” into an Easy English script
showed that the regularity of some podcast formats enables us to explore the possibility of offer
ing format templates in Easy Language that can be used and adapted for specific podcast sections
(e.g., the INTRO). Furthermore, the simplification of the form and the content proved challeng
ing. However, the work carried out in this direction showed that a holistic content-restructuring
approach is more decisive than a local, merely textual, approach. Figures show that in my case
study this approach caused a substantially reduced complexity resulting from the use of fewer
words in general, fewer long words, a heavy re-elaboration of complex nominal groups (that are
widespread in English), and a shorter average sentence length, as well as an increased number of
sentences all containing only one idea (e.g., ILSMH, 1998). In this respect, analysing and under
standing the source text, prioritizing, and selecting content whilst respecting time- and audience-
related constraints should represent the first working phase of any intralingual podcast translator,
while fine interventions on the text can easily come after and can rely on existing Easy Language
guidelines. Besides paving the way to further studies on different podcast genres, this study has
the advantage of offering a possible – yet flexible and ameliorable – working template both for
those (stakeholders and professionals) who wish to follow this approach and include podcasts
into the category of content deserving enhanced accessibility. This study can also be exploited in
diverse training settings. Intralingual translation necessarily involves highly complex and chal
lenging activities such as same-language writing, editing, and summarizing. In fact, performing
these activities involves cognitive and metacognitive processes that include activating previous
knowledge, planning and organizing thoughts, converting passive into active vocabulary, con
solidating literacy, and strengthening verbal skills (Graham & Herbert, 2011; Smetanová, 2013).
These are all instrumental to L1 strengthening and Easy Language creation, and to L2 learning. In
particular, selecting content and summarizing it for Easy Language delivery purposes can improve
the ability to recognize, select, and paraphrase the main ideas in a text and create transitions
between them, thus leading to the “syntactic maturity” (Robinson & Howell, 2008) expected from
language learners and Easy Language professionals, too.
Notes
1 Besides still-existing local and in-house rules, the ADLAB guidelines (Remael et al., 2015) nowadays
represent a landmark and reference for audio describers in need of strategic and flexible recommendations
for writing audio descriptions mainly for the cinema and television. These guidelines are the result of the
three-year project ADLAB (Audio Description: Lifelong Access for the Blind, 2011–2014), acknowledged
for its best practices and awarded the status of success story, financed by the European Union (Education,
Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency) under the Lifelong Learning Programme, Key Action ERAS
MUS Multilateral Projects, Cooperation between HEI and Enterprises. The project was coordinated by C.
Taylor.
2 English followed by translated versions into Catalan, Galician, German, Italian, Slovene, Spanish, and
Swedish, i.e., the languages of the project consortium.
468
3 Leonard (2017) detects seven podcast types: the one-to-one interview, the solo commentary, the panel, the
nonfiction narrative story telling, the fictional story telling, the hybrid, and the repurposed content. Cic
carelli (2021) proposes the four-fold categorization including “nonfiction narrative podcasts”, “interview
and/or conversational podcasts”, “hybrid podcasts”, and “scripted fiction podcasts”. Berry (2020) suggests
that we can reduce podcast mapping to three overarching typologies (conversations, narratives, and fic
tions) that are broad and flexible enough to contain most content.
4 Welcome to Night Vale (2012) was the first scripted podcast to break out as a mainstream hit. It is a surreal
dark comedy presented as a community radio station bulletin from a fictional town. Homecoming, debuted
in 2016, is a psychological thriller podcast that tells the story of a damaged soldier and the caseworker try
ing to rehabilitate him back into society.
5 Although readability has been researched systematically is several languages, oral language and com
munication have been given relatively little attention in spite of the large amount of information that is
consumed aurally (Rubin, 2012).
6 The Gunning Fog Index is one among many readability indexes used for English. It is a weighted average
of the number of words per sentence and the percentage of complex words (more than three syllables). The
index estimates the years of formal education a person needs to understand the text on the first reading. An
interpretation is that a text can be understood by someone who left full-time education at a later age than
the index.
7 Longer, more complex words take slightly longer to say. If we count words per minute, it will affect speech
pace slightly, although negligibly (Barnard, 2018b). This is why we provide cps, too. At the same time,
content complexity is a further factor that can affect speech rate: When presenting complex content, you
will want to speak slower than usual to give the audience time to comprehend the concepts and content
(Barnard, 2018b).
8 The newly launched project Spoken Easy Language for Social Inclusion (SELSI, 2022–2024), financed by
the European Union under the Erasmus+ Programme, Action Type KA220-ADU – Cooperation partner
ships in adult education, Coordinated by the RISA Institute in Slovenia, will focus on the simplification or
oral texts for the first time, with the aim of producing guidelines.
Further reading
Berry, R. (2006). Will the iPod kill the radio star? Profiling podcast as radio. Convergence: The Interna
tional Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 12(2), 143–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/
1354856506066522
Berry, R. (2016). Podcasting: Considering the evolution of the medium and its association with the word
“radio”. The Radio Journal International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 14(1), 7–22. http://doi.
org/10.1386/rjao.14.1.7_1
Gray, C. (2021). What is a podcast? An explanation in plain English. The Podcast Host. www.thepodcasthost.
com/listening/what-is-a-podcast/
Inclusion Europe (2009). Information for all. European standards for making information easy to read and
understand. www.inclusion-europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/EN_Information_for_all.pdf
Rubin, D. L., Hafter, T., & Arata, K. (2000). Reading and listening to oral-based versus literate-based dis
course. Communication Education, 49(2), 121–134.
References
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Barnard, D. (2018a, January 2). 10 effective ways to use pauses in your speech. Virtualspeech. https://virtual
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Barnard, D. (2018b, January 20). Average speaking rate and words per minute. Virtualspeech. Retrieved
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471
AUTHOR INDEX
Abbeduto, L. 409 Bak, J.M. 19

Adamolekun, D. 173 Baker, M. 1, 2, 277–278
Adler, M. 241 Balachandran, A. 167
Aerts, W. 116 Bamford, J. 379–380, 389
Agulló, B. 173 Baños-Piñero, R. 458
Ahrens, S. 234 Barbasán, I. 367
Aitken, A. 146, 147 Barnard, D. 462
Ajzenberg, B. 312 Barnes, B. 174
Alcaeus 96–98 Bartoll, E. 165–166
Alcman 96–98 Bassnett, S. 2, 173, 275, 297
Algeo, J. 293, 297 Batchelor, K. 222
Allinson, F.G. 355 Batho, E.C. 152
Alonso-Pérez, R. 363, 372 Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot, H. 26
Altschul, N.R. 19 Bazani, A. 377
Alvstad, C. 17, 58 Bažil, M. 79, 80–83
Amigo Extremera, J.J. 220 Becher, V. 320
Anderson, B. 115 Beck, D.L. 458
Anesa, P. 336 Becker, E. 381
Anolli, L. 458 Becker, L. 234
Anthony, L. 417 Beckett, S. 123–124
Anula Rebollo, A. 389 Bekker, I. 100–101, 107
Aristotle 100, 355 Bekkering, H. 52
Armostis, S. 351 Belinchón, G. 170
Armstrong, N. 297 Benavides, L. 169
Aronin, L. 348 Benjamin, W. 136
Askehave, I. 254 Berk Albachten, Ö. 1, 3, 5, 23–27, 49, 65,
Asprey, M. 234, 241 131–132, 136–137, 139, 183, 222–223, 355
Assis Rosa, A. 17 Berkenkotter, C. 205
Atkins, B.T.S. 294–295 Berlyne, D.E. 81
Atzori, E. 457 Berman, A. 278
Austin, C. 99 Bernabé, R. 217, 220, 453, 455, 458
Avidan-Ziv 395, 398–399 Berry, R. 456–457
Ávila-Cabrera, J.J. 360–361, 364–365, 367 Bestué Salinas, C. 332
Bhatia, V.K. 455–456, 458
Bączkowska, A. 435 Biber, D. 457, 465
Baer, B.J. 20, 116 Biel, Ł. 330, 334
472
Author index
Bielsa, E. 275 Castro Robaina, I. 220

Birkett, T. 4 Cataldi, P. 70
Bisetto, B. 1 Catford, J. 278, 280
Bisiada, M. 278 Cerquiglini, B. 19
Black Cat CIDEB. 380, 386 Ceruti, M.A. 367
Blommaert, P. 42 Chan, H.L. 70
Bloom, B. 363 Chan, L.T.-H. 145
Bock, B.M. 218, 220, 224, 230 Chaume, F. 166–167, 435, 458
Bohman, U. 218, 238 Cheesman, T. 275
Bohr, N. 186 Chesterman, A. 53, 66, 254, 277–278, 289
Bolaños-García-Escribano, A. 360, 369 Cheyne, R. 18
Bond, S. 456, 458 Chiaro, D. 402, 408
Bonner, T.N. 292 Chromá, M. 330
Boonstra, M. 123 Ciccarelli, S. 456–457
Borghetti, C. 361, 367 Clark, E.A. 85
Borodo, M. 277 Clément-Tarantino, S. 88
Bossche, S. van den 50 Colina, S. 377
Bourdieu, P. 23 Collart, P. 101
Bourdot de Richebourg, C. 38 Columbus, C. 370
Bovim Bugge, H. 238 Colwell, P. 440
Braam, S. 6, 48, 52–58, 60–62 Comstock, J. L. 291
Bredel, U. 218, 220, 224, 234, 237–238, 241, Conte, G.B. 79, 84
243–246 Cook, G. 361–362
Bright, D.F. 78–79, 81, 88 Copeland, R. 18
Brock, S.P. 106 Corbellari, A. 19
Broderick, A. 336 Cordingley, A. 226, 230, 310
Broersma, M. 462 Cornelius, E. 241
Bromme, R. 254 Cornu, J.F. 164–165
Brown, Penelope 422 Corral Esteban, A. 367
Brown, Peter 79 Correa Larios, O. 360
Brownlie, S. 17 Coseriu, E. 196–197
Bruyère, C. 297 Council of Europe 348, 363, 367
Bryson, B. 276–277 Crace, J. 273, 279–280, 284–285
Bugarski, R. 133 Cronin, M. 297
Bühler, H. 396, 402, 408 Crystal, D. 135, 350
Bulić, R. 130 Cuarón, A. 169–170, 173–174
Burgess, J.S. 96 Cullhed, S.S. 82, 86
Buridant, C. 17, 19, 20–21 Culpeper, J. 423
Burkert, W. 96 Cummins, J. 363
Burkhart, D. 130 Cunningham, I.C. 100–101
Busch, W. 18
Butcher, J. 280, 286 Dam, H.V. 223, 347
Butler, T. 130, 135 Dam-Jensen, H. 253, 278
Damrosch, D. 113, 135, 140
Cabaret, F. 50 Danan, M. 360–361, 368
Cacchiani, S. 252, 255 Darbelnet, J. 53, 187–188, 278, 280
Cachin, M. F. 297 Das, S. 207–208
Cadwell, P. 227 Davier, L. 186
Calduch, C. 362, 368 Davis, K. 25, 65, 117, 131–132, 136–138, 297
Calsamiglia, H. 252 Day, R.R. 379–380, 389
Cameron, A. 79 De Groot, G.R. 330
Campbell, A.P. 367 Dean, D.R. 88
Cândido, A. 381 Delabastita, D. 5, 18, 53, 114, 118, 378, 386
Cariss, P. 277, 281, 285 Dembowski, P.F. 19
Carrington, N.T. 152 Denecke, W. 65
Castro-Moreno, C. 367 Denton, J. 165, 293, 297
473
Author index
Derrida, J. 2, 131, 135–138, 141 Fortis, A. 130–132, 134–135, 138, 140

Desmet, M.K.T 50 Foster, J. 291
D’hulst, L. 26 Foulet, A. 19
Díaz Cintas, J. 165, 167, 171, 175, 360, 435 Frigau Manning, C. 226, 230
Dickey, E. 100 Fu, D. 351–352, 356
Dixon, R. 139 Fuentes-Luque, A. 367
Dobos, C. 335–337
Doczekalska, A. 334 Gagnon, C. 186
Dodd, J. 437–438, 450 Galli, M.T. 88
Döpfner, M. 168–169 Gambier, Y. 175, 396, 412, 435
Doran, Y.J. 207, 212 García, O. 1, 351–352
Dörnyei, Z. 362 García-Izquierdo, I. 186, 204
Dossena, M. 147 García Muñoz, O. 456
Douglas, F. 156 Gardner, J. 337
Douglas, V. 50 Garner, B. 331
Driscoll, M.J. 19 Garzya, A. 97
Duijx, T. 51–52 Geerts, S. 50
Dullion, V. 34 Genette, G. 222, 309, 378
Dye, M. 169 Georgiou, V. 120
Dyer, C.R. 241, 335 Gesemann, G. 135
Gibson, E. 254
Eder, P.J. 330 Gil Ariza, M.C. 169
Eichmeyer, D. 395, 398–400 Ginna, P. 274
Einsohn, A. 280, 286 Gitelman, L. 168
Elam, P. 256 Glas, F. de 51
Eliot, T.S. 151 Gläser, J. 223
Elsner, J. 83, 87 Goethe, J.W. 88, 130, 134
Engberg, J. 252, 255, 267, 330 Gölpinarli, A. 80
Erbse, H. 107 González Davies, M. 254, 268, 347–349, 351, 361
Ernst, N. 100 González, J.M. 78
Escobar-Álvarez, M.A. 348 González-Vera, P. 360
Espagne, M. 33 Gonzalo Llera, C. 369
Estévez Grossi, M. 234 Göpferich, S. 228
Eugeni, C. 412 Görlach, M. 18
Evangelista, M.C. 381 Gorlée, D. 65, 131
Evelyn-White, H.G. 86, 88 Goscinny, R. 121
Even-Zohar, I. 348–349 Gotti, M. 254–255, 336
Ezpeleta-Piorno, P. 252 Gottlieb, H. 4, 5, 34–35, 65, 83, 118, 131, 165,
389, 411, 435
Farrell, D. 416 Govind, N. 167
Fassina, A. 83, 86 Graham, S. 468
Fdez, J. 174 Grammenidis, S. 18, 21, 24
Federici, F. M. 305 Greco, G.M. 434–437, 450
Ferguson, C. A. 126, 352 Green, J. 170
Ferguson, F. 154–155 Green, R.P.H. 86
Fernández Delgado, J.A. 102 Greenberg, S.L. 274
Figueroa, V. 173 Grice, H.P. 279, 421–423
Findlay, B. 146 Griggs, B. 174
Fishman, J.A. 35 Grohmann, K.K. 117, 352
Fitt, M. 157–160 Grube, G.M.A. 355
Flood, A. 279 Grutman, R. 20
Floros, G. 18, 21, 24 Gu, Y. 68
Fodde-Melis, L. 294 Gudurić, S. 133
Fonioková, Z. 311–312, 320 Gülich, E. 252, 254, 268
Ford Williams, G. 413, 431 Gutermuth, S. 247
474
Author index
Gutiérrez, A. 173 Huang, Z. 131

Gutiérrez, V. 170 Huber, I. 284
Gutiérrez Rodilla, B.M. 291 Hung, E. 64
Guzmán, D. 332 Husbands, H.W. 152
Hadjipieris, I. 119, 122–123 Ibáñez, A. 364

Hall, S. 169, 174 Incalcaterra McLoughlin, L. 360–361
Haller, J. S. 300 Inclusion Europe 218, 238, 246, 337, 396, 398
Halliday, M.A.K. 197–199 Inoue, R. 312
Hammersley, B. 457 Ishiguro, I. 279, 308, 310–312, 315, 317–320
Hansen-Schirra, S. 218, 224, 235, 237–239, 244, Israeli Institute for Cognitive Accessibility 396,
245, 248, 395, 397, 438, 439 398–399, 402–403
Harris, R.A. 280 Ivić, P. 135, 350
Harvey, K. 286
Harzhauser, M. 88 Jackson, L.M. 164
Hasan, R. 197–199 Jakobson, R. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 34, 113, 115, 125,
Hastings, R. 168–169 131, 136–139, 141–142, 165, 183–186, 193,
Hatch, D.F. 85 221, 246, 252–253, 273–274, 278, 292–293,
Hays, I. 290–292, 294–295, 297–298, 300, 297, 309, 329, 381, 434–437, 453, 456
302–304 James, R. 290
Heaney, S. 25 Janko, R. 100
Heap, D. 115 Jankowska, A. 436–437, 450
Heffer, C. 336 Jarvey, N. 174
Helmle, K.-S. 225 Jenkins, H. 168
Heltai, P. 278, 314, 381 Jensson, G. 79
Hemmungs-Wirtén, E. 275 Jessner, U. 349
Henrichs, H. 100 Ji, M. 351
Herbert, M. 468 Jia, H. 131
Herdina, P. 349 Jin, H. 168
Hermans, T. 2, 80, 131–132, 185, 221, 277 Jobert, M. 12
Hernández Garrido, S. 234, 237–239, 247, 396 Johnson, R. 165
Hewson, L. 25 Jones, C. 147, 148
Hilgartner, S. 212 Jones, F. 17, 20, 23, 130, 132–135
Hill, D.R. 378–382, 388 Jones, H. 167–8
Hill-Madsen, A. 1, 4, 5, 8, 17, 19, 23, 65–66,
115, 145, 151, 165, 183, 185–188, 193, Kabataş, O. 119
253–254, 267, 293–294, 297, 313, 315 Kail, R. 397
Hinds, S. 79 Kaindl, K. 53
Hirsch, G. 314 Kajzer-Wietrzny, M. 1, 222
Hoare, M.R. 291 Källkvist, M. 351
Hoblyn, R.D. 290–291, 296, 300, 302–303 Kambanaros, M. 352
Hodson, J. 283 Karas, H. 4, 65–66
Hokenson, J.W. 3 Karyolemou, M. 119
Holmes, J. 1 Kassel, R. 99
Holzman, G. 24 Katsoyannou, M. 119
Homer 78, 80, 95–107, 114, 135 Kaufmann, F. 25
Honigman, S. 106 Kelly, A. 98
Hoogeboom, H. 121 Kelly, N. 1
Hornberger, N.H. 364 Kern, R.G. 352
Horrocks, G. 114 Kilgarriff, A. 256–257, 264
Hose, M. 79 Kin, B. 70
House, J. 278 Kirk, J.M. 155–156
Howell, K.W. 468 Kirsch, I.K. 397
Hroch, M. 34 Kjaer, A.L. 334
Huang, G. 64 Klein, S.E. 70
475
Author index
Kobayashi, H. 352 Lira, S. 440

Koch, T. 170, 174 Lively, P. 273
Kousoulini, V. 96 Loizidou-Ieridou, N. 122
Kozloff, S. 458 Long, G.B. 463
Krashen, S. 361, 365 Longinović, T.Z. 3, 49
Krathwohl, D.R. 363 Lootens, A. 43
Kristensen, T.M. 88 Lopriore, L. 367
Kroh, A. 88 Lorimer, R. 152–154
Krstić, V. 131 Loveland, J. 291
Kruger, H. 275, 278 Lugea, J. 5, 165
Kuipers, M. 48, 52, 53, 55, 58, 60 Lukežić, I. 130
Kumar, R. 169 Lundon, J. 100
Kussmaul, P. 294 Luo, X. 64
Lupo, L. 456–458
Laan, D. 51–60 Luther, M. 23, 114
Labov, W. 117
Lake, P.G. 102 Maaß, C. 218, 220, 224, 227, 336, 395–397, 453,
Laks, S. 360, 435 455–456, 467
Lambourne, A. 411 Macafee, C. 146
Land, C. 462 Macaro, E. 348
Landau, S.I. 296 Mackridge, P. 24–25, 115
Lang, K. 234–235, 237 Magennis, H. 21
Lanselle, R. 1, 309 Mahmutćehajić, R. 134
Lanstyák, I. 278 Major, R.A. 132
Lasagabaster, D. 364 Maley, W. 152
Lathey, G. 50 Malinowski, B. 197
Latte, K. 100–101 Maranta, A. 199
Laudel, G. 223 Marder, N.S. 335
Lavinio, C. 458 Markman, K.M. 456–457
Laviosa Braithwaite, S. 277 Maronitis, D.N. 1, 5, 115, 347, 353–354
Laviosa, S. 278, 351 Marrou, H.-I. 85
Lebrocquy, P. 40–41 Martin, J.R. 198–199
Leckie-Tarry, H. 198 Martindale, C. 81
Ledeganck, K.L. 39 Martínez Sierra, J.J. 166
Leerssen, J. 33, 43 Martyn, G. 37
Lefere, R. 23 Matamala, A. 166, 454
Lefevere, A. 2, 274, 308–309 Maton, K. 207, 212, 213
Lehmann, W.P. 132 Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. 198
Leichtfuß, A. 395, 399–400 Mattila, H.E.S. 330, 335
Lenzner, T. 254 Maturana, H.R. 228–229
Leonard, M. 456–457 Mayne, R.G. 291
Leonard, T. 151–152 Mayoral Asensio, R. 331
Lepage, Y.G. 19 Mazi/Birlikte 123
Lertola, J. 347, 360, 361–364, 367–370 McArthur, T. 297
Leskelä, L. 38, 246 McCallum, R. 50
Lessinger, E. 273 McClure, G.M. 256
Levinson, S.C. 422 McClure, J.D. 145–147, 152–154
Lévy, P. 168 McColl Millar, R. 146
Lewis, M. 461 McCormack, T. 274
Li, S. 69 McCrum, R. 279
Liao, M.-H. 336 McElduff, S. 80
Linders, J. 51–52 McEwan, I. 273, 275–277, 280–281, 285
Lindgren, M. 456, 458 McGill, S. 79
Lindholm, U. 234, 238, 395, 453, 456–457 McIntyre, D. 5
Linell, P. 197 Mecklenburg, N. 130
Link, H. 364 Medenica, R. 135
476
Author index
Mellinkoff, D. 335 Ofcom 256, 413

Menander (of Athens) 355 Ogea Pozo, M. del M. 360, 367, 369
Mendes, E. 440 Ogilvie, S. 291
Mendoza, M. 164 Okáčová, M. 83
Meyer, B. 5 Ó’Laoire, M. 348
Meylaerts, R. 20 Olohan, M. 278
Meynard, T. 72 Orero, P. 217, 220, 453–455, 458
Miguélez-Cavero, L. 99 Orlowsky, J. 371
Miklosich, F. 135 Orrego-Carmona, D. 168–169, 175
Milanović, A. 133 Osimo, B. 18
Mishler, E.G. 203 O’Sullivan, C. 164–165
Montalt-Resurrecció, V. 254, 268
Montalt, V. 186, 188, 204 Page, D.L. 97
Montini, C. 310 Pang-White, A. 73
Moonen, X. 244 Panofsky, E. 87
Morales, M. 170, 173 Pantelidis, C. 116
Morales Moreno, A. 333 Papapavlou, A.N. 117–118
Moreno, G. 443 Parry, M. 135
Moreno Tovar, M. 1, 437 Patel, S. 164, 175
Morgan, E. 149, 150–154 Pavlou, P. 117–118
Morgan, T.E. 81 Pavlovskis, Z. 78–79, 84
Mossop, B. 17, 164, 167, 170, 175, 253, 274, Paye, C. 34
278–279, 293–296, 298, 350 Peacock, N. 150
Most, G.W. 79 Pedraza Pedraza, M. B. 241
Moyer, J.D. 74 Perego, E. 168
Munday, J. 58, 453, 456 Pérez, J.M. 414
Muñoz-Miquel, A. 204, 252, 254–255 Pérez-González, L. 168
Munson, M. 3 Pérez-Sabater, C. 367
Murko, M. 134 Perl, J. 149
Murphy, A.C. 278 Perrotta, M. 458
Mutesayire, M. 278 Peruzzo, K. 334
Petrilli, S. 4, 197, 294
Naddaff, R. 102, 104 Petrović, D. 133
Nakaš, L. 134, 135 Pfeiffer, R. 100
Nation, I.S.P. 378–381 Pichert, J.W. 256
Navarrete, M. 348, 360–361 Pickles, W. 304
Neely, S. 152 Pierazzo, E. 19
Nelson, B.J. 19 Piirainen, E. 351
Nenkova, A. 254 Pilegaard, M. 211
Neves, J. 165–166, 175, 436, 454 Pillière, L. 1, 3, 4–5, 49, 58, 165, 183–185, 187,
Newmark, P. 253, 278, 280, 293 193, 220–222, 293–297
Newton, B. 116–117 Pintado Gutiérrez, L. 361, 363
Nichols, S.G. 19 Piorno, P.E. 209
Nida, E.A. 20 Pitler, E. 254
Nielsen, R.K. 256 Plato 100, 102–105
Nietzsche, F. 206, 208 Plaza-Lara, C. 360, 369
Nisbeth Jensen, M. 5, 437 Plummer, L. 169
Nocella, G. 402, 408 Pöchhacker, F. 396
Nohl, A.M. 275 Pöchhacker, F. 436
Nord, C. 165, 331, 381 Pollmann, K. 79, 83, 85, 87–88
Nouws, B. 41 Pontani, F. 100
Nunan, D. 362, 364 Popovič, A. 65
Nünlist, R. 101 Poppy, D. 279–280, 284
Possemiers, W. 39
Obenaus, G. 340 Pound, E. 149–152
O’Donnell, M. 198 Pozzo, B. 330
477
Author index
Preite, C. 252 Salotti, B.M. 254

Price, K. 360 San Isidro, X. 364
Pucci, J. 79 Sánchez-Requena, A. 361, 363, 368, 372
Purves, D. 145, 152–154 Sandell, R. 437, 438, 450
Putnam, M.C.J. 85 Sandrelli, A. 337
Pym, A. 17, 25–26, 131, 136–140, 184, 278, 285, Sapir-Weitz, C. 20
293, 310, 320, 352 Sarangi, S. 205
Šarčević, S. 329
Quirk, R. 285 Sassaki, K.R. 437–438, 450
Saussure, F.de 137–139, 198
Radovanović, M. 132 Savaş, B. 355
Raffo, M. 252 Sawyer, A. 335
Rajan, T. 81 Sawyer, C.E. 456–457
Ravotas, D. 205 Sawyer, M. 457
Ray, R. 1 Schaeffer, D. 234
Real Academia Española 171–173 Schäffner, C. 309
Redish, J. 256 Schjoldager, A. 187–188, 191–192, 204
Reid Thomas, H. 380 Schmid, S. 275
Reiss, K. 166, 248, 320, 381 Schmidt, S.J. 228–229
Remael, A. 165, 171, 175, 360, 453 Schneider, A.J. 275, 280, 285
Renner, T. 101 Schreiber, M. 34
Revilla Guijarro, A. 389 Schrijver, I. 308–309
Richardson, B. 311 Schriver, K.A. 228
Richardson, I. 335 Schubert, K. 17, 235, 253, 293
Rink, I. 234–235, 243, 248, 336 Schulz, R. 234, 395, 399, 401
Rinnert, C 352 Scott, A. 148–151, 154
Risku, H. 222, 230 Scott, M. 460
Rizzi, A. 18 Scott, T. 148–151, 154
Rizzo, A. 436 Scott, W. 130
Rizzo, M. 252 Seel, O.I. 388
Robb, D. 148 Sela-Sheffy, R. 20
Robertson, J. 157–159 Selles, H. 121
Robin, E. 279 Semino, E. 81
Robinson, D. 17, 114 Serrure, C.P. 42
Robinson, L.K. 468 Şeyh Galip 80–81
Rodríguez-Arancón, P. 367 Shaffer, B.W. 308
Rodriguez Murphy, E. 1 Shakespeare, W. 18, 113–114, 150, 152–154,
Rolfe, J.C. 80 378, 386
Romaine, S. 298 Shalev, M. 20
Romero-Fresco, P. 165–166, 368, 411, 413–414, Shuttleworth, M. 254
434–435 Sibau, M.F. 67
Rowe, C. 117 Silletti, A. 252, 255
Rowling, J.F.K. 158–159, 160 Simonnæs, I. 255, 267
Roxborough, S. 170 Simpson, P. 283
Rubin, D.L. 458 Singleton, D. 348
Rundell, M. 294–295 Skarpari, C. 122
Ruohonen, J. 256–257 Skopečková, E. 381–382
Rüpke, J. 87 Smeets, K. 48, 52–53, 55, 58, 60
Rusch, G. 228 Smetanová, E. 468
Russell, D.A. 80 Smith, R.C. 380
Snell-Hornby, M. 348
Safran, G. 291 Sokoli, S. 348, 360, 365
Saint-Exupéry, A. 18, 123 Soleil, S. 39
Sakai, N. 24–25, 66 Soler, J. 170, 173–174, 176
Salanitro, G. 87 Soler Pardo, B. 367
Saldanha, G. 314 Sonnedecker, G. 300
478
Author index
Sophocleous, A. 118 Vagle, W. 458

Sotirova, V. 283 Van Dijk, T.A. 252
Speer, M.B. 19 van Doorslaer, L. 224–225
Squire, M. 101 van Gerwen, H. 39
Stadnik, K. 252 van Rooy, B. 278
Staff 456 van Rossum-Steenbeck, M. 101
Starr, K. 455 van Thiel, H. 101
Starr, P. 292 Van Wallendael, C. 334
Steen, G. 81 Vanderplank, R. 360
Stefaniak, K. 329 Vanhatalo, U. 217, 234, 238, 395, 453, 456, 467
Stefanović Karadžić, V. 130, 135, 138 Vasileiadis, P.D. 24
Steiner, G. 132, 136, 193 Venuti, L. 1, 21–22, 115, 148
Stephens, J. 50 Vermeer, H.J. 166, 248, 294, 381
Stetting, K.T. 1, 275, 309 Vermeulen, A. 348, 364
Stuart-Smith, J. 147 Verweyen, T. 79–80
Stubbs, M. 256 Vinay, J.-P. 53, 187, 188, 278, 280
Sturrock, J. 2, 131, 137 Vlachopoulos, S. 24, 335
Suojanen, T. 389 Voellmer, E. 3
Swales, J.M. 457 von Merveldt, N. 309
Swan, M. 362 Voniati, L. 116
Swiggers, P. 40
Sylvan, C.E. 351 Wachter, R. 96
Szarkowska, A. 165, 168 Wakabayashi, J. 28
Waley, A. 69
Takekoshi, T. 71 Walker, W. B. 291
Talese, N. 275–277, 285 Waring, R. 378–379, 380–381
Tanselle, G.T. 19 Weber, J. 309
Telles, S.V. 254 Webster, N. 294, 298
Temmerman, R. 334 Wei, L. 352
Terkourafi, M. 117 Werner, M. 33
Thiesse, A.M. 33 West, M.L. 78, 96
Thomas, P.L. 135 Wharton, M. 241
Thompson, A. 169–170, 174 Whyatt, B. 1, 186, 187, 222, 293, 313, 320, 435, 437
Thompson, J. 167 Wilde, O. 297, 382–384
Thorne, D. 360 Wilhelm, R. 19
Tiersma, P.M. 35–36 Wilhelmsen, M.K. 377–378, 381–382, 389
Tissi, L.M. 83 Wilkins, D. 362
Titford, C. 352 Willems, J.F. 42
Tolkien, J.R.R. 21 Willemyns, R. 40
Torop, P. 18, 131 Williams, C. 335
Toury, G. 5, 18, 22, 66, 131, 136–137, Williams, D.A. 278
277, 278, 293, 314, 317, Williams, E.B. 22
378, 383 Williams, H. 360
Trachsler, R. 20 Williams, W.Carlos 151–152
Trivedi, H. 173 Wilson, J. 361
Trudgill, P. 115 Wittgenstein, L. 228–229
Tsagari, D. 348 Witting, G. 79–80
Tsiplakou, S. 117, 122, 351 Wolf, M. 34
Tsolakidis, S. 122 Wolvin, A.D. 462
Turner, A. 17, 20, 23 Wong, C.F. 308
Tymoczko, M. 223 Wong, L. 64
Wright, B.G. 105–106
Uderzo, A. 121
Ulrych, M. 278 Xia, X. 72, 74
Upton, C. 298 Xing, N. 70
Uziel-Karl, S. 396 Xu, D. 70
479
Author index
Yeo, R 291 165, 196–197, 217, 223, 225, 227,

Yepes Villegas, P. 234 245, 253–254, 267–268, 293,
Yoon, S.R. 22 296–297, 313, 314–315, 320,
329, 351, 354, 377, 383,
Zabalbeascoa, P. 3, 365 411–412, 437
Zanettin, F. 278, 347 Ziolkowski, J.M. 85
Zethsen, K. K. 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 17, 19, 23, Zuckerman, G. 24
34, 48–49, 59, 65–66, 145, 151, Zwischenberger, C. 402, 408
480
SUBJECT INDEX
Note: Page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page.
accessibility 43, 217–218, 226, 235, 239, 244, Beowulf 25, 138–140, 149
252, 314, 337, 339, 364, 368, 389, 395–408, Bible translation 20–21, 24–25, 105–106,
434–450, 453, 463, 468; legal accessibility 224, 113–114, 313
335, 340 bilingual: education 352, 364, 372; bilingual text
adaptation 34, 67, 79, 83, 123–125, 158, 165, 25–28, 38–39, 42, 102, 137, 141,
167, 174, 188, 191–192, 222–224, 330–331, 382
252–254, 274, 278, 290, 293, 296–297, bilingualism 35, 156, 352
304, 337, 339, 377, 381, 386–387, 437, Bosnian 3, 7, 130, 132–134, 138–141
441, 453, 456
addition 28, 70, 103, 173, 188, 191–192, cento 6, 78–89; definition of 78–79; and
276–278, 286, 297, 302, 320, 378, intertextuality 80–81; and intralingual
407, 463 translation 81–83; as literary work 79–80; and
American English 151, 187, 293–295, 297 multimodality 87–89
American English edition 275–277, 290–291, Chanson de Roland 20
294–297, 299, 300, 303 children’s literature 34, 43, 48–60, 65, 123,
ancient Greek 24, 78–79, 95–107, 115; and 157–161, 277, 377, 379
education 10, 347, 353–355 China 6, 64–67, 445
archaization 5, 17–28 Chinese diachronic intralingual translation: baihua
artificial intelligence (AI) 166–167, 169, 173, 175; ben 67; jinyi 67–68; jujie 6, 64–65, 68, 70–71,
as a translation procedure 254, 278, 356 74–75; yanyi 64–65, 74–75; zhijie 64–65, 74, 702
Aucassin and Nicolette 21, 22 Classical Greek see ancient Greek
audio description: lifelong access for the blind code-switching 122, 371–372; see also
(ADLAB) 454–455, 468n1 translanguaging
audiovisual translation (AVT) 165, 221, 347–348, cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP)
360, 434; media accessibility 434–436, 448, 363–364, 367, 371
454; pedagogical resource 360 cognitive difficulties 218, 225, 229, 238–239,
audiovisual translation didactic AVT (DAT) 243–245, 247–248, 389, 395–399, 401, 404,
360–372; advantages in language learning 439, 447, 453, 455, 459, 465
361–365, 367–368, 372; practical applications cognitive effort 254, 338, 367
369–372; and translation studies 361–362 collaborative translation 8, 11, 58, 217, 222–223,
authenticity 22, 28, 37, 58–59, 117, 135, 361–362, 225–228, 230
364, 367–369, 459 Common European Framework of Reference for
authorial editing 310–320 Languages (CEFR) 48, 363, 367–368, 370–371,
authority 35–36, 51, 58–60, 119, 218, 225, 243, 382, 385
267, 274, 334 comparative linguistics 33, 39–41
481
Subject index
condensation 102, 187–188, 190, 192, 367, 369, editing 19, 33, 42, 83, 138, 245, 273–286, 293, 295,
372, 383 308–310, 333, 398, 404, 413, 441, 457–458,
constructivism 217, 228–229, 362 468; content editing 296, 298–303
creativity 56, 80, 184, 191, 274–275, 309, 364–365, editing strategies 428–429
368–370, 436, 460 English: Early Modern 114; Modern English 18,
critical edition 18–19, 23, 28 138–140, 378, 387; Old English 3, 25, 29, 138,
Croatian 3, 7, 117, 130, 132–134, 138–141 148–150, 154–155
cultural heritage 48, 140, 436, 440 epitext 222–224, 228, 378, 386
cultural politics 6, 49, 59 equivalence 25–26, 44, 186, 213, 245, 253,
Cypriot Greek (CG) 7, 113–125, 351; historical 354–355
background 116–117; and Standard Modern European Commission 196, 201, 337, 338
Greek 116–120, 123–124, 335, 351 European Union 117, 238, 255, 331, 334, 337–338,
Cypriot Turkish (CT) 7, 116, 119 420, 454–455
Cyprus: sociolinguistic situation 117–118 explicitation 10, 83, 187–188, 190–193, 204,
277–278, 280, 286, 313–314, 317, 320, 337, 383
deaf and hard-of-hearing 117, 165–166, 368–369,
411–412, 434–435, 453–454 French 51, 121, 130, 147, 246, 290–291, 330, 340,
deletion 188, 190–192, 281 379; Belgian French 37–39; and Flemish 6,
dialectal 35, 65, 118–119, 122, 124, 294, 412 35–36, 40–43; Latin 137; legal terms 334–335;
diamesic 35, 65, 118–119, 122, 124, 294, 412 Medieval French 21, 26; Modern French 19,
diaphasic 35, 65, 118, 122, 187–188, 196–214, 221, 21–22, 42; Old French 18, 21
227, 235, 247–248, 294, 389 functionalism 347–349, 353, 356–357
diatopic 9, 298–299, 304, 352
didactic media accessibility (DIMA) 368–369 glossary 43, 74, 121, 220–221, 332–333, 384
diglossia 35, 352 glossing 68, 70–73, 100–101, 107, 268
diglossic 117, 126n6, 294, 303, 352 Greek 23, 211, 302, 335; alphabet 27; Greek
diplomatic transcription 18–19, 23, 28 Cypriot community (GC) 7, 116–117,
direct transfer 187–189, 192, 197 119; see also ancient Greek; standard modern
direct translation 22, 189, 191–193 Greek (SMG) 24–25, 114–118, 125, 335, 355
domesticating 148, 154
dubbing 164, 169, 175, 360–361, 365, 367–372, Hasanaginica 130–142
435–436 Hebrew 107, 399, 405; Bible 21, 23–24, 105–106;
biblical Hebrew 18, 24–25; Easy Language
Easy Access for Social Inclusion Training (EASIT) 402–403
454–455 heterolingualism 20, 22
Easy Language 434–438, 440, 450; barriers to Hildesheimer Treppe 235–236
communication 235–237, 248, 396–397, 453; historiography 43, 79
characteristics of 220, 244, 396; children 244, hypernym 190, 254, 260–261, 267
434, 439; compared to Plain Language 218, hyponym 212, 254, 260, 267
234, 237, 241–244, 395, 438–439, 450, 455;
and comprehensibility 227–230, 234–235, identity: communal 27, 117, 122; cultural 7, 40,
237; definition of 217, 238, 439; evolution of 49, 117, 123; diachronic 137–138; linguistic 65,
218, 238; interlingual translation 245–246; 136, 138–139, 142, 146, 354, 357; national 36,
intersemiotic translation 245–246; intralingual 39, 96, 133
translation 246–247; legal texts 336, 340; ideology 17, 24, 39, 65, 113–115, 118, 125, 133,
multimodality 218, 220–223, 244; see also Easy 141, 147, 173, 175–176, 274, 277, 293,
Access for Social Inclusion Training (EASIT); 354–357, 382
Easy Language and interpreting (ELI): social illustrations 49–50, 56, 58–60, 157, 218, 380–381
process 222, 225–231; textual guidelines 238– institutional translation 33, 329, 340
239, 398 inter-and intralingual translation: ancient Greek
Easy Language and interpreting (ELI) 395–408; terminology 105–107; blurred boundaries
characteristics of 407; compared to simultaneous 28, 34, 79, 89, 96, 105–107, 124–125, 135;
interpreting (SI) 402–406; in Germany 399, 408; similarities and differences 2–5, 7–9, 24–25,
in Israel 398–399; simplification 400–401; training 58, 106, 175, 183–193, 293, 314, 330, 381; in
400–401, 408 subtitles 165–167, 175
Easy to Understand E2U 454–456, 463 intercultural competence 348, 366, 367–368
482
Subject index
interculturality 380 Portuguese 145, 147, 246, 434, 438, 440–441,

interlingual translation 24, 35–36, 42, 95, 100, 148, 443–445, 447; Brazilian Portuguese 311, 445
150, 161, 297, 330–332, 377, 437, 645; and pragmatics 117, 350, 352, 354, 411, 421–423
audiovisual translation 360–361, 365, 372; and
diachronic variation 18, 22, 353; and Easy/Plain rarefaction 212–213
language 246–247; and education 183, 347, readability 20–21, 28, 43, 227–228, 256–257,
350–352, 354–356, 357; and interpreting 268, 275, 279–280, 314, 318, 337, 416,
395–396, 400, 402–405; vs editing 275, 437–438, 464
277–278, 280, 286 readability level 441–445, 449–450
intersemiotic translation 2, 5, 35, 113, 131, 184, Real Academia Española 171–173
221, 234, 245–246, 292–293, 369, 381, 389, reception 18, 23, 50–51, 58, 60, 80, 85, 95–96, 107,
411, 434–436, 453 164, 167–169, 173–176, 414
intralingual translation: and education reduplication 18–21, 23–25
347–357; and Easy/Plain language 335–338; register 23, 28, 65, 97, 100, 113, 159, 161, 172,
in expert-to-lay communication 253–254; 196–197, 204–205, 208, 254, 268, 294, 336,
and international institutional conventions 350, 352–354, 364, 367–369, 405–406, 460; see
332–334; and legal translation 329–340; and also diamesic
simplification 455; and translanguaging respeaking 166, 411–431, 425
351–353; vs editing 273 revoicing 364–365, 368
language planning 4, 25 Scots 145; archaic Scots 148, 151–152, 155;

layout 25–28, 52, 59, 218, 220, 237, 244, 246, 266, Broad Scots 147; Civil Service Scots
295, 396–397, 438, 455–456 156–157; contemporary Scots 147, 150–151;
learning difficulties see cognitive Itchy Coo translations 157–160; literary Scots
live subtitling 11, 437 148, 152; translation from Old English
live subtitling features 412–414 148–149; translation of English political
texts 154–157; translation of literary canon
media accessibility 368–370, 434–450, 453–456 150–154
modernization 17–28, 56–57, 59, 64–68, 113–115 self-translation 308–310, 314, 317, 319–320
Montenegrin 130–131, 133–134, 139–140 Serbian 3, 7, 117, 130, 132–135, 138–141
multimodal accessibility 87–88, 217, 220–222, 257, Serbo-Croatian 7, 49, 130, 132–134,
266–268, 348, 389, 436, 454, 458 138–140, 142
multimodality 87–89, 220–221 simplification 17, 70, 187, 193, 212, 218, 254,
277–278, 286, 313, 320, 335, 383, 389, 443,
oblique translation 188–192 450, 453, 468; see also Easy Language; Easy
omission 54, 56, 103, 171–172, 276, 280, 302, Language and interpreting (ELI); rarefaction
313–315, 320, 463 skopos theory 66, 145, 166, 185, 187, 197, 245,
248, 253–254, 267, 293–294, 313, 349, 381
paralinguistic features 369, 412, 463 Spanish (Iberian) 164, 169, 173, 302, 389, 447; and
paraphrase 18, 36, 39, 68, 70, 74, 95–96, 101–105, graded readers 377, 379, 382, 385, 386,
107, 187–188, 190–193, 201, 207, 254, 387–389; institutional and legal terms 330–333,
378, 468 335, 340; Mexican Spanish 164, 170–176;
paratext 58, 217–218, 223, 377–378, 385–389 Spanish vs Portuguese 145, 147
parliamentary language 417–420 standard variety 125, 132–133, 139, 141–142,
peritext 222–223, 228 147–150, 157, 160, 218, 234–235, 237, 239,
permutation 188–193 243, 246–248, 291, 293–294, 298, 351, 437,
Pinkeltje 48–60 454–456, 463
Plain English 434, 437–438; and barriers to stigmatization 120–122, 152, 156, 234, 237, 244,
communication 243–244; characteristics 246, 362, 438
395–396; definition of 241; evolution of 241; substitution 20–22, 98, 188, 191–193, 254,
and intersemiotic translation 246; and legal texts 274–275, 277–278, 280, 282, 284, 286
241, 243; textual guidelines 242; and translation subtitling 17, 164–176, 360–372, 411–431,
245–246 434–437, 454; active subtitling 361–362,
podcast: translation into Easy Language 457–468; 364, 372; classification 165–167; technical
format 458; orality 458; types 457 aspects 165
polysystem theory 320, 348–350, 356–357 surtitling 124, 435
483
Subject index
target audience 48, 165–169, 219, 227, 230, 235– oblique translation; omission; paraphrase;
238, 242, 244, 246, 254, 294, 297, 304, 336, permutation; simplification; substitution
378, 395–400, 402, 441, 455, 459–460, 459, translation shift: change in expressiveness 53–54;
463–464 change of voice 57–59, 148, 280, 283; shift
target culture 23, 50, 59, 83, 224, 237, 254, 275, change in tone 54–55; see also modernization
294, 298 translation strategies see translation procedures
transcription 19, 27, 28, 104, 106, 115, 165, 421, translation universals see addition; explicitation;
423, 429 simplification
transediting 275, 309 transliteration 5, 27–28, 118–119, 122
translanguaging 347, 351–353, 356, 361, 364 Turkic languages 3, 136, 331, 397
translation in other learning contexts (TOLC) Turkish 3, 23, 25, 49, 116–117, 122–123, 136;
347–350, 356 Ottoman Turkish 27, 134; Turkish language
translation pact 58 reform 25, 27
translation procedures 188, 223, 273; see also Turkish Cypriot community (TC) 7, 116–117
adaptation; condensation; deletion; direct
transfer; direct translation; explicitation; United Nations (UN) 331, 397
484

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

Linda Pillière is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Aix-Marseille Université,

Özlem Berk Albachten is Professor of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul,

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive overviews

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND RELIGION

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION, INTERPRETING, AND

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY TRANSLATION

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION THEORY AND CONCEPTS

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF KOREAN INTERPRETING

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION, INTEPRETING AND CRISIS

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooks-

Edited by Linda Pillière and

1 Archaization, modernization, and representing the source

2 Retrieving Belgium’s national past: 19th-century intralingual translation

3 Pinkeltje remains Pinkeltje: intralingual translations of a Dutch

4 Forms and practices of intralingual translation in premodern China 64

5 Vergilian centos from the perspective of intralingual translation:

6 Homer into Greek: intralingual translation in Greco-Roman antiquity 95

7 Intralingual translation as a prestige-endowing activity for the

8 Intra- and interlingual translation from a diachronic perspective: the

9 Translation from English into Scots 145

10 Intralingual translation in subtitles and reception: the case of the

11 “Issues of the same order”? The microstrategies of an expert-lay

12 A typology of the various aspects of diaphasic intralingual translation –

13 Easy Language translation and comprehensibility as a social process 217

14 Intralingual translation in Easy Language and in Plain Language 234

15 Intralingual translation in expert-to-lay public communication:

16 Editing and intralingual translation: rewriting for clarity and

17 Two sides of the same coin: the American version of a British

18 “The rule is no fuss”: an analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s shift to

19 Intralingual variation and transfer in legal and institutional translation:

20 Expanding translation studies: a functionalist approach to the use of

21 Intralingual audiovisual translation as a foreign language aid: a

22 Graded readers as instances of intralingual translation 377

23 Intralingual interpretation: simultaneous Easy Language interpreting

24 Respeaking as a form of intralingual translation: intersections between

25 Intralingual translation and media accessibility at a crossroads:

26 Translation into Easy Language: the unexplored case of podcasts 453

Author index 472

14.3 NDR news in Easy Language 240

Spyros Armostis is Lecturer in Linguistics at the Department of English Studies, University of

Some key issues and concepts

Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other

Exploring the concept

Expanding the field

PART I. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION:

PART II. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION: LANGUAGE

PART III. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION:

PART IV. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION: REWORDING AND EDITING

of omission and shortening, accompanied by the removal of rational explanations, contribute to

PART V. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION: EDUCATION AND

PART VI. INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION: ACCESSIBILITY

Between reduplication and translation: diplomatic transcriptions

modernizing translations. Thus, a “diplomatic transcription” (or a “diplomatic edition”) is a ver-

Literal or conventional substitutions for source language items

Conventionalized representation of the earlier language

Modernization vs. intralingual diachronic translation

Archaization, modernization and ideology

Text layout and transparency

Translation and transfer directions in 19th-century Belgium:

two or more speech communities are united religiously, politically or economically

Between French (France) and French (Belgium)

To modern Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian readers, the poem’s language is markedly old-fash

If we discard various ideological extremes, is there a way of deciding whether Serbo-Cro