Chapter 06. Intro Video.

Discourse and Register analysis

approaches
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Chapter 6 looks at discourse and register analysis approaches to translation. This is one area that I
work in particularly.

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Discourse analysis has many different meanings. So, one thing to look out for as you go through the
chapter is that different people are using the word discourse and discourse analysis in different ways
because they come from different

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theoretical backgrounds.

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The one which is predominant in this chapter, and which underpins a lot of the work done from the
late 1980s, 1990s and onwards in the UK, is systemic functional linguistics, systemic functional
grammar,

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which was developed by Michael Halliday

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from the 1960s onwards.

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And there it's particularly suited for the analysis of translation, in my opinion, because of the focus on
communication rather than form or structure….

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rather than formal structure.

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And

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it’s also particularly good because it links very closely the function of a choice

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at a given point in the text
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with

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the

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the form which is chosen. For example, if in a

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text, someone who's particularly

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active, then they would end up probably being in first position in the sentence, they would be the
actor

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in the

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structure of the sentence.

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Similarly, if

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you're looking for evaluation in translation, which is what I look at, [these are] areas of linguistic
choices which the translator has made which reflect his or her background

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and which may be contentious.

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That's part of

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what's known as the interpersonal metafunction. What's known as tenor.

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That could be a particular adjective

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that's used, it could be the choice of pronoun, the hierarchical difference between the pronoun for the
source text and the target text, which is very important in
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Thai and Japanese and many other languages.

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So, and then you've got how the text holds together, the mode,

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with cohesion and coherence.

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So it's got a whole

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model waiting, or toolkit, as some people call it, for the analysis of the text and for seeing how a
meaning is advanced by the choice of one option over another.

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And that

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is the

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crux of

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Chapter 6. And when you finish that, I hope that you have a clear idea of,

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particularly, what register analysis has to offer the analysis of translation.