constructing pathways to translation - Higher Education Commission

The Reader of the Text, especially the Critic, is faced with three questions concerning the
text:
1. What it is about?
2. What is the writer’s purpose in producing it?
3. What is a plausible context for its use?
In order to answer these questions and make sense of the Text, the critical reader has to
draw on appropriate linguistic and social knowledge – syntactic, semantic and pragmatic
– which reveals: (a) the proportional content of the speech acts which make up the text,
(b) their illocutionary forces, and (c) the Text Type of which this particular Text is an
example.
The Text Typology has to deal not with ‘Virtual Systems’ the abstract potential of
language, but with ‘Active Systems’ in which selections and decisions have already been
made and such a typology must be correlated with typologies of discourse actions and
situations. Texts have traditionally been organized into formal typologies on the basis of
the topic, the propositional content of text – making use of quantitative measures, which
are thought to typify the language of science, and the like.
A number of functional typologies are based on the notion of degrees of translatability,
but the majority are organized on three way distinctions: (1) the producer (emotive);(2)
the subject matter (referential); (3) the receiver (conative). The typology labels three
distinctions as (1) expressive (2) informative and (3) vocative; the poetic metalinguistic
and phatic being subsumed under the expressive, vocative and informative respectively.
Further, the text can be divided into three types – literary, institutional and scientific. The
major category text type is arrived at by assigning instruction – each of those major text
types contains two or three sub-types as is illustrated in the model by Bell (1991).
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