translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

At this point, mention should be made that the term matrix does not
characterize the English language exclusively. There is a matrix in any
language and this is due to the fact that human beings tend to set their
brains so as to identify and memorize useful linguistic patterns in order to
make minimum efforts in communication. Once speakers identify patterns,
they can go to the next level of abstraction, that which implies establishing
points of symmetry between the various assimilated patterns. The result of
this complex process will be a linguistic matrix easily accessible and ready to
be used when necessary. Speakers using the matrix of a language will
understand the way that language functions considerably faster and better
than those ignoring it. However, I can firmly state that identification and
productive use of the linguistic matrix is always more accessible in the
native language than in a foreign language.
Before becoming a teacher I had been constantly trying to find ways
of learning English more easily. I found a solution to my problem only
years later, after becoming a teacher of English and while trying to explain
the English tenses to my Taiwanese students. I realized then that I had to
identify the common core of these tenses, i.e. their matrix, in order to help
my students understand and appropriately use them. Once identified this
matrix, I realized how useful it could prove in my teaching English to both
children and adults. However, this idea that there is a matrix of the English
tenses which may prove extremely useful in teaching this language to nonnative
speakers is not new.
Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1991: 111) use the term matrix in
explaining English tenses and suggesting solutions meant to facilitate their
learning by non-native speakers. In their opinion, future tenses may be
compared to a “wild card” in the matrix of the English tenses due to the
fact that there is no future tense that appears as a marking on the verb in English.
The (modal) auxiliary verb will is a mark of future tenses which cannot be
isolated from the elements which mark the categories of tense and aspect in
the present and in the past:
For the future line in our matrix, we use the modal will, since there is
no future tense that appears as a marking on the verb in English. […]
The future adheres to the same patterns as the present and the past in
terms of its combination of aspect markers. […]
Thus, one of the reasons for displaying the tense-aspect
combinations in this manner is to demonstrate that the 12 “tenses” are
simply combinations of tense and aspect. […] This is why we say that
by viewing the tenses and aspect system, the learning burden is
lessened. (Murcia and Freeman, 1999: 111)
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