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THE ROLE OF DISCOURSE MARKERS IN TRANSLATION
Odilova Sitora Umid qizi
1
st
year student of
Master’s degree Uzbekistan State University of World languages
Discourse markers are mostly used for the production of coherent conversation
and, particularly, to make clear the
speaker’s intentions and show what the speaker
intends to do with words. In general, there is no complete correspondence between
two languages in the field of discourse markers: most of the time their correlation in
the target language have not the same pragmatic meaning, constituting a usual
difficulty in translation.
Linguistic expressions that is used to signal the relation of an utterance to the
immediate context with the primary function of bringing to
listener’s attention a
particular kind of the upcoming utterance with the immediate discourse context
(Redeker, 1990). Marking devices which display the
speaker’s understanding of the
contribution’s sequential relationship or relevance to the information set as
established by the immediately preceding contribution (Goldberg, 1980). Certain set
of signals in the
conversationalist’s speech, used to introduce level shifts within the
conversation, or to prepare listeners for the next run in the logical argument
(Keller,1979). Expressions which help the speaker divide his message into chunks
of information and they also help the listener in the process of decoding these
information units (Erman, 1986). Most of the above-mentioned definitions confine
discourse markers only to spoken language. According to this view, discourse
markers are used to maintain and achieve conversational continuity and seen as
response signals and essentially interactive to express the relation or relevance of
an utterance to the preceding utterance or to the context. However, as the view about
discourse markers is gradually broadened, discourse markers also include more and
more items in written language. Vande Kopple (1985) points out that discourse
markers are a kind of linguistic items which appear both in spoken and written
language and are those items which can help the reader or listeners organize,
interpret and evaluate the information. According to him, we work on two different
levels when we speak or write. On one level, we convey information about our subject
matter and on the other level, we show listeners or readers how to listen to or read,
react to, and evaluate what was spoken or written about the subject matter. As
William Vande Kopple explains, the first level is the primary discourse level and the
second is the metadiscourse level or discourse markers level.
Thus discourse markers are special linguistic materials through which the
speakers stop into a text to make their presence felt in the text, to guide an audience
as to how the text is organized, what processes are being used to produce it, and what
the
speaker’s intentions and attitudes are regarding the subject matter, the readers,
and their text. And they can be realized by various forms such as words, phrases, and
clauses. It is usual to find sequences of two or more sentences serving discourse
marker purpose, especially in introductions and conclusions to academic texts.
Therefore in this these, the discourse markers are as inclusive as involving different
language forms, that is words, phrases and clauses.
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The translation of discourse markers is a difficult task owing to the very properties
that members of the functional class of discourse markers share, including non-
propositionality, context depenedence, extreme multifunctional feature and a primarily
non-refential function. Since a corolarry of such criterial features, discourse markers do
not change the basic meaning of utterances, but are important for the organization and
structuring of discourse as well as for marking the speaker
’s attitudes to the proposition
being expressed. In addition, they facilitate the processes of pragmatic inferences, in
other words, help the hearer to find out what is not explicitly stated but is implied by a
given utterance. As discourse markers do not change the basic meaning of utterances,
a straightforward translation strategy is to omit them in target language. The resulting
translation, in certain contexts, can not lose any of the propositional content of the source
text, but will lose a variety of communicative effects, such as the naturalness of ordinary,
everday conversation, or the speaker's attitude to the words being uttered (cf.
Furkò
2013). The difference between a conversational exchange including and omitting a
discourse markers can, in several cases, be captured along various social and functional
dimensions such as solidarity, social distance or effective scales (cf. Holmes 2008). As
a result, omitting discourse markers in the translation conspicuously and repeatedly can
result in a text that does not match either the social dynamics or the intended style of
source text.
In addition, translators have a variety of options depending on the extent to
which they want to convey the subtleties of the source text and the linguistic means
by which they choose to do so. Nid
a’s classical distinction between formal
equivalence and dynamic equivalence is especially relevant to the translation of
discourse markers, as a target text that focuses on the message will yield a radically
different discourse markers equivalent from a target text where the translator has
observed 'the principle of equivalent effect' (Nida 1964). If the translator strives for
formal equivalence, he or she can use the same discourse marker in the target text
every time a particular discourse marker occur in the source text. This will invariably
turn out to be a bad strategy, as research has shown that it is impossible to find
complete correspondences between discourse markers in two different languages.
Equivalent effect is equally impossible to achieve, due to the various social, stylistic,
interpersonal, and other effects that are simultaneously conveyed by a particular use
of a discourse markers. As a result, a series of compromises will occur, which is the
stable of a
translator’s job. However, translating pragmatic effects, for example non-
conceptual meaning, requires a greater flexibility in handling translation options,
which range from lexical items such as target text DMs, modal particles and
conjunctions, through the use of whole clauses as well as grammaticalized forms (cf.
Aijimer and Simon- Vandenbergen 2003).
This paper explored the problems that translators have to face in dealing with
illocutionary phenomena, such as the usage of discourse markers in general and
reformation markers in particular. Although, discourse markers do not normally
convey conceptual meaning, their omission in the target text can result in increased
processing efforts, not intended conversational implicatures, misrepresented
interpersonal dynamics and the absence of the naturalness of every day
conversations. In addition, it is important to take into account a wider range of
discourse markers, since the different subgroups of discourse markers have various
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degrees of communicative transparency, and, as a result, cause different degrees of
pitfalls for translators.
REFERENCES:
1. Aijimer, Karin & Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen. 2003. The discourse
particle well and its equivalents in Swedish and Dutch. Linguistics. 41(6): 1123
–1131.
2.
Furkó, Bálint Péter. 2013. The Presence and Absence of Pragmatic Markers
in Naturally- occurring and Scripted Discourse. In Katarina Labudova and
Nòra Séllei
(eds.), Presences and Absences
– Transdisciplinary Essays, 23-37. Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
3. Holmes, Janet. 2008. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Person: Longman.
4. Nida, Eugene Albert. 1964. Toward a science of translating. Leiden:
E.J. Brill.
5. Redeker G. 1990. Lexical marking of transitions between discourse
segments. Poster presented at the International Pragmatics Conference, Barcelona,
July.
6. Vande Kopple W. 1985. Some exploratory discourse on menadiscourse.
College Composition and Communication, 82
–90.
