The Functionalist Approaches: The Concept of Translational Action

The Functionalist approaches in translation, and especially the Skopos Theory, have made a notable switch from a linguistic oriented to a more sociocultural concept of translation. They have put ‘translation’ on the map and have made a respectable profession out of it. The translator is now regarded as an expert within his area of expertise, just like a doctor or a historian are in their respective fields. They take into account not only literary or religious, but a broad variety of text types, from legal and scientific to commercial and touristic. Moreover, the reign of the source-text itself has come to an end, and sometimes a translation process can even happen in its absence (Nord; 2005, p.18). The ‘dethronement’ (Vermeer) of the source-text lead the translation theories towards a prospective atitude, which focuses now on the needs and expectations of the target audience, and puts at rest the tensions caused by equivalence. For Vermeer, the source-text is not a touchstone anymore in translation, but just a criterion in a series of others, like the background of the source-culture or the target reader’s expected level of comprehending. It is indeed very useful to have the liberty to mold a product text according to the needs of a certain audience, let’s say, conveying a world’s classic like ‘Crime and Punishment’ into a book for 8th graders.

The functionalist approaches are mainly developed on the concept of translational action. This is not viewed as a mere act of transcoding from one language to another, but as an intercultural process in which the mediator accounts multiple aspects of the communication involved, like behaviour or non-verbal signs. It is obvious the affiliation of this approach with the communication theory, but I wonder how far it should extrapolate it.

According to Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer, a text is viewed as an offer of information made by a producer to a recipient, and subsequently, a translation is a secondary offer of information which imitates the former, to a member of a target culture. This is more or less the basic deffinition of the communication, as it results from the following, well-known, linear model:

Sender______encoding___________Channel/Message_______decoding________Receiver

Producer of a text_____primary offer of information____________Translator______secondary offer of information___Text Reader


I feel that what they are practically saying is that everything can be a translational action. Even the example with the baby that couldn’t speak but the mother ‘translated’ his gurgles makes me think that maybe some boundaries should be set as in how should translation be defined. Is translational action a translation? Not necessarily (Christiane Nord refers sometimes to a so called 'translation in a narrower form', as in separating the ‘real’ translation from the rest), but is translation a translational action? It is, according to functionalism. Communication theory postulates that every process which carrries information from a sender to a receiver is a communication process. Even the act of being thirsty can be accounted as a communication process in anatomy. When the level of water from the body cells gets lower they send a message to the nerve system, which alerts the brain, which puts the locomotory system in motion to go get some water. So I could argue then, that this is a translational process, for the chemical indicators from the body cells convert into a stimulus and then into an impulse which runs through the nerve system and so on. Or I could say that a widow who wants to contact her dead husband is the target reader for what a psychic should ‘translate’ to her from the world beyond. These are, after all, some primary offers of information rendered in secondary ones by a medium.

I may be exaggerating a little bit, but I feel that translation has become so derivative, that it is no more than a fuzzy concept nowadays. There must be a limit to what we may legitimately call a translation, as oppose to any other form of product text which encounters a translation process, as, let’s say, an adaptation.

References:
Translating as a Purposeful Activity, by Christiane Nord, St Jerome Publishing, UK 2005