Text, genre and discourse shifts in translation1

As we have explained in Unit 11, Section A, recent developments in relevance
research have signalled a shift back to text typologies. These are now seen as
important templates for the alignment of communicator intentions with audience
expectations, thus guiding the text receiver in the search for optimal relevance. For
example, one would not seek intended relevance in a novel’s historical accuracy
of detail the way one would in an historical reference book.
A glance at the list of the various text typologies rehabilitated by the relevance
model, however, reveals that the term ‘textual’ is used in a fairly generic sense,
covering quite an assortment of textual products:eulog ies, summaries, novels, comic
strips, commentaries, abstracts, text books, hymn books, historical reference books,
etc. Strictly speaking, these are not all text types.While some of these forms are texts
proper (e.g. summaries, commentaries), others belong to what we have called genres
(e.g. eulogies, novels, comic strips), and still others form part of discourse (e.g.
textbooks, historical reference books).
Genre occupies Carl James in his study of translation shifts (James 1989, see Text
B11.1). James’s study may be credited with being the first to recognize, from an
essentially applied-linguistic perspective, the distinction between two levels of
abstraction in approaching the notion of genre in translation.Translation itself may
be seen as a genre in the abstract.This is a function of the total effect of choices made
and felt to be intrinsic to any act of translation (i.e. the translational sense of genre,
as in ‘all translation intrinsically seems foreign or contrived’). There is, on the
other hand, the detailed more concrete sense of genre. This subsumes all kinds of
purposeful activities with which translation, like any other form of text production,
deals and which revolve around conventionalized communicative events (i.e. the
linguistic sense of genre, as in the cooking recipe, the academic abstract

The second extract in this unit (Text B11.2) shifts the focus from genre to discourse,
and from Applied Linguistics to Cultural Studies, the discipline which examines the
cultural ramifications of issues such as conventions and attitudes. In this field of
inquiry, two basic research trends may be identified:one simply unsympathetic
to linguistics or even to discourse analysis, the other cognisant of the contribution
of discourse studies to the study of culture and translation. The latter approach may  be illustrated by the work of the Canadian cultural commentator and translation
theorist Donald Bruce which, while firmly grounded in Cultural Studies, has nevertheless
branched out in a number of interesting ways to include discursive models
and socio-political theory. Specifically, it is the focus on discourse alongside other
types of sign (genre, text, etc.) which has primarily motivated our choice of this
reading at this point in our discussion.
But, whatever the brand, Cultural Studies is credited with raising an important
question in the study of translation. This relates to which texts to translate and which
to ignore. This sensitive decision is closely bound up with the translation strategy
favoured by a given translation tradition. For example,within the Anglo-American
translation tradition, careful selection has ensured that only those texts which lend
themselves to a domesticating strategy are included, while other texts which resist
such a strategy are all but totally excluded.The question of what determines whether
a text will be translated and published or not is thus at the heart of cultural politics,
a topic that Donald Bruce addresses in his study of discourse shifts.).