Systemic functional linguistics

2012

Following on the first volume (Manfredi 2008), which focuses on the theoretical issues that link Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Translation Studies (TS), this second volume of Translating Text and Context aims at demonstrating how they can be fruitfully exploited in the actual practice of translation. The book starts with the illustration of four models informed by SFL which have been offered by renowned TS scholars and linguists (House 1977/1981, 1997, 2014; Bell 1991; Baker 1992/2011; Steiner 1997, 1998, 2004) and which, to varying degrees, have been applied to the practice of translation. Then, partly drawing on such models, as well as on the SFL analysis outlined by Miller (2005), the book puts forth a Hallidayan approach to translation practice, integrated with further insights from TS. The goal is to offer a tool for translation teaching, to be employed for both the production and evaluation of target texts, working with the language pair English/Italian. It is argu...

Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 2019

Erich Steiner, as a leading scholar in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), has been involved in various important strands of research on SFL and translation. In this interview, he discusses his motivation of studying linguistics, and introduces his works in different areas, including machine translation in the 1980s, corpora, register, explicitation, grammatical metaphor, integration of product- and process-based researches, as well as language description and comparison.

Translators work with both the most concrete forms of meaning, like phonemes, words and structures, and the most abstract forms of meaning, like contexts, cultures and ideologies. These meanings are negotiated in translation with the aid of one or more theories. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a linguistic theory that views language as a medium to create meanings in context (Eggins, 2004, p. 327). Because meanings and contexts are the tools of the translator’s trade, SFL seems to offer an appropriate bridge between the two, relating linguistic meanings to their wider context. Considering this potential, I decided to further explore SFL in translation, applying an SFL analysis to the English translation of an Argentine novel, Rayuela (Hopscotch). I chose this specific literary work for personal and academic reasons. In the personal sphere, its author, Julio Córtazar, is one of the greatest Spanish-­speaking writers. He has been widely translated and is known for his rebellious, unconventional use of language. I felt curious to see how this was handled in English. In the academic sphere, I intend to determine whether SFL could provide objective insights into literary translation. In this article, I shall argue that SFL can indeed offer an effective comprehensive theoretical framework to help render meanings embedded in a source text into a target text. Firstly, I will briefly introduce SFL, its main concepts and founder, together with some translation scholars who have used it. Secondly, I will describe some criticisms to SFL, followed by its more positive applications in the practice and assessment of translation. I will later demonstrate how SFL may be applied to some excerpts of Hopscotch. Finally, I will conclude with some final remarks about applying SFL in translation.

2023

Translation is the challenging performance of transferring meaning from one language to another. In recent years, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has gained popularity as a framework for analyzing and understanding the language features of translation. This point of view strongly emphasizes the impact that context, register, and genre have on language's ability to transmit meaning. In this book, we investigate the role of SFL in translation studies, stressing both its theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. This book offers deep details on the significance of SLF and translation as well as how they affect international collaboration and communication. The importance of SLF and translation in bridging linguistic and cultural divides and fostering mutual understanding and cooperation among many cultures and languages is also highlighted in this book. It goes through the fundamental ideas, guidelines, and ideal procedures of SLF and Translation as well as how they apply to actual situations. For academics, students, and professionals interested in the relationship between language, translation, and meaning, we hope that this book will be a valuable resource.

Since the 1990s, discourse analysis has been applied to translation studies, and studies with this approach have become quite prominent. As one resource of discourse analysis, the SFL (Systemic Functional Linguistics) model can be applied to analyze both the original text and the translated text. Following this approach, both texts are compared at the sociological, semiotic, generic, registerial, discoursal, and lexicogrammatical levels by adopting a top-down process. The applicability of Halliday's linguistic framework has then been widely recognized within the field of translation studies. Meanwhile, different strata of Systemic Functional Grammar have shed light on a number of studies. In this paper, I have restricted the topic to one aspect only, i.e. the textual metafunction. I have first traced the development of SFL and its integration with translation studies. Some basic terms in SFL and Theme/Rheme analysis are also explained. Then, some of the existing studies involving thematic analysis and translation are reviewed. As advocated by several scholars, what we need is a more objective apparatus for descriptive translation studies. It would be beneficial to link SFL and descriptive translation studies together, as SFL serves as a tool that relates linguistic choices to the sociocultural context systematically.

During my practice as a translating student and professional translator, I based many of my choices on what sounded “more faithful or natural”. Therefore, I changed or moved things around very much based on subjective impressions, giving reasons such as “it's not what it says in the source text (ST)”, “it has a stronger connotation in the ST”, or “it sounds better.” I knew something was not right when giving these explanations to myself, to colleagues or even clients. So I tried to supplement them with grammar or corpus-based examples whenever I could, considering the translation context and users. And yet something was still missing. When I was introduced to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), I slowly started seeing the gears of a big machine at work. I started noticing ways to ground my choices in a stable, systematic theory. For the purpose of this article, I studied an editorial on a policy about asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat, originally written in English and translated into Spanish. The translation was hypothetically to be published on the Spanish-speaking community news website LatinHub (www.latinhub.com.au) in Australia. In the following sections, I will firstly introduce the theoretical concepts of Theme and Interpersonal Metafunction, then present some particular translation choices and apply the concepts of Theme and Interpersonal meanings to improve those choices in a revised version. Finally, I will discuss some benefits and draw a conclusion.

Globe: A journal of language, culture and communication, 2020

This article is concerned with demonstrating the methodological relevance of Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG) for Descriptive Translation Studies. More specifically, the article establishes a framework for the analysis of so-called shifts in translation, i.e. lexicogrammatical changes occurring between source and target texts. It is thus argued that SFG may serve to fill a methodological void within Translation Studies, since, while other typologies of microstrategies exist, these other taxonomies typically serve a pedagogic purpose, being aimed at alerting translator trainees to a relatively limited number of broad options available to them in the translation process. This means that, given the didactic nature of such frameworks, the level of granularity is typically too low to be suitable for the retrospective analysis of a translation product in comparison with its source. Hence it is argued that what is needed for retrospective research is a much more fine-grained framework with clearly defined categories derived from an elaborate grammatical theory such as SFG. Therefore, on the basis of key SFG concepts such as paradigmatic organization, metafunction, rank and cline of delicacy, the very nature of shifts in translation is theorized and an outline of a systems network is presented in the central sections of the article. The framework is exemplified first and foremost by means of English-into-Danish translations of LSP texts within the fields of medicine and business, but in order to illustrate the appliability of the framework to the retrospective analysis of any kind of derivational text generation, whether inter- or intralingual, the example material also includes the monolingual rewriting of a specialized source text into a lay-oriented version, and the registerial adaptation (also monolingual) of formal, standard documents from public-sector authorities into more accessible, modernized versions.

Perspectives from Systemic Functional Linguistics, 2018

2016

Applied-linguists study language use in context such as the contexts associated with specialized registers (e.g., business or academic), contexts for language learning (e.g., classrooms and study abroad programs), and contexts for language assessment (e.g., speaking and writing tests). As a result, many of them are interested in linguistic theory that takes into account the contextual dimensions of language. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) views language as a social semiotic resource people use to accomplish their purposes by expressing meanings in context (Halliday, 1985). This perspective is refreshing to applied linguists since it offers a framework for their work. In SFL, language must be studied in contexts such as professional settings, classrooms, and language tests.