Discourse Analysis and Translation Practice

This paper aims to address the relationship between discourse analysis and translation practice. Discourse analysis is a discipline which investigates the study of the relationship between language and the context in which it is used. The main foundation of discourse analysis is that language does not occur in isolation; it depends upon social context and concentrates on the units above the sentence. This is where discourse analysis and translation go hand in hand as translation is not a simple process of transferring words from one language into another. In fact, translation is not a mere activity which emphasizes on producing equivalences for lexical and syntactical elements. In this sense, translation is a communicative process which occurs in two different social contexts. As a result, for translators to produce an accurate and faithful translation of the source message into the target language, phoneme and the word cannot be regarded as the basic units of language. Indeed, translators need to look at the linguistic units above sentence rank. Without recognizing and emphasizing these units, translation cannot be proceeded

Keywords:

translation , discourse analysis , communicative process