Where the information is not given by a thematic title like this, the subject matter of a text can be formulated in an introductory lead, as is very often the case, for example, in newspaper articles (cf. Liiger 1977: 49ff.) or in the first sentence or paragraph which can then be regarded as a kind of "topic sentence" paraphrasing the thematic essence of the text.
Example
The Soviet Disunion
UNITED IT STANDS ...DIVIDED IT FALLS
While 1989 was the year of eastern Europe, 1990 may be the year of the Soviet Union. Confronted by growing nationalist unrest and economic mayhem, the empire is beginning to come apart at the seams. James Blitz in Moscow reports on the crisis in the Kremlin (...). (The Sunday Times, 1 January 1990, p. A l.)
Example
Title: Ford Is Rebuffed By Mazda Sub-title: No Chance Seen For Larger Stake
TOKYO - Mazda Motor Corp. said Monday that it saw no opportunity for Ford Motor Co. to enlarge its stake in the Japanese company and that Mazda had no plans to raise funds by issuing new shares, warrant bonds or convertibles. (...) (InternationalHerald Tribune, 9 January, 1990, p. 9)
This applies not only to titles which are a shortened paraphrase of the text, but also to descriptive titles, e.g. of literary works.
Example
The original title El sigh de las luces ("The Age of Enlightenment") indicates the subject matter of the novel, while the titles of the English and the German translation (Explosion in A Cathedral Explosion in der Kathedrale) use the name of a picture that plays a symbolic part in the story. The reader, however, cannot recognize it as such and will probably interpret it as an indication of the subject matter or content. This may lead to a (wrong) classification of the book as a kind of thriller.
If the subject matter is not described in the title or title-context, it can be elicited by reducing the textual macro-structures to certain basic semantic propositions or information units, which constitute a kind of resume or "condensation" of the text. Occasionally, the translator is even asked to produce a short version of the text (i.e. a summary, abstract, or resume) in the target language. In translation teaching, the production of summaries can be used for checking text comprehension.
Condensing and summarizing, however, does not in all texts lead to an elicitation of the real subject matter, since in some cases this is obscured by a "false" subject occupying the foreground of the text. In these cases it is the analysis of other intratextual factors, mainly of lexis, which may lead to success.
The crucial concept in the analysis of the subject matter at the level of lexical items is that of isotopy. Isotopic features are semes shared by various lexical items in a text, thus interconnecting the lexical items and forming a kind of chain or line of isotopies throughout the text. The lexical items linked by isotopy are referred to as the "isotopic level", which may indicate the subject matter(s) of the text. There can be various isotopic levels in a text, either complementing each other or hierarchically subordinate to one another.
Checklist
The following questions may help to find out the relevant information about the subject matter of the text:
1.Is the source text a thematically coherent single text or a text combination?
2.What is the subject matter of the text (or of each component of the combination)? Is there a hierarchy of compatible subjects?
3.Does the subject matter elicited by internal analysis correspond to the expectation built up by external analysis?
4.Is the subject matter verbalized in the text (e.g. in a topic sentence at the beginning of the text) or in the text environment (title, heading, sub-title, introduction, etc.)?
5.Is the subject matter bound to a particular (SL, TL, or other) cultural context?
6.Do the TC conventions dictate that the subject matter of the text should be verbalized somewhere inside or outside the text?
Content
General considerations
Where the translator has a good command of the source language and is fully conversant with the rules and norms governing text production, s/he will usually have little or no difficulty in determining the content of a text. Even so, it would still be useful to have some means of checking this intuitive understanding. It would be even more useful, of course, to have some guidelines available in translator training, where competence in this area is still inadequate.
Paraphrase as a procedure for content analysis
By "content" we usually mean the reference of the text to objects and phenomena in an extralinguistic reality, which could as easily be a fictitious world as the real world. This reference is expressed mainly by the semantic information contained in the lexical and grammatical structures (e.g. words and phrases, sentence patterns, tense, mood, etc.) used in the text. These structures complement each other, reduce each other's ambiguity, and together form a coherent context.
Therefore, the starting point for the analysis of content has to be the information carried by the text elements linked on the surface of the text by the text-linguistic linking devices, such as logical connections, topic-comment relationships, functional sentence perspective, etc.
Since at this stage the external analysis of the communicative situation has been completed, the meaning of the text can be elicited, as it were, "through the filter" of extratextual knowledge.
Analysing the content of syntactically or semantically complicated texts can be made easier by a simplifying paraphrase of the information units, which can be formulated independently of the sentence structure. However, in so far as they are explicitly verbalized in the text, the logical relationships between these units should be noted. This procedure permits the translator to identify (and possibly compensate for) presuppositions, and even defects in coherence, which frequently occur in texts.
These paraphrases have to be treated with great caution, however. The paraphrased information units form a new text which is in no way identical to the original. Paraphrases can only be used in order to simplify text structures, making them more transparent. When paraphrasing lexical items we also have to take account of the connotative content, which has to be preserved, or at least marked, in the paraphrased text.
In any case, it must not be the simplified paraphrase which should be taken as a starting point for translation, but the original source text.
Connotations
The amount of information verbalized in a text includes not only denotative but also connotative (or "secondary") meaning, i.e. the information expressed by a language element by virtue of its affiliation to a certain linguistic code (stylistic levels, registers, functional style, regional and social dialects, etc.). By selecting one specific element in preference to another from a number of possible elements the author assigns a secondary meaning to the text. Since the connotative meaning can only be analysed in detail in connection with the stylistic values of lexis, sentence structure and suprasegmental features, I would recommend at this stage of the analysis provisionally marking those text elements which can be intuitively classified as "probably connotative". The extratextual category of text function often provides a certain expectation here.
Example
Kate Saunders in The Sunday Times, 7 January 1990: Career woman - or just the little woman?
Chic dinner tables are resounding with funereal orations over the twitching corpse of the women's movement - they come to bury it, certainly not to praise it. It was so selfish, so uncaring, so unnatural - surely home-building is nicer and more fulfilling than hacking through the professional jungle? The Eighties' ideal was the woman who ran a business, made breakfast appointments with her own husband, and spent 20 minutes' "quality time" a day with her children. But women are wondering now whether the effort of juggling home and career was worthwhile. All you got for your pains was nervous exhaustion, and kids who spoke Icelandic because they were brought up by the au pair. How much simpler to give up the struggle and devote yourself to stoking the home fires. Part of the problem seems to be that women are discovering the real snag about equality - work is a pain. Any man could have told them this. (...)
Certain connotations are a part of every speaker's communicative knowledge whether they speak the standard language or a particular regional and/or social dialect. They are linked so closely to a lexical item that they would be specified in the dictionary (e.g. kid is marked "slang" in OALD 1963, and "informal" in OALD 1989, whereas snag is marked "colloquial" in OALD 1963 and not marked at all in OALD 1989). Connotations such as these, even though they may change in the course of time, must be considered to be part of the "linguistic competence" of sender and receiver. Other connotations, however, are merely valid for certain persons, since they can only "work" if the participants know particular social, political, regional or cultural phenomena, e.g. career woman vs. the little woman or the allusion to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in example 3.2.274. Such connotations belong to the "horizon" of sender and receiver.
In his famous book How to Be an Alien, George Mikes gives a humorous example.
Example
"You foreigners are so clever," said a lady to me some years ago. First, thinking of the great amount of foreign idiots and half-wits I had had the honour of meeting, I considered this remark exaggerated but complimentary. Since then I learnt that it was far from it. These few words expressed the lady's contempt and slight disgust for foreigners. If you look up the word clever in any English Dictionary, you will find that the dictionaries are out of date and mislead you on this point. According to the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, for instance, the word means quick and neat in movement, skilful, talented, ingenious. (...) All nice adjectives, expressing valuable and estimable characteristics. A modern Englishman, however, uses the word clever in the sense: shrewd, sly, furtive, surreptitious, treacherous, sneaking, crafty, un-English, un-Scottish, un-Welsh (Mikes 1984: 42).
The "internal situation"
The information in the text can be "factual", i.e. based on the facts of what is conventionally regarded as "reality" by sender and receiver, or "fictional", i.e. referring to a different, fictitious world imagined or invented by the author, which is quite separate from the "real world" in which the communicative action takes place. However, this distinction is not of immediate importance for content analysis. Fictionality is a pragmatic property which is assigned to a text by the participants in communicative interaction. Its definition depends on the notion of reality and the norms of textuality prevailing in the society in question. If the notion of reality changes, then a text which was intended to be factual might be read as fictional, or vice versa. If we look at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or George Orwell's 1984 we might come to the conclusion that a fictional text describing a Utopian situation could even become factual if reality were to change accordingly. However, the question of fictionality or factuality really becomes relevant to translation when we consider presuppositions.
Nevertheless, an analysis of content will have to specify whether or not the internal situation of the text is identical with the external situation. If it is not, the internal situation will have to be analysed separately, using the same set of WH-questions applied in the external analysis. This is very often the case in fictional texts, and in factual texts of the complex text type which contain embedded texts of another category.
In an internal situation there might be an internal sender (speaker, narrator), who may adopt various attitudes or perspectives towards the narration (e.g. "author's perspective", or "camera-eye" perspective), or there might be an implicit reader or listener, and implicit conditions of time and place; there may also be hints as to the medium used, the motive for communication and the function assigned to the particular embedded text. The internal situation may even, like the famous Russian doll, contain further embedded situations.
The situational factors of an embedded text are normally mentioned explicitly in the frame text, whereas the internal situation of a fictional text (i.e. its "setting") can often only be inferred from hidden clues or indirect hints, such as proper names of persons and places, references to culture-specific realities, elements of regional dialect in a dialogue, etc.
However, there are cases where an analysis of the external situation yields information on the internal situation, as shown in the following example.
Example
In one of his short stories written in his French exile in Paris, the Argentinian author Julio Cortazar describes an urban environment which is not named explicitly, but hinted at by the information that from the window of his multistorey apartment block the auctorial narrator sees a sign saying Hotel de Belgique. The reference to the setting is not crucial to the interpretation of the story, which deals with the problem of daily routine and the hopelessness of life in modern society. The plot might equally well be set in any big city of the Western industrial world. But still, by describing (or pretending to describe) the view from his own window, the author gives a "personal touch" to the story, which makes it more authentic. This may be important for the translator when she has to decide whether to translate the description of a routine breakfast situation (tomamos cafe con leche) by "we drink our morning coffee" (neutral), "we have our coffee with milk" (non-specific strangeness) or "we have cafe au lait" (specific strangeness, explicitly referring to France as the setting of the story) or even "we have our ham and eggs" (receiver-oriented adaptation).
Checklist
The following questions may help to elicit the relevant information
about the content of the text:
How are the extratextual factors verbalized in the text?
Which are the information units in the text?
Is there a difference between the external and the internal situation?
4.Are there any gaps of cohesion and/or coherence in the text? Can they be filled without using additional information or material?
5.What conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of content with reference to other intratextual factors, such as presuppositions, composition, and the stylistic features?
Presuppositions
What is a presupposition
The notion of presupposition is rather complex because What we mean here is the "pragmatic presupposition". These presuppositions are implicitly assumed by the speaker, who takes it for granted that this will also be the case with the listener. Communication can therefore only be successful if speaker and listener both implicitly assume the same presuppositions in sufficient quantity.
For example, the answer Twelfth Night or What You Will presupposes the knowledge on the part of the receiver that this is the title of a play, and this presupposition forms the basis on which the joke "works".
In everyday communication it is usually the factors of the communicative situation which are presupposed to be known to the participants and which are therefore not mentioned explicitly. Nevertheless, they have to be taken into consideration when the utterance is made. If, for example, the referent of the information is a person present in the room, the speaker may lower or raise his/her voice or choose simple or complicated or even coded formulations, etc. Of course, it is usually superfluous to mention the things and persons one can point at.
Presuppositions comprise all the information that the sender expects (= presupposes) to be part of the receiver's horizon. Since the sender wants the utterance to be understood, it seems logical that s/he will only presuppose information which the receiver can be expected to be able to "reconstruct".
Presuppositions may refer not only to the factors and conditions of the situation and to the realities of the source culture, but can also imply facts from the author's biography, aesthetic theories, common text types and their characteristics, metric dispositions, details of subject matter, motives, the topoi and iconography of a certain literary period, ideology, religion, philosophy and mythical concepts, cultural and political conditions of the time, media and forms of representation, the educational situation, or the way a text has been handed down.