4. Grammatical Equivalence
Grammar is the set of rules which determine
the way in which units such as words and pharases can be combined in language
and the kind of information which has to be made regularly explicit in
utterance.
4.1. Grammatical vs lexical categories
The most important difference between
grammatical and lexical choices,as far as translation is concerned,is that
grammatical choices are largely obligatory while lexical choices are largely
optional.grammatical structure also differs from lexical structure in that it
is more resistant to change.however deviant grammatical configurations are
simply not acceptable in most contexts.This means that,in translation,grammar
often has the effect of a straitjacket,forcing the translator along a certain
course which may or may not follow that of the sorce text as closely as the
translator would like it to.
4.2. The Diversity of grammatical categories
across languages
A brief discussion of some major
categories,with examples,is intended to illustrate the kinds of difficulty that translators often encounter because of
differences in the grammatical structures of source and target languages.
4.2.1 Number
Unlike japanese,chinese amd vietnamese,most
languages have a grammatical category of number,similar but not necessarily
idential to that of english.information on number can therefore be encoded
lexically.however as with any grammatical category,a translator working from a
language with a category of number into one without such a category must be careful
not to overspecify this type of information in the target text.
4.2.2 Gender
Gender is a grammatical distinction according
to which a noun or pronoun is classified as either masculine or feminine in
some languages.Gender distinctions are generally more relevant in translation
when the referent of the noun or pronoun is human .Gender distinctions in
inanimate objects such as’car’or ‘ship’ and in animals such as’ dog’ and ‘cat’
are sometimes manipulated in english to convey expressive meaning ,particularly
in literature,but they do not often cause difficulties in non-literary translation.
4.2.3 Person
The category of person relates to the notion
of parcipant roles. In most languages,parcipant roles are systematically defined through a closed
system of pronuns which may be organized along a variety of dimensions.in
addition to the main distinction based on participant roles,the person system
may be organized along a variety of
other dimensions.
4.2.4 Tense and aspect
Tense and aspect are grammatical categories in
large number of languages.the form of the verb in languages which have these
categories usually indicates two main
type of information: time relations and aspectual difference.
4.2.5 Voice
The use of the passive voice is extremely
common in many varieties of written
english and can pose various problems in translation,depending on the
availability of similar structures,or structures with similar functions, in the
target language.
4.3. a brief note on word order
The sytantic structure of a language imposes
restrictions on the way messages may be organized in that language,the order in
which functional elements such as subject,predicator,and object may occur is more fixed in some languages than in
others.
4.4. introducing text
Following brown and yule (1983 :6),text is
defined here as ,the verbal record of a communicative event; it is an instance
of language in use rateher than language as an abstract system of meanings and
relations.
4.4.1 text vs non-text
The nearest we get to non-text in actual life,leaving
aside the works of those poets and prose writers who deliberately set out to
create non-text,is probably in the speech of young children and in bad
translations.a text,then,has features og organization which distingish it from
non-text,that is,from a random collection of sentences and paragraph.
4.4.2 features of text organization
Another important feature of text organization
derives from the overlapping notions of genre and text type .both relate to the
way in which textual material is packaged by the writer along patterns familiar
to the reader.