Levels of Translating

JC Mark Gumban

BSEdENGIV

Levels of Translating

1. Textual Level

2. Referential Level

3. Cohesive Level

4. The Naturalness

Levels of Translating

The Textual Level

It involves the source text.

At this level, you decode or render the syntactic structures

of the source text into their correspondent structures in the

target text.

Levels of Translating

The Referential Level

Operates on the content of the ST. It deals with the

message or the meaning of the text.

On this level, you decode the meaning of the source text

and build the conceptual representation.

Levels of Translating

The Referential Level

On it you decode idioms and figurative expressions.

This is where you figure out the pragmatic function of the

ST.

Once you have decoded the ST, you encode it into an

appropriate target language expressions.

The referential level and the textual level are closely

related because the language of the source text conveys

the message, and you use language to encode the

message into the target text.

Levels of TranslatingThe Cohesive Level

The Cohesive level links the textual and referential levels.

It deals with the form and the meaning of text.

You take into consideration the tone and the mood of the

text.

You establish the tone by finding the so-called value-laden

and value-free passages, such as subjective and objective

bits, euphemisms, and other framing devices.

Levels of TranslatingThe Cohesive Level

The train of thought has to be followed.

You reconsider the lengths of paragraphs and sentences,

the formulation of the title; the tone of the conclusion.

This is where the findings of discourse analysis are

pertinent.