line-up of 2 very familiar persons and 6 strangers,
she could not pick out her
sister.
(italics added)
Sample 2.5
For he [the patient] approached these faces—even of those near and dear—as if
they were abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them, he did not behold.
No face was familiar to him, seen as a ‘thou’, being just identified as a set of
features, an ‘it’.
Samples
2.4
and
2.5
are drawn from comparable sections of two
neuropsychological case histories, one published in a professional journal (2.4),
the other appearing in what has been described by the author himself as a
‘clinical tale’. The striking point of comparison between the two instances is that
the same experience which is succinctly represented by the single sentence
she
could not pick out in 2.4, is encoded by no less than four ‘mental’ process
clauses in 2.5. In raising these issues here, our aim is merely to illustrate what we
take to be static or dynamic uses of language. If context tells us that what we are
reading is a report of a medical case history, then
Sample 2.4
fulfils expectations
and the communication would be maximally stable (i.e. static). However, given
the same expectations on the part of the reader, a not unlikely proposition,
Sample 2.5
, would conversely be disconcerting in the way it defies expectations,
albeit in an interesting fashion.
Before relating our model of textuality to the activity of translating, it is
perhaps helpful to underline a number of basic points. First, it must be stressed
that there is nothing pejorative about the use of the term static to describe certain
textual occurrences, nor is there anything particularly privileged about
occurrences being described as dynamic. Being static or dynamic is a normal
Figure 2.4 The static/dynamic
continuum
24 THE
TRANSLATOR AS COMMUNICATOR
condition of natural language use; and opting for one or the other is a matter of
choice informed by factors such as register membership, the purpose for which
utterances are used, as well as wider socio-textual and socio-cultural
considerations. As suggested above, to be viable, communication constantly
finds its most suitable location on a scale between complete defiance of
expectations and complete fulfilment of expectations. This is in line with an all-
important characteristic of communicative behaviour, namely that too much
stability is as undesirable as too much dynamism, and that language users have a
way of striking a balance, thus avoiding either extreme. In the words of
Beaugrande
and Dressler,
Complete knownness—or, in cybernetic terms, total stability— is evidently
uninteresting to the human cognitive disposition. Communication therefore
acts as the
constant removal and restoration of stability through disturbing
and restoring the continuity of occurrences.
(1981:36)
The next point regarding the model of text processing presented above relates to
our use of terms such as ‘minimal’ or ‘inaccessible’ or stability being ‘removed’.
Here, we do not in any sense imply that a given stretch of linguistic material has
degenerated into a ‘non-text’. When stability is said to be minimal, this is simply
a reference to cases where the process of retrieving coherence and matching
textual material with a text world becomes more challenging. In these cases,
intensive processing effort has to be expended, and reading for intention
becomes less straightforward (i.e. becomes interesting). By the same token,
removal of stability is seen as an attempt to minimize boredom, to shock, to be
creative.
Another point relevant to the discussion of our approach to the processing of
texts concerns the motivations which often lie behind the way utterances take on
static or dynamic values. The varying degrees of stability or dynamism are the
outcome of purposeful linguistic behaviour. We relay or perceive a certain
degree of, say, dynamism when it is appropriate and not gratuitous. One or two
examples should make these points clearer. Returning to Samples
2.4
and
2.5
, we
can now see that the dynamic use of language brings the medical case history to
life and restores human beings to the centre of action. More significantly,
perhaps, text producers use dynamism as a vehicle for promoting certain ideals
and for the fulfilment of important rhetorical purposes. Through the kind of
writing we have seen in
Sample 2.5
, for example, Oliver Sacks has sought to
question the ideology encoded in the ‘standard’ texts on neuropsychology and to
warn ‘of what happens to science which eschews the judgmental, the particular,
the
personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational’ (1985:19).
A MODEL OF ANALYSING TEXTS 25
