A study on logical meaning using SFL and the implications of this for translation studies

摘要

Translation studies and linguistics have often made beneficial contributions to each other, and each can potentially benefit from developments within the other (e.g. Fawcett, 1997; Gregory, 2001). Yet in recent years they seem to have drifted apart. No doubt this has been at least in part because of the diversity of collaborations translation studies has engaged in to deal with a plethora of translation issues. However, these interdisciplinary trends should not be at the expense of its existing “strong link” with linguistics (Munday, 2001, p. 182). Linguistics has made continued progress and thus maintains a great capacity to enrich translation studies, and further, there are still many translation phenomena that can be explained only by linguistics (Fawcett, 1997, Forward). This study aims to shed light on some of the recent developments in linguistics, specifically Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), with the purpose of applying some of SFL’s recent developments (since 1980s) to translation theory and practice. SFL’s context level (which contains genre and register) and grammar level help make text analysis more elaborate and applicable. In this study, grammar is given special attention because languages vary in their specific grammatical description, and Korean, one element of the language pair used in this study along with English, has not been described with respect to its logical meaning (how clauses are combined). Drawing upon the English clause combination systems that were originally identified using Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), this study attempts to describe Korean clause combination systems. These newly described systems are then used, along with the English systems and concepts related to the context level within SFL, in the analyses of translation texts.This study finds that clause combination and context (genre and/or register) work in close association in translation texts to make logical meanings. The interrelation displayed between clause combination and context is found to be particularly useful for translation education. The study also concludes that SFL, in particular SFG, can be used together with some recent translation theories (e.g. Skopos theory) in such a way that the former provides specific tools to analyse grammar in a text and the latter offers useful explanations about the context in which the text is located.