Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored - Meng Ji
9. Constrained meaning construction and attention re-allocation
Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored - Meng Ji
Mikolaj Deckert [+]
University of Lodz
Description
The chapter looks into how language users guide their receptors in the process of allocating attention to fragments of conceptual content. The premise for this – voiced in Cognitive Linguistics – is that humans have the ability to construe conceptual representations in an infinite number of ways. The selected construals get coded in the form of linguistic expressions whose processing initiates the procedure of meaning construction. By favouring one construal variant over another speakers opt for a particular level of detail, they choose a vantage point from which the scene is viewed, and introduce a particular prominence configuration (cf. Langacker 2008). This paper concentrates on the last of these operations which will be investigated contrastively in authentic Polish subtitles produced for English-language filmic material. The objective is to identify categories of prominence shifts, viz. cases where the target text and source text construals prompt the source and target viewers respectively to focus attention differently on portions of conceptual content. The motivation behind such salience asymmetries and their implications for meaning re-construction will be addressed taking into account constraints endemic to interlingual subtitling (e.g. Karamitroglou 1998, Tomaszkiewicz 2006), as well as the more general ones.