Unit 4 stylystic analysis of non-fictional texts in the process of translation: texts of official and business documents

Main points:

4.1. The general notion of a functional style

4.2. Major functional styles and sub-styles in English

4.3. The style of official and business documents: specific lexical and grammatical features

4.4. Sample texts for illustration and analysis

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4.1. The general notion of a functional style

There exist many definitions of a functional style of language (FS) given by various writers on the subject. I.R.Galperin [1977: 249] gives the following definition of the functional style:

“A FS is a patterned variety of literary text characterised by the greater or lesser typification of its constituents, supra-phrasal units (SPU), in which the choice and arrangement of independent and interwoven language media are calculated to secure the purport of the communication”.

For practical reasons we will reword this definition as follows:

“A functional style (FS) of language is a system of language means which serves a definite aim of communication”.

It is also assumed by I.R.Galperin [see: ibid.] that each FS is a relatively stable system at the given stage of development of the literary language, but it changes from one historical period to another. I.R.Galperin refers the notion of a functional style only to the literary standard of language while other authors [see Арнольд 1981: 245; Брандес, Провоторов 2003: 92-97; Кожина 1977: 157] also list the colloquial style among the functional styles of language. Whatever the academic argument may be, we will not discuss the colloquial style of language here, because professional translators and interpreters seldom have to translate “colloquial discourse” (which is no doubt a very interesting and important subject of a separate research) but mostly deal with written or oral literary discourse.

4.2. Major functional styles and sub-styles in English

So we assume that functional styles appear mainly in the literary standard of language. What we will call here “functional styles” of language is also called in the Western-European linguistics “registers” or “genres” of language [Toolan 1991: 202-204]. Most scholars of linguistics distinguish between the following styles (and sub-styles) of language:

1. The language of official documents with the following sub-styles: the language of legal documents (both international and national); the language of business documents; the language of military documents;

2. The language of scientific and technical prose;

3. The publicistic style of language¹ which may be subdivided into the language of the mass-media with the following sub-styles: the language of newspapers, magazines, radio and television (brief news items; headlines, editorials, journalistic articles, essays; radio and TV commentaries, talk-shows, journalistic radio and TV programmes; advertisements and announcements); the language of public and political speeches; the language of the informational technologies, such as Internet;

4. The language of belles-letters with the following sub-styles: the language of poetry; the language of emotive prose; the language of the drama.

In this book we will consider main properties of texts belonging to the above-mentioned styles focusing on the features that are relevant for translators’ activity and bearing in mind similarities and differences observed between the texts of these styles.