Levels of the Process of Translation

In fact, Newmark asserts that the process of translation operates in four levels:

• source text level: the source text itself and its immediate impression on the translator.
• referential level: the level of content of the text (technically the level of the conceptual representation).
• cohesive level: the level where you aim at making a cohesive target text (and analyze the cohesion of the source text).
• level of naturalness: the level of constructing a natural target text in an appropriate language.

1. The textual level:

At this level, you translate, or transpose, the syntactic structures of the source text into corresponding structures in the target text. Often you will find that, for a variety of reasons, you will have to change these structures into something quite different further down the line to achieve target language naturalness.

2. The referential level:

As mentioned above, this is the level of content, so here you operate primarily with the message (or information) or semantics of the text. This is where you decode the meaning of the source text and build the conceptual representation. This is where you disambiguate polysemous words and phrases and where you decode idioms and figurative expressions. This is where you figure out whether what the locution(s) and illocution(s) of the source text are and what the perlocution might be.
Once you have decoded the word or expression in question, you encode it into an appropriate target language expression. Note that there will be cases, like idioms and metaphors, in which you will have to use literal expressions in the target language, because it does not have any corresponding idioms or metaphors.
The referential level and the textual level are, of course, closely intertwined, as the nature and texture of the source text convey the message, and, of course, you also encode the message, using language, into the target text.

3. The cohesive level:

The cohesive level links the textual and the referential levels in that it deals with the structure/format of the text and information as well as with what Newmark calls the mood of the text.
At the structural sublevel, you investigate how various connectors, such as conjunctions, enumerations, repetitions or reiterations, definite articles and determiners, general category labels, synonyms, punctuation marks, simple or complex conjuncts, link sentences and structure the text and what Newmark calls its train of thought – which is basically its underlying information structure.
You establish its tone by finding so-called value-laden and value-free passages, such as subjective and objective bits, euphemisms, and other framing devices, framing being the strategy of linguistically presenting something in the perspective of one's own values and worldview, in a way promoting these. All of this will have to be somehow transferred into the target text so you achieve maximal equivalence at this level.

4. The level of naturalness:

This level is target text oriented, focusing exclusively on the construction of the target text. Random, unpredictable things that just seem unnatural in the target language makes things more complicated as naturalness often depends on the situation, such that something might seem natural in one context but unnatural in another. Perhaps, the only way, to ensure naturalness is to read through your translation and spot unnaturally sounding parts and change them into something that sounds more natural. This is something that most people skip when they do translations.

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