The Process of Discourse Comprehension: Implications for Translation

Abstract

Translation involves a mediating language. To better understand the nature of translation, one first needs to know what language itself is since translation is above all rendering one form of language into another. It has also been argued that text comprehension is a prerequisite for text production, a technical version of which is translation; hence an appraisal of the process of discourse comprehension appears vital for understanding the processes at work in translation. It is accordingly the aim of this paper to first clarify the meaning and nature of language itself. Then, the factors involved in text comprehension will be delineated with a particular focus on the relationship between text and context – since as House rightly asserts, 'the notion of context, its relation to text, and the role it plays in translation has received much less attention' – in an attempt to pave the way for the first step of translation, i.e., comprehension, to gain realisation in as uninterrupted a way as possible, since otherwise, no acceptable translation may follow.