Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

Evaluative language
The translator has to detect and asses evaluative language, which expresses the SLT 
author's or reader's or his peer group's explicit or implicit value judgements, not to mention 
the value-judgments of the prevailing SL or TL culture. Some words, such as 'good', 'fair', 
'terrible', 'passable', 'excellent', 'superb', have a vague meaning until they are placed on a scale 
which can be derived from the writer's values or those of the group where the words' currency 
originates; the words may then have to be 'converted' to correspond the value-scales of an 
analogous person or group in the TL culture. Other words are partly evaluative and partly 
informative (perceptive, stupid, pigs (police), star, judicious, etc.). A third set of words are at 
face value informative and obtain their evaluative aspect from the culture they drive from: 
e.g. democracy, bourgeois, conservative, revolutionary, communist, monarchist, revisionist, 
formalist, etc. If the evaluative aspect of these words is not carried over into the target 
language, the translator must assist his reader, possibly with a footnote, better by 
characterizing the translated word (proletarian ideal, revisionist subversion, narrowly 
conservative, etc.) to preserve the thought-content of the original. Moreover the translator 

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may have himself to evaluate the degree of subjectivity in the evaluations made by the SL 
writer.
The scale of linguistic intensity
Languages are written on a scale of intensity as well as evaluation; all words 
expressing actions or qualities to some extent are ranged on a cline between strength and 
weakness, energy and inertness. Evaluating the degree of intensity is apt to be subjective. It is 
difficult to translate a noun phrase such as 'mild hostility', as 'mild'.