Unit 4 texts of official and business documents in the focus of discourse analysis in translation main points

The scientific style.

The official and business style.

The publisictic style.

The style of belles-lettres.

The colloquial and everyday (разговорно-бытовой стиль) style.

Professor Morokhovsky A.M. [Стилистика английского языка: 244-245] and the group of other authors, being guided by the differences between non-fictional (both oral and written) and fictional (both oral and written) functional types of languages, suggest defining functional styles at three levels: at the level of the language stylistics, at the level of speech activity stylistics and at the level of speech stylistics [Стилистика английского языка: 238-247]. This approach gives grounds to this group of authors to single out the following styles at the level of speech activity [op. cit.: 244-245] :

1. 
   The official and business style (официально-деловой стиль);
   
2. 
   The scientific and professional style (научно-профессиональный стиль);
   
3. 
   The publisictic style (пулицистический стиль);
   
4. 
   The literary colloquial style (литературно-разговорный стиль);
   
5. 
   The familiar (unceremonious) colloquial style (фамильяно-разговорный стиль).
   

I.V. Arnold [Арнольд 1981: 245] singles out six functional styles in languages, namely:
1) The scientific (academic) style;
2) The colloquial style;
3) The official and business style;
4) The poetic style;
5) The oratorical style;
6) The publicistic style.
Thus, the survey given above, shows that there is no universal approach to singling out functional styles of languages.
4.4. Discourse analysis and text types

In Western European linguistic tradition, categories that are traditionally called “functional styles” by the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet schools of stylistics were usually referred to as “registers” or “genres” [Toolan 1991: 202-204].

However, in the 21^st century, with the rapid development of text linguistics, communicative linguistics (pragmatics, pragmalinguistics) and discourse analysis, new approaches to viewing functional styles of languages appeared on the agenda. Thus, O.O. Selivanova [Селіванова 2006: 582-583; Селіванова 2011: 695] mentions the traditional approach, according to which the following functional styles of languages are distinguished: the official and business style, the publicistic style, the scientific style, the colloquial style, the style of belles-letters. As we see, O.O. Selivanova combines classifications of I.R. Galperin and N.M. Kozhina into one. However, following further ideas of O.O. Selivanova and other scholars mentioned above, we believe that texts can be analyzed today on the grounds of the most common features they share – namely on the grounds of the spheres of communication or types of discourse to which certain text belongs. Thus, O.O. Selivanova writes [ibid.] that nowadays it is worthwhile to distinguish the following types of discourse (spheres of communication): political, legal, scientific, mass media, pedagogical, advertising, religious, everyday, business, fictional, sports and military. It is obvious that this list may be extended further on.
Below we suggest a table, the aim of which is to apply discourse, communicative and referential approaches to text analysis in translation. While compiling this table, which practically has unlimited room for perfection and further updating we had the following reservations in mind:
1. We included in the table only a brief outlook of the colloquial discourse as such that clearly belongs to the spoken register of speech, though this book is focused, first of all, on the analysis of written literary texts. Chunks of oral discourse may be parts of fictional (belles-lettres) discourse (both written and spoken), in which case they are treated as belonging to the stylistic devices and expressive means of the language.
2. Another reason to leave aside the in-depth analysis of the colloquial discourse is conditioned by the undisputable fact that translators and interpreters in most cases have to deal with literary discourse – both written and oral (but not colloquial and such) that is used in official publications (starting with statutes of laws, academic and technical texts, newspapers, magazines, etc.) or officially pronounced in political and public speeches, reports, presentations, programs on the radio, TV, the Internet and other electronic media.
3. We believe that it is worthwhile to clearly distinguish between the type of discourse, the communicative intention of the relevant texts, and referential type of texts, i.e. reference of texts either to real or unreal (fictional) world, temporal deixis of texts, etc., while the key communicative intention of the relevant texts can be marked, according to J.L. Austin [1962] by the illocutionary verbs to bind, to agree, to promise, to warn, to guarantee, to persuade, to make believe, to inform, etc.
4. We also believe that referential approach includes typology of texts that distinguishes between artefact, grey zone and mentafact texts [Аспекты 1982; Максімов 2010: 11-12; Sinclair 1986], because this classification clearly describes relationships with the text and the real or unreal (fictional) world in terms of the impact texts have upon the world (artefact texts change or describe the real world, while mentafact texts describe the unreal, fictional world).
5. We have limited our table by focusing only on the major types of discourse relevant for the most general practical needs of written discourse analysis in translation.
Thus, there is plenty of room to continue and expand this table by including other types and subtypes of discourse into it, such as religious (sacral), military discourse, discourse of sports, etc. However, as rightly states O.O. Selivanova [op. cit.: 583], the linguistics of today creates grounds for profound reload of the traditional approach to functional styles, which may be seen as the basic task of written and oral discourse analysis.
Further on in this book we will consider main linguistic properties of texts belonging to the discourse types listed in the table focusing on the features that are relevant for translators’ activity and bearing in mind similarities and differences observed between these texts.