View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Universidade de Lisboa: Repositório.UL Universidade de Lisboa Faculdade de Letras Programa em Estudos Comparatistas ENGLISH ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: ITS HEGEMONIC STATUS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANSLATION KAREN BENNETT Doutoramento em Estudos de Cultura Especialidade: Estudos de Tradução Professor Orientador: Professor Doutor João Ferreira Duarte 2008 Abstract This research has emerged directly from my work as a translator of academic discourse and represents an attempt to answer some of the questions that have arisen during the course of my professional practice. It aims, firstly, to confirm my intuition that, in Portugal, there exists an academic discourse that is clearly distinguishable from the hegemonic one, as represented by English, and to make a start on the complex task of defining its parameters, tracing its history and exploring the ideology encoded within it; secondly, to study what happens to this discourse during the process of translation; and, finally, to examine some of the ideological and cultural issues arising from the translation process. The research is based upon a Corpus of 408 academic texts (1,333,890 words) of different genres and disciplines that were submitted to me for translation over the course of a roughly ten-year period. The Portuguese texts were analysed for the presence of particular discourse features not usually found in standard English Academic Discourse (as determined by a survey of English academic style manuals, supplemented by reference to research in the fields of descriptive and applied linguistics) and the results interpreted in the light of discipline and genre. Strong correlations were found with discipline, leading to the conclusion that in Portugal there is a thriving humanities discourse that is based upon very a different epistemological framework to that underlying EAD. Cultural reasons were then sought for this difference in orientation using a broad interdisciplinary approach. It was concluded that the distinction can be traced back to the Early Modern period, when Catholics and Protestants deliberately cultivated different rhetorical styles and epistemologies as a marker of their respective identities, and that the dichotomy has persisted into modern times as a result of particular political and social circumstances. Today, with the influence of Anglo Saxon empiricism and French poststructuralism, Portuguese academics have several discourses at their disposal, though not all of them are readily translatable into English. The final section of the thesis looks at the translator’s role in bridging the gap between different paradigms of knowledge. Drawing upon Evan-Zohar’s Polysystems Theory and Vermeer’s Skopos Theory, it examines the options available to the translator in a variety of real-life situations and discusses the extent to which translation might contribute to the development of a new epistemological climate that blurs the boundaries between different forms of knowledge. Keywords: academic discourse, translation, epistemology, English, Portuguese, Polysystems Theory, Skopos Theory. 4 Resumo Esta tese representa uma tentativa de responder a questões que surgiram directamente da minha prática profissional como tradutora no âmbito ‘académico’. Visa-se, em primeiro lugar, confirmar a existência em Portugal de um discurso ‘académico’ com contornos bastante diferentes do discurso hegemónico inglês, assim dando início ao trabalho complexo de definir os parâmetros, traçar a história e explorar a ideologia subjacente; segundo, estudar o que acontece a esse discurso durante o processo de tradução; e finalmente, focar as questões ideológicos e culturais que surgem no processo de tradução. A investigação baseia-se num Corpus de 408 textos das ciências exactas, sociais e humanas (1.333.890 palavras), de disciplinas e de géneros diversos, que me foram apresentados para tradução durante um período de dez anos, sensivelmente. Os textos portugueses foram analisados para determinar a presença de características discursivas não habitualmente usadas em discurso académico inglês (segundo os manuais de estilo académico inglês e a investigação feita nas áreas de linguística descritiva e aplicada), sendo os resultados interpretados à luz de questões de delimitação disciplinar e de género. Encontraram-se correlações fortes com a disciplinaridade, levando à conclusão que, de facto, existe em Portugal um discurso das humanidades assentado num enquadramento epistemológico muito diferente do que subjaz ao discurso académico inglês. No seguimento, procuraram-se, através de uma abordagem interdisciplinar, razões culturais para explicar tal diferença em orientação. Concluiuse que a questão se remonta aos séculos XVI-XVII, quando católicos e protestantes, no contexto da Reforma/Contra-Reforma, cultivaram estilos retóricos e epistemológicos diferentes 5 como marcadores de identidade, perdurando a dicotomia devido a específicas circunstâncias politícas e sociais. Hoje, com a influência do empirismo anglo- saxónico e do pós-estruturalismo francês, os investigadores portugueses têm ao seu dispor uma gama de discursos diferentes, nem todos facilmente traduzíveis em inglês. Na secção final desta tese, aborda-se a questão do papel do tradutor como mediador entre paradigmas de conhecimento. Com base na teoria do polissistemas de Evan-Zohar e na Skopostheorie de Vermeer, consideram-se as opções translatórias disponíveis numa série de situações tiradas da vida real, discutindo-se a possível contribuição da tradução para o desenvolvimento de um novo modelo epistemológico em que as fronteiras entre as formas diferentes de conhecimento se tornem cada vez mais indistintas. Palavras-chave: discurso científico/académico, tradução, epistemologia, inglês, português, teoria dos polissistemas, Skopostheorie 6 Contents Acknowledgements 8 Introductory Note 9 Part I. General Overview Chapter 1. Surveying the Field: Aims, Methods and Problems 14 Chapter 2. Theoretical Background 29 Part II. English Academic Discourse Chapter 3. English Academic Discourse: the Hegemonic Style 58 Chapter 4. The Structure and Ideology of English Academic Discourse 70 Chapter 5. The Historical Roots of English Academic Discourse 104 Chapter 6. Challenges to English Academic Discourse 143 Part III. Academic Discourse in Portugal Chapter 7. The Structure and Ideology of Portuguese Academic Discourses 182 Chapter 8. The Historical Roots of Portuguese Academic Discourses 208 Part IV. Translating Portuguese Academic Discourses Chapter 9. Translating Portuguese Academic Discourses: the Issues 252 Chapter 10. Translating Portuguese Academic Discourses: the Practice 271 Conclusion 303 Bibliography 307 Appendices: 325 Appendix A: Corpus of Portuguese Academic Texts and their Respective Translations 1-65 Appendix B: Review of English Academic Style Manuals 1-54 Appendix C: Survey of Portuguese Researchers 1-49 Appendix D: Review of Portuguese Academic Style Manuals 1-18 Acknowledgements I would like to thank above all Professor João Ferreira Duarte, who first got me interested in Translation Studies back in 1999 when I enrolled on the Masters programme at FLUL, and who has since been a constant source of both information and support. As my supervisor, he has always been available to offer advice and constructive criticism, and, in the final desperate phase, must often have put other commitments on hold in order to ensure that I was able to get the thesis in on time. I would also like to thank Prof. Carlos Gouveia for his helpful comments and criticisms about Chapter 4, which gave me a much more solid basis from which to proceed, and also – at a much earlier stage in the process - for guiding me towards the most relevant authors in the fields of Critical Discourse Analysis and other branches of Linguistics. My thanks also go to Prof. Fátima Nunes from the University of Evora, who responded to my solicitations for information in her area of research by sending me a large heavy package of books and journals at her own expense. This material has enriched my argument considerably, particularly as regards the development of science in Portugal during the 18th and 19th centuries (Chapter 8). Finally, I would like to thank all my friends and family who, for years, have had to put up with me going on and on about translation and knowledge and paradigms, as I tried to work out my ideas by picking arguments with all and sundry. Hopefully now they will all get a bit of peace. 8 Introductory Note This thesis has developed directly out of my professional activity as a teacher and translator of academic discourse in Portugal, activities which I have now been engaged in for some 15 to 20 years. It was in the EAP classroom and at the computer that the questions first began to form in my mind about the kind of prose that I was being presented with in Portugal and its relationship to the discourse that I was used to reading and writing in English. And it was in those contexts that I first started trying to work out solutions for dealing with some of the technical problems raised by the intercultural transfer of knowledge. The kind of Portuguese prose that most perturbed me back then was radically different in all respects to the discourse that I had been brought up to expect in the academic context. There were sentences that stretched like pythons, heavy and languid, across whole pages, so intricately coiled that it was difficult to distinguish the point that was being made.