CULTURE & RELEVANCE

1. CULTURE & RELEVANCE BASIL HATIM Hong Kong 2007

2. IDEATIONAL MEANINGS There is more to register than Field’s subject matter Technicality Thompson (1996: 28): We use language to talk about our experience of the world, including the worlds in our own minds, to describe events and states and the entities involved in them.

3. REALITY I • For he approached these faces – even of those near and dear – as if they were abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them, he did not behold. • Sacks (1985)

4. REALITY II • Photographs of 16 famous people, politicians, actors, etc., recognition of whom was expected for her educational level, were presented individually. She recognized only President Kennedy the first time, but not on subsequent occasions.

5. INTERPERSONAL MEANINGS There is more to register than Tenor’s Formality or Informality We also use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behaviour, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change theirs.

6. INTERACTION I How could he, on the one hand, mistake his wife for a hat and, on the other, function as a teacher at the Music School? Sacks (1985)

7. INTERACTION II She was observed to have severe memory impairment and difficulty naming objects….

8. TEXTUAL MEANINGS There is more to register than Mode’s Spoken vs Written In using language, we organise our messages in ways which indicate how they fit in with the other messages around them and with the wider context in which we are talking or writing.

9. HUMAN TEXTUALIZING … and yet it is precisely the downfall of judgment (whether in specific realms, as with Dr P., or more generally, as in patients with Korsakov’s or frontal-lobe syndrome) which constitutes the essence of so many neuropsychological disorders Sacks (1985)

10. ROBOTIC TEXTUALIZING She was discovered to have severe visual agnosia in October 1967 during a naming task, and was institutionalized because of poor memory at the time….

11. THE TRANSLATION PROCESS In the translation process, the translator, consciously or unconsciously, often adjusts the original ideational/interpersonal and textual profiles with his or her own attitudes.

12. TRANSLATION OF IDEOLOGY BUT IS IT ALWAYS THE CASE THAT MOTIVES ARE PERSONAL/ IDEOLOGICAL? DO WE ALWAYS HAVE TO ENTERTAIN A CONSPIRACY THEORY?

13. IDEOLOGY OF TRANSLATION COULD THE REASON FOR THE ALTERATION SIMPLY BE THE DESIRE TO UPHOLD THE NORMS OF THE TL TRANSLATION TRADITION, FOR EXAMPLE

14. RHETORICAL NORMS INDEED, COULD THE REASON FOR THE ALTERATION NOT BE THE DESIRE TO UPHOLD TL RHETORICAL NORMS (EG THE CONVENTIONS OF A PARTICULAR GENRE, A PARTICULAR DISCOURSE, OR A PARTICULAR MODE OF ARGUMENTATION)?

15. TEXT-GENRE-DISCOURSE TRIAD DISCOURSE GENRE TEXT

16. CULTURE MAGNITUDE • If culture is all that humankind creates, from mascara to myths, marriage vows to slang, then complexity comes as no surprise.

17. VANTAGE POINTS • Civilization. Big C, heritage etc. • Communication. Verbal and non-verbal • Intercultural communication. The capacity to cater for other cultures • Group or community interactions. Insiders and outsiders, haves and have-nots

18. VANTAGE POINTS • Dynamic construction (of the other) including values or beliefs of self and others • Evolutionary psychology. The nature and function of the human brain. Innate biological commonalities

19. CULTURE Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behaviour or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. (Goodenough 1964:36).

20. CULTURE WITH A SMALL C 1) Ecology: Animals, plants, local winds, mountains, etc. 2) Material culture: Food, clothes, housing, transport and communications 3) Social culture: Work and leisure

21. CULTURE WITH A SMALL C • 4) Organizations, customs, ideas: Political, social, legal, religious, artistic • 5) Gestures and habits

22. CULTURE WITH A CAPITAL C It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. (Goodenough 1964:36).

23. Language and Social Structure There is a dialectical interrelationship between language and social structure: the varieties of linguistic usage are both products and practices

24. Products products of socio-economic forces and institutions - reflexes of such factors as power relations, occupational roles, social stratifications, etc. - and practices

25. Practices practices which are instrumental in forming and legitimating the same social forces and institutions

26. CULTURE REDEFINED Definitions of culture revolve around three poles of a triangle: • Products (artifacts, forms) • Practices (behaviors, sociofacts) • Perspectives (ideas, knowledge, mentifacts, meaning, pragmatic signs)

27. Products Artificats • produced or adopted by persons/communities • located in physical space, • the environment (plants, animals, etc),

28. Products • tangible objects (tool, clothing, written documents, buildings, etc) • more elaborate yet still perceptible constructions (written/spoken language, music, family, education, economy, politics, religion, etc)

29. TWO TYPES OF PRODUCTS • SOCIO-CULTURAL PRODUCTS • TECHNO-CULTURAL PRODUCTS

30. Practices The full range of • actions and interactions that members of the culture carry out, individually and with others, • verbal and nonverbal language in different contexts of communication

31. Practices • generic actions and communicative events associated with social groups, using cultural products, and governed by norms appropriateness

32. Perspectives The explicit or implicit perceptions, beliefs, values and attitudes that discursively • underlie the products • guide the practices of a culture,

33. Perspectives • providing meaning • constituting a unique outlook or orientation toward life – a worldview

34. EXAMPLELAW ENFORCEMENT • Objects. Handcuffs, tickets, badges, two-way radios, accident report forms, structures such as local government and the judicial system

35. EXAMPLELAW ENFORCEMENT • Practices. Directing traffice, patrolling a beat, making arrests, gathering evidence, resolving disputes, reporting

36. EXAMPLELAW ENFORCEMENT • Perspectives. Values, beliefs, views of the law, civic duty

37. THE MINUTES • XXX Meeting Minutes • DATE • PLACE • TIME _____________________________________________________________________ • Chair: XXX • Attended: XXX • The Chair called the meeting to order at 10.15 am • The meeting was called to order by the Chair at 10.15 am • Faculty unanimously approved last meeting’s minutes. • Faculty unanimously approved the XX course syllabus.

38. DEGREES OF MARKEDNESS PASSIVE WITH NO AGENT PASSIVE WITH BY-AGENT ACTIVE

39. MINUTES • Announcement: the Chair announced the approval of XXX Course • summarizing that we now have authorizations for 4 undergraduate programs and 5 graduate programs. • He also mentioned that the XXX and YYY courses are still in development • and we will bring them to the faculty before seeking authorization from XXX. • The Chair announced that Dr. X will be starting preparations of the XXX course

40. SOCIO-TEXTUAL PRACTICES • social actions and communicative events (GENRES) associated with particular social groups, • using cultural products (including TEXTS), • conveying particular perspectives (DISCOURSE), and • governed by NORMS of effective, efficient and appropriate language use

41. REGISTER PRAGMATICS ACTION Social Processes/ Institutions (Ideational Field) > < Power/Solidarity (Interpersonal Tenor) > < Physical Distance (Textual Mode) > < SEMIOTICS INTERACTION Socio-cultural Practices Socio-textual Practices Genre Text Discourse THE CONTEXTUAL MAP

42. TEXT • A unit of ‘sense’ which relates to how language users attend to particular rhetorical purposes and thus achieve a variety of rhetorical aims (e.g. arguing, narrating as texts).

43. TEXT AS MACRO SIGN To be sure Indonesia and Malaysia are far from perfectly open… Still the country’s carefully monitored multiculturalism has allowed Malays, Chinese and Indians to rub shoulders and get to know one another without much rancor…

44. TEXT AS MACRO SIGN • Of course this does not mean that we should defend all clergymen. Dependent, pseudo and ossified clergy have not been, and are not, few in number. There are even persons in the seminaries who are active against the revolution and against pure Mohammedan Islam. There are some people nowadays who, under the guise of piety, strike such heavy blows at the roots of religion, revolution and the system, that you would think they have no other duty than this ...

45. TEXT AS MACRO SIGN • Tomorrow’s meeting of OPEC is a different affair. Certainly, it is formally about prices…. Certainly, it will also have immediate implications for the price of petrol…. • But this meeting … is not primarily about selling arrangements…. It is primarily about the future cohesion of the organization itself.

46. GENRE A unit of ‘sense’ which entails having to operate within highly conventionalized text structure and texture and thus upholding the requirements of conventionalized communicative events or occasions (e.g. the compositional format of a ‘cooking recipe’ as genre);

47. GENRE AS MACRO SIGN • Take for example the case of translating a philosophical text which started with the illustrative statement when recently. In translation, this appeared as not so very long ago, a miscue erroneously conjuring up the image of a drastically different genre - a fairy tale (Fawcett 1997).

48. GENRE AS MACRO SIGNThe Tourist Brochure • The reptile and insect house has exhibits of many of the Arabian snakes, lizards, amphibians, common insects and arachnids. A huge aviary, with a waterfall cascading down rocks into a small lake and river, contains several species of local songbirds as well as some small raptors.

49. The English View • The English guide objectifies the zoo’s contents as if these existed quite independently of any visitor, who is not even mentioned.

50. The English View • The displays and rooms are expressed as Actors of Actions like ‘having exhibits’, ‘containing species’, and ‘leading back’.