The Ugly Truth

The Ugly Truth was directed by Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde), from a script by Nicole Eastman and the team of Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz, "The Ugly Truth" is an arch, contrived, entirely predictable romantic comedy assembled with sufficient audience-friendly elements to put it over as both a good girls' night attraction and a date-night enough to leave couples in the right mood afterward. The Ugly Truth is the latest generic romantic comedy from the Hollywood factory. Everyman who doesn't believe in deep relationships meets fussy, high-strung professional woman looking for love.
I think the movie has embarrassingly limited ideas about both the sexes and sex. Like most women in movies right now, Katherine Heigl was born in the wrong decade. She has the misfortune to work in a time when her business values women either as something else for the camera to do. Sixty years ago, she might have been a biggish deal in minor comedies, the way she is now. But she might also have had taller, more charismatic men to star with and better things to be and represent than she does at the start of the 21st century, where she’s stuck playing professionally capable, socially retarded women. Heigl plies her trade in so-called chick flicks, the Lean Cuisine of romantic comedy, and her latest contribution, “The Ugly Truth’’ - or, as I fondly came to think of it, the Baja-style chicken quesadilla (only five Weight Watchers points!) - casts her as an undersexed television news producer named Abby Richter. This is a promotion from being an aspiring TV personality (“Knocked Up’’) and a smitten eco-magazine drone (“27 Dresses’’).
The film explores the truth of who comes out on top in a battle-of-the-sexes scenario, but by the end it's clear that the real truth lies somewhere in the middle. But The Ugly Truth can not escape its own ugly truth, that the central characters are written to extremes both ludicrous and tiring; the sparks that fly between them are totally manufactured.

scientific journal

On Translation Theory

The Invisible in Translation: The Role of Text Structure

By Abdolmehdi Riazi, Ph.D Shiraz University Iran

1.Abstract

It is conventionally believed that familiarity with the source and target languages, as well as the subject matter on the part of the translator is enough for a good translation. However, due to the findings in the field of text analysis, the role of text structure in translation now seems crucial. Therefore, the present paper sets out with an introduction on different types of translation followed by some historical reviews on text analysis, and will then describe different approach to text analysis. As a case in point, a text analysis of the rhetorical structure of newspaper editorials in English and Persian and its contribution to the translation of this specific genre will be discussed. It will be indicated that newspaper editorials in these two languages follow a tripartite structure3 including “Lead,” “Follow,” and “Valuate” making translation of this specific genre possible and more contribute and lead to more accurate and communicative translations.

2.Introduction

Conventionally, it is suggested that translators should meet three requirements, namely: 1) Familiarity with the source language, 2) Familiarity with the target language, and 3) Familiarity with the subject matter to perform their job successfully. Based on this premise, the translator discovers the meaning behind the forms in the source language (SL) and does his best to produce the same meaning in the target language (TL) using the TL forms and structures. Naturally and supposedly what changes is the form and the code and what should remain unchanged is the meaning and the message (Larson, 1984).

Therefore, one may discern the most common definition of translation, i.e., the selection of the nearest equivalent for a language unit in the SL in a target language. Depending on whether we consider the language unit, to be translated, at the level word, sentence, or a general concept, translation experts have recognized three approaches to translation:

•translation at the level of word (word for word translation)
•translation at the level of sentence, and
•conceptual translation

In the first approach, for each word in the SL an equivalent word is selected in the TL. This type of translation is effective, especially in translating phrases and proper names such as United Nations, Ministry of Education, Deep Structure, and so on. However, it is problematic at the level of sentence due to the differences in the syntax of source and target languages. Translated texts as a product of this approach are not usually lucid or communicative, and readers will get through the text slowly and uneasily.

•The structure of the source text becomes an important guide to decisions regarding what should or should not appear in the derived text.

When translating at the sentence level, the problem of word for word translation and, therefore, lack of lucidity will be remedied by observing the grammatical rules and word order in the TL while preserving the meaning of individual words. So, sentences such as “I like to swim,” “I think he is clever,” and “We were all tired” can easily be translated into a target language according to the grammatical rules of that language. Translation at the sentence level may thus be considered the same as the translation at the word level except that the grammatical rules and word order in the TL are observed. Texts produced following this approach will communicate better compared to word for word translation. In conceptual translation, the unit of translation is neither the word nor is it the sentence; rather it is the concept. The best example is the translation of idioms and proverbs such as the following.

•“He gave me a nasty look” “Carrying coal to Newcastle”
•“Do as Romans do while in Rome” “He kicked the bucket”

Such idioms and proverbs cannot be translated word for word; rather they should be translated into equivalent concepts in the TL to convey the same meaning and produce the same effect on the readers.

In addition to word-for-word, sentence-to-sentence, and conceptual translations, other scholars have suggested other approaches to translation. Newmark (1988), for example, has suggested communicative and semantic approaches to translation. By definition, communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the source language. Semantic translation, on the other hand, attempts to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures ot the TL allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Semantic translation is accurate, but may not communicative well; whereas communicative translation communicatives well, but may not be very precise.

Another aspect of translation experts have attended to is the translation processes. For instance, Newmark (1988: 144) contends that there are three basic translation processes:

•a. the interpretation and analysis of the SL text;
•b. the translation procedure (choosing equivalents for words and sentences in the TL). And
•c. the reformulation of the text according to the writer’s intention, the reader’s expectation, the appropriate norms of the TL, etc.

The processes, as Newmark states, are to small degree paralleled by translation as a science, a skill, and an art.

This paper is concerned with some aspects of the first process. It will be suggested that a major procedure in the interpretation and analysis of the SL text should be text analysis at the macro-level with the goal of unfolding rhetorical macro-structures. By macro-structures we mean patterns of expression beyond sentence level. In the next parts of the paper, first a brief history of text analysis will be presented followed by approaches to text analysis. The paper will then continue by indicating how two specific genres; namely, newspaper editorials and poetry, lend themselves to macro analysis of texts and how this analysis will help translators.

3.Historical Perspectives on Text Analysis

It is major concern of linguists to find out and depict clearly how human beings use language to communicate, and, in particular, how addressers work on linguistic messages in order to interpret and understand them.

Accordingly, two main approaches have been developed in linguistics to deal with the transmission and reception of the utterances and messages. The first is “discourse analysis,” which mainly focuses on the structure of naturally occurring spoken language, as found in such “discourses” as conservations, commentaries, and speeches. The second approach is “text analysis,” which focuses on the structure of written language, as found in such “texts” as essays and articles, notices, book chapters, and so on. It is worth mentioning, however, that the distinction between “discourse” and “text” is not clear-cut. Both “discourse” and “text” can be used in a much broader sense to include all language units with ac communicative function, whether spoken or written. Some scholars (see, e.g., Widdowson, 1977; Halliday, 1978; Kress, 1985; Leckie-Tarry, 1993) talk about “spoken and written text.” In this paper, we stick to “text analysis” with a focus on the structure of written language at micro- and macro-levels.

According to Connor (1994), text analysis dates back to the Prague School of Linguistics, initiated by Vilem Mathesius in the 1920s. Later on it was elaborated by Jan Firbas and Frantisek Dane in the 1950s and 1960s. Connor (1994) believes that The Prague School’s major contribution to text analysis was the notion of theme and rheme, which describes the pattern of information flow in sentences and its relation to text coherence.

On the other hand, Stubbs (1995) states that the notion of text analysis was developed in British linguistics from the 1930s to the 1990s. In this regard, the tradition, As Stubbs (1995) continues, is visible mainly in the work of Firth, Halliday, and Sinclair (See, e.g., Firth 1935, 1957a, 1957b; Halliday 1985. 1992; Sinclair 1987, 1990). The principles underlying these works, as stated by Stubbs, demands studying the use of real language in written and spoken discourse and performing textual analysis of naturally occurring language.

As (Connor 1994: 682) states, “ systemic linguistics, a related approach to text analysis and semiotics, emerged in the 1960s with the work of linguists such as Halliday, whose theories emphasize the ideational or content-bearing functions of discourse as well as the choices people make when they use language to structure their interpersonal communications (see, e.g., Halliday, 1978).” Halliday’s systemic linguistics has influenced text analysis tremendously as well as curriculum models for language education (see, e.g., Mohan 1986). Following Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy, the notion of cohesion has been one of the popular issues in text anaysis.

According to Connor (1994), in the 1970s and 1980s, many linguists, psychologists, and composition specialists around the world embraced text and discourse analysis. Connor believes that this New School of Text Analysis is characterized by an eclectic, interdisciplinary emphasis, placing psychological and educational theories on an equal status with linguistic theories (whereas the Praque and systemic approaches primarily orient themselves to linguistics). Examples of text analysis from this new approach include studies of macro-level text structures such as Swales’s (1990) studies of the organization of introduction in scientific research articles; and Biber’s (1988) multidimensional computerized analysis of diverse features in spoken and written texts.

Bloor and Bloor (1995) contends that by the process of analysis, linguists build up descriptions of the language, and gradually discover more about how people use language in social communication. The same thing can be considered with the dynamic process of translation in that the discourse and rhetorical structures encoded in the source language can be reconstructed in the target language, and then the translator goes for the appropriate syntax and lexicon. One of the indexes of a “good” translation would, therefore, be to see to what extent a translator has been able to reconstruct the rhetorical structures of the source text in the target language through text analysis.

4.Approaches to Text Analysis

We may roughly divide the available literature on text analysis into two groups. First, those aiming at providing a detailed linguistic analysis of texts in terms of lexis and syntax. This approach has mostly referred to as analysis at micro-structure. Second, those related to the analysis and description of the rhetorical organization of various texts. In this paper, we are concerned with macro-analysis and its implication in translation. First, the macro-structure of newspaper editorials in two languages, English, and Persian, will be presented. Then, the macro-structure of the poems of a famous Persian Poet, Hakim O’mar Khayam, and the English translation of these poems by a well-known English translator, Fitzgerald, will be presented as two cases in point. It would, of course, be naïve to generalize these cases to all languages and all types of genres without adequate research and empirical evidence. However, the point of discovering and unfolding macro-structures in a SL with the goal of reconstructing nearly the same patterns in the TL in the process of translation deserves theoretical and practical attention.

5.The Case of Newspaper Editorials

Bolivar (1994) studied editorials of the Guardian. She selected 23 editorials from the Guardian during the first three months of 1981. Based on the analysis of these editorials, she found out that a tripartite structure called “triad” organizes the macro structure of the editorials. Bolivar explains that the function of the triad is to negotiate the transmission and evaluation in written text and that it consists of three turns or elements, namely, Lead, Follow, and Evaluate, serving distinctive functions of initiation, follow-up, and evaluation of the two. It shares similarities with the “exchange,” as the minimal unit of spoken discourse. The following excerpt taken from The Gardian, “Behind closed Irish doors.” March 3, 1981, cited in Bolivar (1994: 280-1) is an example of a triad.

•L. Britain and Ireland are now trying, at long last, to work out a less artificial link between them than that which binds two foreign states.
•F. This is the most hopeful departure of the past decade because it opens for inspection what had lain concealed for half a century and goes to the root of the anguish in Northern Ireland.
•V. The two countries now recognize that though they are independent of one another they cannot be foreign.

According to Bolivar, not all triads have three turns. Triads can exhibit more than turns provided that the sequence LF is repeated and V is the final turn. Thus, triads such as LFLFV or LFLFLFV can be found when the V turn is delayed by the writer.

The study of editorials from other British newspapers conducted by Bolivar confirmed the existence of three-part structures in those newspapers.

Parallel to Bolivar’s study, Riazi and Assar (2001) conducted a similar study on Persian newspaper editorials to see if the same macro-structures are detectable in this particular genre. The editorials of six currently published Persian newspapers were examined. A sample of 60 editorials, 10 for each newspaper, was randomly selected to be analyzed.

The editorials were analyzed at two levels 1) at a rhetorical macro-structure level, and 2) at a micro syntactic level. Each text (editorial) was segmented by sentence units and was codified according to its functions; lead, follow, or valuate. The inter-coder reliability indices of the segmentation and codification of the editorials were then determined. An inter-coder reliability index above 80 was obtained. The following excerpt from Iran (June 27, 1997), one of the newspapers, is an example of a triad in Persian newspaper editorials.

•L. The motivating command of the Late Imam in May 1979 was the beginning of a revolutionary era for the popular movement to construct and develop the villages through the establishment of an organization called Jihad-e-Sazandegy.
•F. it was a revolutionary institution whose fundamental duty was the improvement of economic and social conditions of villagers in Iran.
•V. The marvelous achievements of Jihad-e-Sazandegy and the fruitful actions of this public institution proved the Imam’s correctness of recognitions and depth of revolutionary perception.

Results of the analysis performed on the editorials indicated that the most frequent pattern pertaining to all the studied newspaper was LFV. In other words, we can say that the general macro-structure of Persian newspaper editorials is LFV. This finding is in line with that of Bolivar’s (1994) as related to The Guardian newspaper. This common Pattern between the two languages enhances the Translatability of the newspaper editorials. The task of translators would be to look for the triads and go for the appropriate syntax and lexicon. It is interesting to point out that in both Bolivar’s and our study, it was found that each turn is characterized by specific sentence types. For examples, it was found that “Leads” were mostly expressed in interrogatives; “Follows” mostly used passive structures; and “Valuates” used conditional and copulas. The usage of special syntactic structures for specific turns can be justified partly in light of the discoursal function, attributed to each structure and reported in previous studies. Interrogatives sentences, for example, are used with the goal of eliciting information or presenting some new topic for discussion. Since the main function of L turn is to introduce the aboutness of the triad and a subject, therefore, it seems quite reasonable to have interrogatives mostly in L turns. On the other hand, the correspondence of passive structures and F turns might be due to the fact that passives provide development and elaboration of the events. Reid (1990: 201) points out that “the passive voice is indicative of the formal interactional character of …[a] prose as opposed to the more personal, interactive prose of narrative.” As for V turns, we can say that the function of conditionals is to produce or suggest some kind of solution or desirable action on some conditions (Bolivar 1994), thus, the association between V turns and conditionals. Becoming aware of these macro- and micro-features of texts, we can make our translations of particular texts and genres more accurate, meaningful, and communicative.

Source: Abdolmehdi Riazi, Shiraz University, Iran. Copyright Translation Journal and the Author 2003.



MY REVIEW:

This journal tells about the invisible in translation, which is focused on the role of the text structure. In this paper, the researcher concerned with the macro-analysis and its implication in translation. First, the macro-structure of newspaper editorials in two language, English and Persian, then the macro-structure of the poems of a famous Persian Poet, Hakim O’mar Khayam, and the English translation of these poems by a well-known English translator, Fitzgerald.
It uses pure research to analyze this journal, because it is for knowledge development, and its purpose is to develop the theory and find the new theory. The important thing is this research had been researched before by another research. The data collection method of this journal is document analysis through the test. Data collection methods is document analysis, because, Bolivar selected 23 editorials from The Guardian during the first three months. So the source data is using the newspaper editorials in English and Persian.
The researcher stick to the text analysis approach with a focus on the structure of written language at micro- and macro levels. By looking back to the researchers before, like Connor (1994), Jan Firbas and Frantisek Dane (1959s-1960s), Stubbs (1995), Halliday and Hasan’s (1976), Swalles’s (1990), Biber’s (1998), Bloor and Bloor ( 1995),. As the case of newspaper editorials, she found out that a tripartite structure called “triad” organized the macro structure of the editorials, it function is to negotiate the transmission and avaluation in written text and that is consists of three turns or elements, namely, Lead, Follow, and Valuate, serving distinctive functions of initiation, follow-up, and evaluation of the two. The following excerpt taken from The Gardian, “behind close Irish doors.” March 3, 1981, cited in Bolivar (1994: 280-1) is an example of a triad. Another is Riazi and Assar (2001).
Results of the analysis performed on the editorials indicated that the most frequent pattern pertaining to all the studied newspaper was LFV. In other words, we can say that the general macro-structure of Persian newspaper editorials is LFV. Becoming aware of these macro- and micro-features of texts, we can make our translations of particular texts and genres more accurate, meaningful, and communicative.