Festschrift Reiner Arntz - GENTT

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Text typology for professional technical translation: the GENTT project Silvia Gamero Pérez

1. Introduction The task of establishing a typology of texts is a very ambitious undertaking, as it involves attempting to measure, classify and define the huge variety of texts that are produced in each language and which, additionally, are constantly evolving. But if it were to be accomplished, the result of the research would provide translators with a valuable novelty, i.e. access to a pool of information that goes beyond the level of words or phrases (as offered by dictionaries and glossaries, for example) to operate at higher levels, with a specific format that is ready for use. In other words, we are talking about a reference resource that can be used by translators to clear up their doubts about the particular text genres they work with. To achieve this, first we need the raw material. It is therefore essential to design the most efficient method for extracting the information to be contained in the work. Later, research must be conducted to decide on the most suitable format for transferring the data to the user, for example, an encyclopaedia of genres, a bilingual or multilingual textual glossary, published online or on paper, and so forth. In the last few years, the GENTT group at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló has been working to provide an answer to two needs, that is to say, on the one hand, that of establishing a taxonomy and description of the genres in different areas of specialisation (technical, medical, legal and administrative) in several languages (Spanish, Catalan, English, French and German) and, on the other, that of designing a practical tool that translators will find useful in the practise of their profession. The idea behind this paper stems from the work carried out by the above mentioned team (led by I. García Izquierdo and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and Fondos Feder – code HUM2006-05581/FILO); it also draws on the results obtained in previous research studies (Gamero 2001).

2. Text, genre and the multilevel system of genres in the technical field To address the research, the first step was to establish a working definition of what we actually understand by the term technical text. It is in fact a makeshift definition that has allowed us to select the samples for the corpus, but will have to be confirmed when the whole analysis has been completed. We can say that a technical text is an act of communication that takes place between certain senders (engineers, technicians, technical editors, specialised journalists or other professionals) and certain receivers 1

Festschrift Reiner Arntz

(engineers, technicians, students studying a technical specialisation or the general public) within the context of industry, farming, manufacturing products or offering services. The predominant text functions are expository and exhortative, the mode is generally written, the field is exclusively technical (epigraphs 31 and 33 of the UNESCO International Nomenclature) and the dialectal variety (temporal, geographical, idiolectal) is very scarce. Lastly, it must be said that technical texts offer a wide variety of intratextual features that are largely determined by the conventions of the genre as a semiotic category (Gamero 2001, 38). Now there goes a fundamental concept, that of genre, which is used by nearly all the authors who have proposed text typologies in the field of translation. Let us now look at some significant examples. Although the earliest classifications appeared at the beginning of the seventies, it was Arntz (1988) who laid the foundations for a taxonomy of technical texts aimed specifically towards professional translation. The same year, Durieux (1988) produced a classification for teaching purposes, as did Cormier (1991) and, again, Arntz (1993) in the following years. These taxonomies take into account the concept of genre and also that of the complexity or level of difficulty of the text. Other proposals include those by Möhn and Pelka (1984), Callut (1990), Titov (1991), Loffler-Laurian (1991), Göpferich (1995) and Sevilla and Sevilla (2005), which are also based more or less explicitly on that same concept (see Gamero 2001, 62-64 for a detailed review of most of these propositions). We conceive genre as being a tangible expression of the textual and contextual conventions contained within the texts that can be considered to be representative of particular socio-professional fields (García Izquierdo, ed. 2005). Hence genre has a somewhat chameleonic nature because it changes depending on different sociocultural parameters; at the same time it also displays a number of transversal features, due to the fact that there are genres that share characteristics and there are also genres that are common to different areas of specialisation. But the most important of all is its communicative character, which allows us to include it within certain specific socio-professional coordinates, with specific participants (sender, receiver, author) and with novel communicative needs that arise and produce genres that previously did not exist (for example, the so-called cybergenres, see Montero et al., in press). Genre systems One of the questions that had remained unanswered up till now when attempting to define exactly what we mean by genre was the multilevel character of the concept, since it comprises different degrees of abstraction. A letter is considered to be a genre, but there are many types of letters, such as a letter of complaint, a cover letter, a letter of resignation, and so forth, which are also genres. We therefore need to identify the different levels of the concept of genre and to establish the parameters that define each of the

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Silvia Gamero Pérez: ¡Error! Estilo no definido.

levels. This has been done in all the subject areas of GENTT, the result being a structuring of the concept genre on three levels of abstraction: Denomination

Identification criteria

Example in the technical area

Level 1

Macrogenre

Communicative purpose

Level 2

Genre

Level 3

Subgenre

Communicative purpose, situation, channel Communicative purpose, situation, channel, field or thematic complexity, participants (sender, receiver, etc.).

Product operating instructions and warranty Specialised instruction manual Operator's manual

The first level, i.e. macrogenre, corresponds to the maximum degree of abstraction. It embraces a group of texts that share a particular communicative purpose within a specific socio-professional context (Ezpeleta and Gamero 2004, 152). Thus, the product operating instructions and warranty make up a set of genres whose purpose is to comply with the legal obligations that the manufacturer takes on with users or consumers, the most important being that of instructing them on how to use the products they have acquired and guaranteeing its correct functioning over a period of time. On this level, few linguistic materialisation features are shared, since the only thing the texts have in common is a general communicative purpose. Yet, it is worth considering because it offers a context to account for the relation between the different genres. This in turn enables us to better understand the meaning of a certain text in its context of use. The second level is the genre, an abstraction that offers the minimum number of features that are common to the texts included within it, i.e. communicative purpose, situation and channel. Thus, the macrogenre product operating instructions and warranty offers the following genres, among others: specialised instruction manual, general instruction manual, warranty. The purpose of the genre specialised instruction manual is to describe the characteristics and how to use a piece of equipment or specialised machine, its situation of use is the socio-professional field of industry, and its channel is written communication. On this level the shared linguistic features start to be more abundant, since the texts also have more extratextual factors in common. The third level deals with the concept of subgenre. Subgenres, as we understand them here, are text samples that are linked by a common general

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format (that of the shared genre), but nevertheless display conventional differences among them that give rise to variants of the genre. The criteria for identifying and defining them are built around two fundamental dimensions (Hatim and Mason 1990), that is, the participants in the underlying communicative act and the thematic complexity of the object the text refers to. Thus, the genre specialised instruction manual includes subgenres such as the engineer’s manual and the operator’s manual, which share the same sender (engineer or technical editor) and are distinguished by their receiver, an engineer (who is responsible for programming and maintenance of the machinery) and an operator (whose job is to use the machine on the production line), respectively. The general instruction manual has different formats according to the thematic complexity of its specific object: there is an important difference between, for example, the manuals of a small household appliance and those written for a sophisticated mobile phone device. It is on this third level where the features indicating the linguistic materialisation of the genre begin to become more apparent; it therefore makes more sense to perform microanalyses and study the internal characteristics of texts at this level, with a view to creating a tool to assist translation. Taken together and arranged in an appropriate fashion, we call these three levels the genre tree. The GENTT group is currently working on the elaboration of the tree of technical genres, together with those of the other thematic areas it deals with (legal, medical and administrative).

3. Technical macrogenres In what follows we will outline our taxonomy of technical texts, although (due to space restraints) we will limit our description to the first of the levels of the tree, that is, the ten macrogenres that have been identified in the technical domain. We will offer a general characterisation of each macrogenre and a brief panoramic view of the genres included within each of them. In later publications we will reproduce the whole tree (with the three levels). The proposal should be taken as being open and provisional, since it was conceived in such a way as to allow it to be expanded in the future as new genres appear and as the analysis progresses. In any event, its present format reflects the state of the research carried out in GENTT over the past six years. The ten macrogenres that are directly related to a similar number of communicative situations that occur in technical communication are as follows: • Documents for use in industry • Certification documents • Industrial property documents • Documents about operating the product and about warranty • Normative documents 4


• Reference works • Didactic texts • Popular informative texts • Advertising texts • Periodicals Documents for use in industry The family made up of documents for use in industry offers the greatest textual variety as regards the number of genres and subgenres it contains. All of them are used for internal communication within an enterprise (for example, the genres minutes, work instructions, tender documents, report, parts list, project, quality manual, etc.) or in the confidential relationship between the enterprise and any of the following: its Shareholders and Board of Directors (annual report); its suppliers, subsidiaries or franchisees (company technical standards, also called company specific standards); certain external institutions or bodies (patent application form, quality certification application form, technical specifications documents for public tenders or bidding). Exceptionally, some genres in this group can extend beyond the company’s internal communication, for example, the annual report can be made available to a wider public, for marketing reasons. We have left out of this classification genres such as contracts because, although their content can be technical, they have traditionally been considered as belonging to the legal domain. Certification documents Certification documents are those which contain a written statement of some fact concerning the enterprise or product by someone who has the capacity or is authorised to do so. They can be divided into two main groups. First, technical certificates of all kinds, which are issued by experts, engineers or technical offices and which are used either for administrative (an architect's final completion certificate) or for legal purposes (a technical certificate of sound level measurements). Second, there is a group of certificates called certificates of conformity (or compliance), which are issued by an accredited certifying body such as AENOR in Spain. They offer proof of the fact that a particular company, product or service complies with the requirements set out in a given standard or technical specification. There are also several different types of certificates of conformity, depending on the kind of standard they refer to, for example, management systems standards (such as quality or environmental management) or standards concerning a particular product or service. The certificate of quality, for example, offers the general public and other interested parties proof of the fact that the company has implemented a quality management system that complies with the requirements of a certain international quality standard.

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Industrial property documents Industrial property documents grant their holders a legal right to protection against third parties over a given number of years. There are three main types. Firstly, the distinguishing signs of a company, establishment, product or services, which are eligible for protection by the law because they allow them to be differentiated from the rest. These include trade name, trademarks and business signs. Secondly, inventions that provide solutions to technological problems, like patents, utility models and, more recently, semiconductor product topographies. Thirdly, industrial design: drawings or designs and industrial models. Documents about operating the product and about warranty Documents concerning the operation and warranty of products allow the user to utilise the products and assert his or her right to complain to the manufacturer if the item turns out to be faulty. They include documents such as product warranty, building specifications (guarantee issued to cover residences that are bought while still under construction), general instruction manual, computer system manual (software manual, etc.), complex systems manual (vehicles, small boats, etc.) and specialised instruction manual. Normative documents Normative documents are those that set out the technical requirements that have to be met by products or services in order to ensure quality and safety. There are two fundamental types, depending on whether they are mandatory or not: standards (of specification), which are generally speaking voluntary (unless legislation makes them mandatory through the enactment of some legal disposition), and technical (or industrial) regulations, which are compulsory and are adopted by an authority with the power to specify technical requirements that are to be applied by law in a particular industrial sector (for example, in Spain, the Low Voltage Electrical Regulations 842/2002). Regulations are usually accompanied by the corresponding complementary technical instructions, which are also compulsory. On the other hand, the standards are normally drafted and written up by national or international standardisation institutes, after all the parties involved have reached an agreement. There are many different types of specification standards and they can be classified according to their purpose: basic standards, standards concerning terminology, products, testing, processes, services and occupational issues (among others). To make it easier to apply standards, standardisation institutions and competent State bodies publish reference materials mainly aimed towards enterprises. Such publications are the so-called guides to interpreting or applying standards or regulations, which we include in the reference works section due to the fact that they are chiefly used for consultation.

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Standards are also drawn up by large business groups (such as manufacturers of vehicles), which are organised in a complex, transnational manner with numerous suppliers that provide them with the parts and materials needed to manufacture their products and that therefore need to be standardised. But this is another genre (company technical standards) and since it is for in-company use, we have included it within the so-called documents for use in industry group. Reference works Reference works are texts that contain information about the general state of the art or about a particular area, some of which allow the user to make very specific queries, either in alphabetical order or by subjects. They are similar to didactic texts in that they are to some extent instructional, but they lack their pedagogic intention. Some of the genres are used by the general public (encyclopaedic dictionary, encyclopaedia) and others are typically found in the daily professional activity of the technical sector, as is the case of the collection of standards, the technical guide (for example, guide to applying standards, guide to interpreting regulations), the safety data sheet/record, the reference technical manual or the handbook. The difference between these last two cases is that the handbook offers engineers or operators a concise compendium of technical data for quick reference and calculations in very specific fields and usually includes a large number of examples, tables and charts, whereas the manual is far less schematic. Didactic texts Didactic texts are those that are produced with the aim of disseminating technical knowledge from a particular field or area of technical expertise, which may be wider or more restricted, depending on cases. To achieve this end, they make use of an academic format, which is oriented towards formal learning, since they outline a training programme. The receivers of such texts are students (or teachers if they are didactic guides) at any level of instruction within the educational or lifelong training system. Examples include technical course notes, teaching guide for teachers, textbook or teaching manual. These last two are works that include a compendium of the most important points in a subject. In the case of a textbook, the receivers are schoolchildren or university or vocational training students. The target audience of a teaching manual consists of technicians undergoing training (or self-training) of any kind and at any level. The author of a didactic text must be an educationalist and a specialist because their aim is to instruct, unlike the authors of popular informative texts who only seek to inform and entertain. This means that they can be specialised in the topic but are not necessarily specialists in the field in question. Popular informative texts Popular informative texts, like didactic texts, are intended to disseminate technical knowledge about a specific field, but they use a more attractive 7


format than didactic texts in order to arouse the reader’s interest and at the same time make them easier to understand (minimum terminology; emotive elements; references to daily life; focus on the most relevant, practical or interesting features; narratives; exemplification, metaphors; illustrations; mechanisms to create intrigue or suspense; and moreover they are produced and used outside the academic, or any kind of instructional, context. They are therefore aimed at a wide, heterogeneous audience that is defined only by its age, that is, children, youths or adults. As we have said, the writer is not necessarily a specialist. Examples include popular informative article, popular informative monographic publication, institutional informative leaflet (all of which give rise to different subgenres according to the age of the population to which they are addressed). Advertising texts The purpose of advertising texts is to persuade the receiver to acquire or use a certain product or service. They may be addressed to the general public (advertorial, direct marketing letter, outlet poster, discount voucher) or a more restricted and specialised audience (commercial article, catalogue of prices and products, product specifications sheet, and so forth). Some genres can be directed towards either of the two audiences (advertisement, press release, product note, leaflet). Generally speaking, advertising texts aimed at specialists tend to put more emphasis on giving information rather than on persuading, in contrast to what happens in those intended for the general public. Periodicals Periodicals constitute an up-to-date means of communication among users, customers, suppliers and all the members of a particular industry. They are published by professional associations, public institutions, specialised publishing houses or private companies, and their final users are the people in charge of machinery in companies, owners of repair workshops and maintenance chiefs, materials and machinery purchasing managers, directors of technical offices, industrial plant managers, teachers in educational centres, and so forth. Some examples of genres include technical journal, technical periodical and technical bulletins. They all share the particularity of including genres within their structure, that is to say, the editorial, press release, specialised article, etc., some of which may be strongly marked by their advertising intent, since at the end of the day periodicals are a means by which companies make their products or services known to an interested audience (for example, through genres such as the product presentation or note; see advertising genres).

4. Conclusions and outlook of the project Our initial results have enabled the GENTT group to build a corpus management program that is specifically designed for translation, the Gentt program, which is based on a communicative and formal conception of the 8


notion of genre and includes a three-level classification tree. Once the corpus had been analysed by this management program, we identified and briefly characterised the ten macrogenres in the technical domain. In the future we will have to develop the whole tree, with the description of each genre and subgenre, and carry out a microlinguistic analysis of the corpus with suitable tools. Finally, we will create an electronic encyclopaedia or dictionary that can be probably consulted online and which offers terminological, conceptual, textual and linguistic information about all the genres in the fields of specialisation included in the project.

References Monographic publications Durieux, Ch. (1988): Fondement didactique de la traduction technique. Paris: Didier Erudition. Gamero Pérez, S. (2001): La traducción de textos técnicos. Barcelona: Ariel. Göpferich, S. (1995): Textsorten in Naturwissenschaften und Technik: Pragmatische Typologie, Kontrastierung, Translation. Tübingen: Narr. Hatim, B. / Mason, I. (1990): Discourse and the Translator. London: Longman. Möhn, D. y Pelka, R. (1984): Fachsprachen: Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Collective works García Izquierdo, I. (ed.) (2005): El género textual y la traducción. Berne: Peter Lang.

Chapters in collective works Arntz, R. (1993): “Fachtexttypologie und Übersetzungsdidaktik”, in: HolzMännttäri, J. / Nord, Ch. (eds.): Traducere Navem. Festschrift für Katharina Reiß zum 70. Geburtstag. Tampere: University, pp. 153–168. Ezpeleta Piorno, P. / Gamero, S. (2004): “Los géneros técnicos y la investigación basada en corpus: proyecto GENTT”, in: Gaser, R. / Guirado, C. / Rey, J.: Insights into Scientific and Technical Translation, pp. 147–156. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Loffler-Laurian, A.M. (1991): “La traduction technique et scientifique”, in: Lepinette, B. et al. (eds.): Actas del I Coloquio Internacional de Traductología. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, pp. 37–40. Titov, V. (1991): “Los géneros de los textos científicos y la traducción”, in: Lepinette, B. et al. (eds.): Actas del I Coloquio Internacional de Traductología. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, pp. 199–200.

Articles in journals Arntz, R. (1988): “Steps towards a Translation-Oriented Typology of Technical Texts”, in: Meta – Journal des Traducteurs / Translators’ Journal, 33, 4, pp. 468– 471.

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Callut, J.P. (1990): “Les approches de la traduction de textes scientifiques et techniques”, in: Le Linguiste, 36, 3/4, pp. 41–52. Cormier, M.C. (1991): “Traduction de textes destinés à des spécialistes: approche pédagogique”, in: Meta, 36, 2-3, pp. 440–447. Montero, B. / Montesinos, A. / Pérez, C. / Turney, E. (in press): “Computer mediated communication and informalization of discourse: the influence of culture and subject matter”, in: Journal of Pragmatics. Sevilla Muñoz, M. / Sevilla Muñoz, J. (2005): “Una clasificación del texto científico-técnico desde un enfoque multidireccional”, in: Language Design, 5, pp. 19–38.

Silvia Gamero Pérez Senior Lecturer Departament of Translation and Communication Universitat Jaume I Av. Vicente Sos Baynat, s/n, 12071 Castelló, Spain [email protected] www.gentt.uji.es

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