Description vs prescription in translation teaching: a bridgeable gulf?

This paper seeks to demonstrate that translation teaching could gain fruitful insights from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1985/1994; Halliday, Matthiessen 2004). It is argued that Functional Grammar can offer a useful tool for translators, with a dual purpose. First, as Carol Taylor Torsello (1996) put forward, it can serve as a practical skill for analysing the multidimensional kinds of meanings encoded in a Source Text and reproducing them in a Target Text. Second, it could help narrow the gap between the theorist’s descriptivism and the student’s desire for prescriptivism. Indeed, while descriptivism underlie both Hallidayan approach to language and theories of most Western translation scholars today, a certain amount of prescriptivism is often sought by translation practitioners, who look for guidelines and instructions to be able to produce a ‘good’ translation. After briefly illustrating such different positioning and sketching the main aspects of Functional Grammar that translators could exploit, a selection of illustrative examples is offered, drawing from the author’s personal experience as a teacher of courses in Translation Studies, addressed to graduate students. The material is taken from real assignments dealing with a variety of text-types – i.e., a specialized book in the field of Urban Studies, a horror novel and a tourist guide – and consists of English Source Texts along with the published Italian Target Texts. The focus is on the production of a ‘functionally equivalent’ translation, in particular at the levels of ‘stratification’ and ‘metafunction’ (Halliday 2001; see Manfredi forthcoming). The final aim of the proposed method is an attempt at making students concretely realize that a metalinguistic reflection on translation in functional terms, rather than a rule-based approach, can help them reflect on wordings and meanings and take informed translation decisions within a range of more/less acceptable and effective choices.