Systemic Functional Linguistics as a tool for translation teaching: towards a meaningful practice

This paper focuses on the centrality of meaning in the practice of translation. Since this major concern is also shared by Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004), which considers language a meaning making resource, it is argued that such an approach could serve as a helpful tool for translator education and training. After a theoretical first part, where the relevance of Systemic Functional Linguistics to the activity of translating is discussed and a cursory sketch of its key notions is outlined, the paper moves on to present illustrative segments from a small selection of English sample texts and of their translation into Italian. Dealing with different text types, and drawing on authentic teaching assignments, some lexicogrammatical features are analysed in order to identify the multidimensional meanings being realized. Special focus is on modality, ideational grammatical metaphor, thematic progression and also on appraisal systems, a model for evaluation recently developed within the framework of Hallidayan linguistics (Martin & White 2005). The empirical examples are offered to show that a textual analysis based on this perspective might represent for the translator an ideal “set of resources for describing, interpreting and making meaning” (Butt et al. 2000: 3).