Traduction commentee sur les code des societes du Ghana, loi 179 de 1963
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Date
2008-08-05
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Abstract
Every translation derives necessarily from two discourse communities: the text source discourse community and the target source discourse community. If we accept that language is culturally determined and also that professional, ethical standards impose further constraints on language use, then much care needs to be exercised in objectively drawing out the real import of a text, what it is actually saying, its target audience, its context and its situation.
Certainly, to table a motion in American parliamentary parlance means to put off discussion altogether on the motion, whilst the same term means to actively discuss the motion in British parliamentary procedure. Such situations obviously give rise to what is known as bypassing, when the same expression connotes a different meaning in a different situation. Therefore, in translation activity, one needs to avoid, as much as possible, focusing on only the linguistic underpinnings of a text, when one wants to find out its real message.
The present work therefore considers as only «surface structure», (to borrow the term of Nida), the morph-syntactical composition of the text which we have translated, that is, the Companies Code (1963), Act 179 of Ghana. This means that for us to derive the real meaning of the text, a conscious exploration of the central interpretative devices emeshed in it, which serve as contextual clues enacting the intended meaning of the message, was painstakingly pursued.
Indeed, the Legal-linguist, Lord Hoffman, reminds us that the fact that the document appears to have a clear meaning on the surface does not prevent or indeed excuse us from looking at the background. Such and other cues have guided us to consciously base the present translation activity on current theoretical positions that inform translation as an exercise in pragma-linguistics.
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A dissertation presented to the College of Art and Social Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters of Philosophy (French)