Contrastive rhetoric and translation studies

Abstract

Contrastive rhetoricians working on second language writing, not only in North America but in other countries, are often unfamiliar with the theories and research of scholars in translation studies. Translation theorists seem to be equally unaware of developments in contrastive rhetoric. This mutual ignorance is curious considering the many goals and research methods these two disciplines have in common. Both are applied rather than theoretical, in the sense that linguistics is used in each field for equally practical purposes: Contrastive rhetoric assists language teaching experts and translation theory assists translators. Both contrastive rhetoric and translation studies deal with first language and second language processing and benefit from the same literature on language acquisition. Both have experienced changes in methodology in the past decade as their individual theories were supplemented with relevant hypotheses and methods of literary study, education, and cognitive science. The explanation for the mutual ignorance may rest in social differences between educational systems: In countries with “small” national languages such as Finland, translation is a must; whereas in countries with “big” languages such as the United States, England, or France, composition is emphasized together with the need to teach ESL. This chapter addresses three broad issues: first, current theories and practices of translation; second, the issue of “transfer” in contrastive rhetoric and translation theory; and finally, the potential of translation theory to contribute to the solution of some of the outstanding problems in contrastive rhetoric.