Systemic Functional Linguistics Tools in Translation Training With Examples From French-Greek Translations

Using as a springboard the principle that there is necessarily an ongoing linguistic process during the translation process, it is necessary to determine which tools of language science could better serve translation training. From these tools, we selected some key notions of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to analyze the source text (ST) and evaluate its transfer to target text (TT). More specifically, we investigated the influence of context on the variation of use (Halliday, 1978), the factors such as field, tenor, and mode on which the choice of register depends (Halliday, 2003); and the cohesion/coherence of the discourse as a whole (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). The core notion is to carry out a so-called top-down analysis. After analyzing the ST as an organized entity using markers carefully chosen by its author, we proceed to analyzing the choices made at the register level while also considering the communication situation. The translation process begins once the TT context has been determined and equivalences in ST have been sought. The contained examples used for this approach are text excerpts translated from French to Greek.