Discourse markers and peculiarities of their translation

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Discourse analysis is a general term for a number of approaches to analyze written, vocal, or sign language use or any significant semiotic event. The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, conversation, communicative event—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech acts, or turns-at-talk. Contrary to much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language use ‘beyond the sentence boundary’, but also prefer to analyze ‘naturally occurring’ language use, and not invented examples. Text linguistics is related. The essential difference between discourse analysis and text linguistics is that it aims at revealing socio-psychological characteristics of a person/persons rather than text structure. Discourse analysis emerged as a new trans-disciplinary field of study between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s in such disciplines as anthropology, ethnography, microsociology, cognitive and social psychology, poetics, rhetoric, stylistics, linguistics, semiotics, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences interested in the systematic study of the structures, functions, and processing of text and talk. Over the past few decades research on discourse markers (DMs) has been rapidly expanding and the theoretical appeal is amply demonstrated by the number of frameworks that have been applied to the study of Relevance Theory, Rhetorical Structure Theory, Construction Grammar, coherence-based studies, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis. Since DMs do not change the basic meaning of utterances, a straightforward translation strategy is to omit them in the target text (TT). The resulting translation, in certain contexts, might not lose any of the propositional content of the source text (ST), but will definitely lose a variety of communicative effects, such as the very naturalness of ordinary, everyday conversation, or the speaker’s attitude to the words being uttered.