ABSTRACT
Translation and interpreting activities deal with groupings of words in sentences and with sequences of sentences. These groupings are non-random; they are assembled deliberately for communicative purposes. This deliberate selection produces a so-called text. Texts are "interaction structures" whose formal and semantic properties are intentionally structured in alignment with the communicative purposes of situated social interactions. As such, texts have specific language characteristics that can allow, for instance, for classification into text types. Any actions taken by the translator or interpreter must account for these characteristics or properties (and cultural differences in them) when creating a new vehicle for situated communication in the target culture. The study of how language is used in texts is referred to as text linguistics and is associated with the work of, among others, Van Dijk; Halliday and Hasan; and de Beaugrande and Dressler. Much of text linguistics developed in parallel with translation studies. Both had early and continuing relationships to systemic functional linguistics and were concerned with the nature of textuality. However, the intersection of text linguistics and translation studies was first formalized by the work of Hatim and Mason (1990) and Neubert (1985, 1992). These works introduced core concepts of text linguistics into translation studies: coherence, cohesion, intentionality, situationality, acceptability, informativity and intertextuality.
