Viewpoint in Translation of Academic Writing: An Illustrative Case Study

Abstract

This article employs the concept of viewpoint, also referred to as point of view or stance, to offer a short case study of semantic shifts in the translation of academic writing. Drawing on a model of the concept developed specifically for research into the subjective aspects of academic prose, the study seeks to show what viewpoint shifts can occur in translation, based on an analysis of a Cognitive Linguistics monograph translated from English into Polish. The examples, supplemented with English back-translation glosses, illustrate several types of viewpoint shifts taking place in translation, such as increasing or decreasing the author’s commitment to a claim, the removal of author emphasis from the text, and shifts from implicit to explicit author mention. Given that academic discourse has ceased to be regarded as objective description of facts, and based on the assumption that the linguistic resources connected with hedging, evaluation and (avoidance of) self-mention are consciously deployed by authors of academic texts, it is suggested that viewpoint phenomena may represent a valuable research area for the strand of translation studies concerned with academic writing.

Keywords

• viewpoint
• stance
• self-mention
• linguistics
• academic discourse MOaP_