Deprivations and Limits of Discourse Analysis in Translation Theory

The general attention to discourse analysis developed in the 1970s has found application in translation theory in the 1980s and into the 1990s. However, a survey of the linguistic approaches concerned shows that many kinds of analysis are inappropriate to the study of translation quite simply because they cannot say if a source text and a target text can or should belong to the same discourse. That is, most theories cannot describe the limits of any particular discourse within or across different tongues. A more relevant approach is to define discourse as a set of constraints on semiosis, and then use this definition to recognize translation as a possible index of intercultural discursive constraints.