The Traveller’s Phrasebook: Linguistic Translator and Cultural Mediator

© 2019 Emma Ruth KochThe printed translating phrasebook for travellers dates back more than 500 years and represents a particularly rich and varied genre. However, despite its ubiquity and longevity, the phrasebook has essentially been hidden in plain sight and remains a relatively undervalued and under-researched genre. This study aims to advance knowledge about the phrasebook genre, both as linguistic translator and as cultural mediator. It further aims to change the way we think about phrasebooks by examining the ways they function not just as linguistic translators, but also as cultural interpreters. This thesis is a discourse analytic study of printed phrasebooks for travellers that begins with a brief bibliographical study of eight phrasebooks dating from c.1480 to 2018 to trace the evolution of the genre. It proposes a model of the printed phrasebook’s evolution to make sense of differences in form, function and content in phrasebooks over the genre’s development. It undertakes a diachronic analysis of the function and features of the eight phrasebooks examined in the first chapter, to identify the defining characteristics of the genre, asking what it is a phrasebook does and how its form and content both contribute to and are shaped by that function. Turning its attention to the content of the eight phrasebooks, it identifies three broad categories – linguistic, metalinguistic and extra-linguistic content – and the semantic domains common to these books. It then considers how these semantic domains are represented in relation to the evolutionary model proposed in the first chapter, and it examines the ways in which the domains remain consistent while the linguistic expressions comprising them change in response to the changing needs of phrasebooks users over time. Acknowledging both that genres are dynamic and that flexibility is necessary for the longevity of the genre, the fourth chapter examines the genre’s adaptability and the types of variation it permits. It asks what a selection of phrasebooks and phrasebook-like tools reveal about what the phrasebook is becoming through its extension to specialised domains and to new formats. At the same time, the assortment of phrasebooks surveyed here serves as an introduction to the enormous diversity of this highly adaptable genre. The thesis then investigates ways in which phrasebooks explicitly and implicitly mediate both the linguistic and the cultural experience, exploring mediation strategies employed and the effects of these strategies. Chapter five examines strategies that mediate the target language, including representation of the target language and its systems as easy and accessible, down-playing the need for correct production or usage of the target language for communication, establishment of relationships of linguistic equivalence between the source and target languages, and direction of the user’s gaze towards some aspects of the linguistic systems of the target language and away from others. Chapter six examines strategies for cultural mediation, including explicit acknowledgement and explanation of cultural difference and prescriptions for adhering to cultural norms, mediation of culinary culture, and mediation of the traveller–host relationship, as well as the assumptions inherent in these strategies, and their implications