A Visit to the Gentle Island : How to retain the pragmatic functions of a tourist guide in translation

This study discusses how the pragmatic text functions of the Prince Edward Island Visitor’s Guide can be retained in translation from English into Swedish. Katharina Reiss’ model of texttypes and their different functions have been used to identify the functions of the source text, and in order to investigate the possibilities of retaining these functions in the target text, the discussion is tied to text features where the pragmatic text functions are displayed. The translation choices, next, are supported by the translation strategies offered by Rune Ingo and Peter Newmark. The results show that the informative function can be retained by using the translation strategies of addition or explicitation in most cases, whereas the operative function can be retained by copying the sentence structure or the direct address from the source text to the target text. The expressive function, next, can be retained by using Ingo’s strategy of equivalence. However, there are also examples where the expressive function has to be neglected in favor of the informative function.