Genre and translation

We use the term textual genre to refer to a conventionalised form of text that has a specific function in the culture in which it is set and that reflects a purpose of the sender that is foreseeable to the recipient (García-Izquierdo 2002:136). Speakers of a cultural community identify it by its macrostructure and because of a learned, recurring and routinised inheritance, it is associated with specific communicative situations. The concept of textual genre is a polyhedral concept, which combines textual aspects (form), contextual or discursive aspects (communicative situation, professional community in which they are present and pragmatic characteristics) and cognitive aspects (processing of notional aspects, socialisation), as if they were permeable compartments (Aragonés 2009) which must be explored to understand it. This complexity is precisely what makes genre a key concept in the field of intralinguistic and interlinguistic communication, and to describe them we need to understand the concepts related to the formal (cohesion and intertextuality), communicative (register, dialect and pragmatic purposefulness) and cognitive (coherence and ideology) aspects that were mentioned before (García-Izquierdo 2011). Therefore, genres are important categories in any discourse community (professional ones or not). This inherent complexity of the concept is exacerbated by the variations that occur between languages and cultures, which can lead to inconsistencies and justifies the importance of having a good generic knowledge of them (Montalt & García-Izquierdo 2002) for translation and linguistic mediation purposes. Certainly, this definition of genre makes it difficult to describe the category, given the fact that the conventions of each genre are culturally determined will entail several difficulties. These include its dynamic nature (Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995), in accordance with cultural changes; the existence of hybrid genres (Bhatia 2002, 2004; García Izquierdo 2007); or, from the translator's perspective, the existence of intergeneric (heterofunctional) or equigeneric (between symmetrical genres) translations (García-Izquierdo & Montalt 2014) that depend on the assignment and the field. Yet, it is also certain that only a good knowledge of the conventions that regulate the genres will allow us to identify the communicative practices of the different discourse communities (Swales 1990) in our working languages and, therefore, guarantee the success of the mediation activity (Hurtado 2001)