Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing, defined as an alternative way to convey the same information, is a broad and vague phenomenon. The reformulation or rewording can involve modifications ranging from shallow surface restructuring to deep manipulation of the original content. This can be done for various reasons—for example, to avoid verbatim repetition and direct citation, to adjust the content for a better effect on the reader/receiver, to simplify or shorten the original text, to adapt or “translate” the meaning for a different purpose and/or to create a completely new text tailor-made for a different reader than the one intended by the original author. Vila, Martí & Rodríguez (2014: 213) conclude that “given the vague and multifaceted nature of paraphrasing […], paraphrase boundaries are not fixed and depend on the task and objective”. In other words, paraphrasing can range from the reformulation of meaning by using a synonym or an alternative syntactic structure to creating a new text, i.e., intralingual translation. Paraphrasing works on linguistic forms and meaning, so its family resemblance to intralingual and interlingual translation in terms of cognitive processing and communicative function seems justifiable. The multifaceted nature of paraphrasing as a broad cognitive phenomenon makes it an interesting area of study for many language-related disciplines including communication studies, foreign language teaching, computational linguistics and Translation Studies