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LIT-1863: Translating as a purposeful activity: a prospective approach

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StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1448) from the publisher's open-access PDF on the TradTerm site (periodicos.usp.br/tradterm/article/download/49673/53784/61052, 14 pp.). Worth reading as Nord's own short statement of functionalist translation, the record's only reading of the functional account while her book (LIT-829) is unread. A text is an offer of information, which different receivers take differently, so the translator works prospectively, toward the purpose the translation is to serve for a particular target audience as the brief specifies. Nord sorts communicative purposes into phatic, referential, expressive and appellative functions. Where target-culture conditions differ, the translator either adapts the text so that the function works (instrumental translation) or turns it into a meta-function that tells the audience how the original worked (documentary translation). Neither is better in general: the brief decides. Equivalence is often "not required or not even desired".
Tagstranslation
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-205 — Functional and relevance-theoretic accounts of translation, as Nida, Nord and Gutt state them, need not fix one context or a static stance profile of the rendering
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1448 — Nord — Translating as a purposeful activity: a prospective approach

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Christiane Nord (2005), “Translating as a purposeful activity: a prospective approach”, TradTerm 11, 15–28. DOI 10.11606/issn.2317-9511.tradterm.2005.49673.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-1448.

  • Prospective, not retrospective. The translator does not reproduce “the” source text, which is “as many texts as there are receivers of it”. The translator adapts it to “a particular target audience from among various possible audiences” (pp. 16–17).
  • Four functions. Phatic, referential, expressive and appellative, after Bühler with Jakobson’s phatic function added. Most texts carry several, one usually dominant (pp. 19–24).
  • Two options when conditions differ. For each function, either adapt the text so the function works for the target audience (option A, instrumental), or explain it in a meta-text so that it becomes meta-phatic, meta-referential and so on (option B, documentary) (pp. 24–26).
  • The brief decides. Nord, unlike Cicero, Schleiermacher, Nida or Venuti, does not hold either option better in general. The choice follows the translator’s reading of the brief: who the audience is and what the translation is for (p. 27). Equivalence is often “not required or not even desired” (p. 26).

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-30 because CLAIM-205 rests what functional accounts are committed to on no reading: Nord’s book (LIT-829) is unread. This article is Nord’s own compact statement of that account, and a separate work.

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