Translation and editing as mediated discourse: focus on the recipient

Mediated discourse is attracting attention from linguistics and translation studies as its pervasiveness becomes increasingly apparent. Almost all forms of communication are affected from the intralingual to the interlingual and intersemiotic. Mediation entails intertextual socialisation processes as texts are rewritten to fit the new recipient context. The recipients of the mediated discourse are thus vital links in the communication chain, significantly influencing the way texts are recontextualised. In adapting to their new environment recontextualisations undergo various adjustments (Nida 1964) so as to become accessible to recipient audiences. Translation and editing are typical representations of mediation although the boundaries that set them apart are becoming blurred, giving rise to hybrid forms such as transediting. Following on from Nida’s early intuitions on recipients roles in the field of translation, our current research based on a Corpus of Mediated Discourse (CoMeDi) aims to extend this receiver-oriented view to include other forms of mediation (principally translation, editing and non-native language production ) to assess whether they share the modification strategies encountered in translation. Preliminary results provide evidence of “mediation universals” and the intrinsically recipient-oriented nature of mediated discourse. A key element of the research is that many forms of communication generally regarded as originals are in fact mediated in various ways and are hybrid in nature