Intertextuality and directionality in the communication discourse of a translation activity

Abstract

This paper reports on a study based on a corpus of written professional discourses. Both e-mails and doumails (a specific sort of e-mail used at the website of douban) between a translator and several editors from a publishing house during a translation activity on book publication are collected as data for the analysis. The purpose of compiling the corpus is to describe professional literacy by means of identifying the different types of intertextuality found as well as the directionality of intertextuality in discourse flows. Intertextuality is signaled, and some frequent-occurred phraseologies are found within the corpus. The study also quantifies the types and the directionality of intertextuality by distinguishing prior, current, and predicting intertextual references. The prevalence of intertextuality could thus be identified. It is expected that this study could shed some light on researches in professional discourses and the training of novice professionals with communication skills. In addition, this study also reveals the power relationship between the translator and editors, and would be helpful to the description of translation activities.