FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES AND STRUCTURE OF THE DISCOURSE-COMMUNICATIVE MODEL OF TRANSLATION

Translation studies has, over the past four decades, undergone a decisive shift away from purely linguistic and code-oriented conceptions of translation toward models that treat the translated text as an act of communication embedded within discourse. Whereas earlier structuralist accounts reduced translation to the substitution of source-language units by target-language equivalents, contemporary research increasingly recognises that a text is never a self-contained string of sentences but a coherent unit of “discourse”, shaped by genre conventions, communicative purpose, participant roles, and socio-cultural context. This reconceptualisation gave rise to what is now generally termed the discourse-communicative model of translation (hereafter DCMT), an approach that integrates insights from discourse analysis, pragmatics, and communication theory into a unified framework for describing and evaluating translation as a purposeful, context-bound activity.