DU Jinbang
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
According to DIT, information units are the building blocks of discourse information. In light of DIT, the functionalist approach and Fillmore’s Case Grammar, the discourse information elements model goes further to analyze each information unit (relatively complete simple statement) in a more in-depth way. According to this model, each information unit comprises a number of elements which may be classified into three categories: entity, process and condition. Such categories can be further classified as is shown in Table 1:
Table 1 Information Elements
| Process |
Entity |
Condition |
| State |
Agent |
Instrument |
| Quality |
Dative |
Location |
| Relation |
Patient |
Source |
| Affect |
Factitive |
Goal |
| Cause |
Attribute |
Commititive |
| Turn |
|
Time |
| Behave |
|
Affected |
| Negation |
|
With |
| |
|
Basis |
| |
|
Manner |
| |
|
Elaboration |
| |
|
Situation |
This model views a statement as process-centered. Without the process, often corresponding to the predicate at the surface level, the statement cannot adequately express meaning. Whereas entity guarantees that who or what will be brought into the topic and condition specifies the environment without which the topic would be too broad to manage.
The model has been applied to legal translation and assessment of legal translation quality (see Du 2010, 2012).
References
Du, Jinbang 2010. Application of discourse information element analysis in advanced legal translation teaching [A]. In Yu Suqing (ed.), Legal Language and Translation [C]. Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
Du, Jinbang 2012. A study on assessment of legal translation quality: from the perspective of discourse information, The Second International Conference on Law, Translation and Culture Hong Kong, June
