Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is Distinguished Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, and Department of Linguistics, UIBE, and Professor, Department of English Studies, Complutense University. He has degrees in linguistics from Lund University (BA), where he also studied English, Arabic and philosophy, and in linguistics from UCLA (MA, PhD), and has previously held positions at USC/ Information Sciences Institute, Sydney University, Macquarie University, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
With researchers around the world, he is working on multilingual studies — including description of particular languages, translation studies, comparative and typological studies; health communication, aspects of educational linguistics, language description, registerial cartography, language arts, the language of space, and the development of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory.
Matthiessen has authored and co-authored over 15 books and 170 book chapters and journal articles. The most recent books are Matthiessen (2021), Systemic Functional Linguistics, Part I, edited by K. Teruya; Matthiessen, Wang, Ma & Mwinlaaru (2022), Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics. Matthiessen & Teruya (2024), Systemic Functional Linguistics: a complete guide (Routledge), Matthiessen (2023), System in Systemic Functional Linguistics: a system-based theory of language. Wang & Ma (2023), Theorizing and Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics Developments by Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, provides an overview of some domains of his work.
Translation, like love, is a “many-splendoured thing”, and like any aspect of language in context, it is approached and illuminated from different vantage points, including not only those located within different academic disciplines but also ones situated within other institutions where translation plays a major role, centrally the instituion of translation as a profession. Our understanding of translation benefits from this “group picture” of it, as do our activities relating to translation; but there is always the danger of the kind of fragmentation that comes with increasing specialization (cf. Bohm, 1979).
In principle, the one discipline that is focussed on language as its object of scientific study, linguistics, ought to provide an integrated picture of translation to counteract the tendency towards fragmentation. However, in general, it doesn’t — it has failed to live up to this task: in the last 60 years or so, linguistics has tended to diversify into traditions with a fairly narrow focus on certain research questions, and many theories do not actually engage with translation even though it must be central on the agenda of any linguistic theory, as must multilinguality more generally.
In contrast, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) provides a holistic theory of language in context as a semiotic system within an ordered typology of systems operating in different phenomenal realms (semiotic [also conceptualized as cognitive] > social > biological > physical; cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2006; Matthiessen & Teruya, 2024) — one that resonates with holistic theories of complex adaptive systems more generally; cf. Capra & Luisi, 2014), and this theory is designed to be appliable to a wide range of problems that arise in human life and to support the development of comprehensive descriptions of particular languages such as Chinese and English in their contexts of culture. Scholars developing SFL have engaged with translation since its origins in the 1960s, including the pre-SFL work by its main originator, M.A.K. Halliday (e.g. 1956); and in first decades of the 21st century, SFL-informed publications engaging with translation have grown considerably in number, dealing with a growing number of pairs of languages (e.g. Steiner & Yallop, 2001; Hansen-Schirra et al., 2012; Wang & Ma, 2021; Kim et al., 2021; Kunz et al., 2021; Wang et al., in press).
In this talk, I will identify key characteristics of SFL that have been central in the illumination of translation as a many-splendoured phenomenon — or that can be in future as the demands on, and conditions for, translation keep changing, as in the current dramatic change in capability of “machine translation”. They include: the systemic organization of languages as meaning-making resources in context, the spectrum of metafunctional modes of meaning, the continuum between the multilingual meaning potential and instantial acts of translation, the phenomenal orders of translation. Translation is interpreted as the recreation of meaning in context through choice (e.g. Halliday, 2010; Matthiessen, 2014) in its various environments (Matthiessen, 2001).
In short, just as the stage is in the centre in theatre in the round, translation is in the centre in stranslation in the round informed by SFL: thanks to its multidimensional relational “architecture” of language in context, it enables us to move along different dimensions, viewing translation from complementary angles. I will suggest that we can appreciate the richness of the phenomenon of translation and the need for a framework like SFL, touching on special cases of translation, like the translation of “nonsense” and interlinear glossing. And I will show how the study of translation can productively be related to the investigation of other multilingual phenomena (like code mixing and switching; “translanguaging”; cf. Matthiessen et al., 2008) and also metalingual phenomena (like revision, editing, summarization). Using SFL’s holistic account, I will refer to different “turns” in translation studies (e.g. Snell-Hornby, 2006, 2010; Martínez González, 2015), suggesting how they complement one another.
tra@cuhk.edu.hk