text-type-skopos-and-the-brief

name	text-type-skopos-and-the-brief
description	Reviews a translation, translation choice, or translation-studies analysis against an explicit brief and the source's predominant text-type function, and against the skopos hierarchy (purpose, then intratextual coherence, then source fidelity); this skill reviews the reasoning behind a translation, it does not produce the finished translation or make the publication decision.
kind	skill
status	ready
provenance	{"principles":["P009","P038","P060","P061","P062","P063","P070","P078","P079","P107","P108","P128","P129","P145","P165"],"claims":["C00132","C00133","C00134","C00135","C00136","C00137","C00138","C00139","C00140","C00142","C00143","C00144","C00145","C00146","C00147","C00148"],"evidence":[],"source_anchors":[],"authored_from_digest":"02c0889da801612125e25c10f6718fd0c2d1911d182be66e8357690fca58976d"}

Text Type, Skopos And The Brief

Purpose

This skill reviews whether a translation is driven by an explicit brief (commission) and by the predominant function of the whole text. It checks the skopos hierarchy — purpose first, then intratextual coherence, then fidelity — while flagging that a fulfilled skopos does not excuse micro-level neglect, and situates the target's function, which may legitimately differ from the source's. It reviews the reasoning and the resulting text; it does not draft the translation itself.

When to use

• A translation lacks an explicit brief specifying function, audience, medium, and conditions for both source and target.
• A text type (informative, expressive, operative) is being mapped to a general method.
• A skopos is being used to license neglect of stylistic or connotative detail.
• Audience and medium require omitting known redundancies or making implicit meaning explicit.
• A verdict on the translation cites only source-fidelity, with no check of the target's own internal coherence or purpose.

Procedure

1. Check that the translation commission — Vermeer's Auftrag — was made an explicit instruction stating both the goal and the conditions for attaining it; this skill owns whether the brief and skopos hierarchy were the right ones and were followed, while whether a quality-evaluation method documented that specification before scoring routes to the sibling translation-quality-and-applied-studies (P009).
2. Verify the translation was driven from the brief and source analysis, flagging a strategy asserted with no comparison of source and target profiles, whose priorities then appear arbitrary rather than derived from a documented brief (P038).
3. Check that the whole text is worked at as the unit and that its predominant function was mapped to a method, flagging a word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence method applied uniformly regardless of whether the function is informative, expressive, or operative (P060).
4. Confirm that most texts are recognized as hybrids carrying several coexisting functions, that the target function may legitimately differ from the source function, and that the method depends on far more than text type (P061).
5. Verify that Vermeer's skopos rules were applied in hierarchical order (P062).
6. Check that the rendering was adjusted for the audience and medium, flagging a target that keeps every source redundancy the audience already knows or leaves implicit a meaning the audience will miss, with no adjustment for medium constraints (P063).
7. Confirm the commissioner's constraints set the macro-level characteristics and overall strategy while the translator decided the micro-level procedures, with translator's notes conditioned on genre and skopos (P070).
8. Check that the review recognizes why mere trans-coding will not produce a serviceable translatum, flagging a target judged by how closely it copies the source's form rather than by its skopos-relative adequacy, where any divergence in content or goals is treated as an automatic defect (P078).
9. Confirm every translation is oriented toward a set of addressees even when that set is indeterminate and fuzzy, flagging a translation that addresses no identifiable reader at all or claims a single, universally correct rendering exists independent of any commission (P079).
10. Check that translation is treated as purpose-driven human interaction that guides cooperation across cultural barriers, flagging a target whose form and genre are copied straight from the source profile instead of being set by what the target culture's expert users find functionally suitable (P107).
11. Confirm a fulfilled skopos is not used to excuse micro-level neglect (P108).
12. Check against Reiss's frame: interlingual translation is bilingual mediated communication aiming at a target text functionally equivalent to the source, with the translator as a secondary sender, so some change of message is inevitable (P128).
13. Verify against Reiss's governing thesis that the text type determines the general method of translating while the text variety demands the target language's structural and stylistic conventions (P129).
14. Check that text types are treated as prototypes on a continuum without rigid divisions, incorporating the relevant non-linguistic disciplines, flagging text types treated as rigid, mutually exclusive boxes or a digital or multimodal genre assessed by print-genre conventions alone (P145).
15. Check that the target text is assessed against Reiss's adequacy criteria, flagging a target scored only on lexical accuracy with no weighting for situation, receiver, sender, or affective implications appropriate to its text type (P165).
16. Rank every finding from these checks by impact — a broken skopos hierarchy or an absent brief outweighs a single mishandled redundancy — and report the highest-impact findings first.

Inputs

• The translation brief (or its absence), the source text type, and the target's intended function.
• The reasoning offered for the decision under review: the orientation, strategy, brief, and any quality claim made.
• The target text itself, where available, for checking audience- and medium-driven adjustments against the source.

Output

Per finding: name the flaw and the principle it violates, apply the correction, state the residual uncertainty and the trade-off it reflects, and end with a concrete next step. Order findings highest-impact first. When the request is an advise or compare rather than a post-hoc critique, apply the same checks forward — in advise mode, a recommendation naming the governing principle(s) and orientation with its residual trade-off; in compare mode, a side-by-side of what each option preserves and costs, ending in a brief-weighted recommendation. This skill reviews a translation, a translation choice, or a translation-studies analysis; it does not produce the finished translation or make the publication decision.

Anti-patterns to flag

• The translator proceeds without any stated goal, deadline, or client conditions, inventing a commission after the fact to justify choices already made (P009).
• The strategy is asserted without any comparison of source and target profiles, so priorities appear arbitrary rather than derived from a documented brief and source analysis (P038).
• A word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence method is applied uniformly regardless of whether the text's predominant function is informative, expressive, or operative (P060).
• A text is forced into a single pure category and judged only against the source's function, ignoring that most texts are hybrids and that the target function may legitimately diverge (P061).
• Source-fidelity is checked before, or in place of, the target's internal coherence and its fulfilment of the purpose, inverting the skopos hierarchy (P062).
• The target keeps every source redundancy the audience already knows, or leaves implicit a meaning the audience will miss, with no adjustment for medium constraints (P063).
• Translator's notes appear, or are withheld, without regard to genre and skopos, or micro-level procedures are dictated by the commissioner rather than left to the translator (P070).
• The target is judged by how closely it copies the source's form rather than by its skopos-relative adequacy, treating any divergence in content or goals as an automatic defect (P078).
• The translation addresses no identifiable reader at all, or claims a single, universally correct rendering exists independent of any commission (P079).
• The target's form and genre are copied straight from the source profile instead of being set by what the target culture's expert users find functionally suitable (P107).
• A verdict of "skopos fulfilled" is used to wave away sloppy stylistic or semantic choices at the sentence or word level (P108).
• Every departure from the source's exact message is treated as an error, with no distinction drawn between unintentional shifts from language mismatch and intentional shifts serving a deliberately different aim or readership (P128).
• The same source passage is rendered by one fixed procedure regardless of whether the text is informative, expressive, or operative, ignoring that the method must track the type (P129).
• Text types are treated as rigid, mutually exclusive boxes, or a digital or multimodal genre is assessed by print-genre conventions alone (P145).
• The target is scored only on lexical accuracy, with no weighting for situation, receiver, sender, or affective implications appropriate to its text type (P165).

References

See ../../references/descriptive-translation-principles-index.md for the full principle catalogue grouped by skill, and ../../references/descriptive-translation-evidence-notes.md for how these principles are grounded and kept faithful to the sources.

Provenance

Derived from P009, P038, P060, P061, P062, P063, P070, P078, P079, P107, P108, P128, P129, P145, P165, grounded in the distillation-only sources (Munday, Introducing Translation Studies; Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader; Toury, The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation). The frontmatter provenance block lists the exact principle and claim ids, which resolve into principles/principles.yaml and analysis/claims.jsonl.