Text-Functions in Translation

Abstract As a text-type in their own right, titles and headings are intended to achieve six functions: distinctive, metatextual, phatic, referential, expressive, and appellative. Taking as a point of departure the hypothesis that translated texts have to "function" in the target situation for which they are produced by serving the purpose(s) they are intended for (which may or may not be the "same" as those of the source text), it is argued that the translator has to reconcile the conditions of functionality prevailing in the target culture with the communicative intentions of the source-title sender (= functionality + loyalty). The discussion of several examples from an extensive corpus of German, French, English, and Spanish titles and their translations shows how this methodological approach can be put into practice, establishing a model for the functional translation of other texts and text-types.