ABSTRACT
The textual variables considered in this chapter are grammatical, occurring at the levels of word morphology (inflection expressing grammatical function), sentence syntax and discourse syntax. Any utterance in any language — other than a basic, isolated interjection — requires the hearer or reader to interpret the words in it both as lexical items conveying meaning and as sentence components fulfilling syntactical functions. A native speaker of a language acquires a partly intuitive, partly explicit knowledge of a hugely complex system of general rules and particular patterns governing how words can be combined in that language to make meaning and generate discourses. Producers of discourses do not necessarily plan all the syntactical features of their texts: they make more or less conscious use of their knowledge of the resources available in their language, constructing relatively simple or complex sentences, linking them together in ways appropriate for different genres, choosing grammatical forms suitable for different registers or language varieties, being more or less careful according to the purpose of the communication and how it is being produced. The translator, however, must be able to make explicit what is built into a ST and to analyse exactly how it works in order to construct a TT that works in a comparable way for TL readers. As with other aspects of the translation process, this is above all a matter of determining priorities, reaching compromises, and finding the best ways of compensating for the inevitable translation loss caused by the systemic differences between languages.
