ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a synopsis of sociolinguistic theory and its focus. It explains how language functions in human interaction and how meaning is interpreted across social settings and across cultural groups. It also discusses some basic sociolinguistic principles that are relevant to survey translation, in particular, pragmatics, speech act theory, and ethnography of communication. This chapter shows that sociolinguistic analysis is a useful tool to study human communication in many social domains, and it has high relevance to survey translation. The second half of the chapter outlines the characteristics and challenges of survey translation, key issues in the debate of literal translation versus adaptation in survey translation, and research on survey translation methods. It further explicates how sociolinguistic theory can offer insights into the unique challenges of survey translation by examining the adequacy of a translation at three levels: lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic. It argues that in order to achieve the pragmatic level of translation, we need to view language through the lens of sociolinguistics.
