Rhetoric, persuasion and ethics (L1, L2 and translations)

The fact that the concept of rhetoric has not only changed the type of speech to which it applies (from oral for the ancient Greeks to current written and multidimensional discourse) but also the connotations that are linked to it (from positive to negative connotations) is due to the fact that it is commonly associated with persuasion. According to Connor, who quotes Mauranen to support this idea, studies of rhetoric can be beneficial to improve efficiency in writing and it constitutes an analytical tool to understand how discourse works (Mauranen 1993: 20 in Connor 1996: 63). Therefore, studying rhetoric or carrying out discourse analyses can help us to uncover ideologies in discourse, either if we do it in our native language or in a second language.

Going back to the idea of persuasion as the negative aspect that is often linked to rhetoric, it is important to notice that language (written or oral forms of language) is just a tool that can be employed for many reasons with different purposes and it is up to to the speaker/writer to use it ethically or unethically . So persuasion should not be equated to manipulation or deception. There are many criteria that could be analyzed in order to determine whether we are facing coercion, manipulation, deception or persuasion in discourse. In my opinion, the purpose intended by the author has a major role. Perelman´s categorization of "audience" relates different argumentation strategies to the intended audience of the discourse (1982 in Connor 1996: 70).  Other factors, such as the type of people and how aware they are of what they are being exposed to is also important when deciding if we are talking about persuasion or other types of discourse. Maybe, the most important aspect regarding to this idea is the effect that the discourse has in the public. 

To sum up, knowing that there are many factors that determine communication (and the use of certain rhetorical figures or expressions) we can carry out studies or analysis to find out how the discourse was constructed and so, we can associate certain linguistic or rhetorical aspects to the properties of the discourse we are analyzing. In contrastive rhetoric, we go one step further, by contrasting how similar or different the strategies employed in different languages are in a particular text or discourse. As we have seen in Connor´s article "Intercultural rhetoric research: beyond the texts" (2004), there is not a single methodology involved in this type of analysis. For instance, among many other possible aspects, in order to find out the purposes of an author we need to know about cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. We also have to determine the frequency (or quantity of occurrence) of a particular linguistic structure, which can be made by carrying out corpus analyses. Connor proposes a table with the different steps that can be followed to carry out contrastive analyses (2004: 299). One of the key elements of this table is the " analytical criteria to the description of the two corpora independently", a concept which is not explained. What sort of aspects can be included in this analytical criteria? Does it only refer to linguistic devices present in the texts/discourses? Once we have made the analysis of a text/discourse separately in the L1 and L2, we have to "draw conclusions about the relation between writing cultures and how textual meanings are expressed on the basis of the comparative results (2004: 299). However, how are we going to analyze cognitive aspects of language used such as topoi (common places or beliefs shared by a community in L1 and L2), scripts and frames when expressing a certain concept in L1 and L2? What about all the ideas related to stereotypes? How can we analytically analyze the representation of a stereotypical concept when it is expressed in a L2? For example, lets imagine that we are reading a text in English about the American style of life written by a student from Brazil. Would that student represent the same ideas (s)he has about Americans in his/her essay written in his/her native language? Can (s)he access the same meaning (s)he intends to convey by making use of the expressions (s)he knows? Does s(he) know what type of connotations are associated to the expressions (s)he is employing in her/his discourse? And if yes, for what purposes does s(he) employ them?
If the student is writing about politics for a history class, for instance, the results will produce a very different impact of what it is being written and it can lead to misunderstandings if not to communication breakdowns.
Another situation in which these aspects should be taken into account is for example that of a person from a country where the political leaders are not called "presidents" because the political regime in his/her country is not the same as in many Western countries. Lets think about a person from Egypt. The ideas associated to the political leaders there are totally different to what we are used to. So when that person is writing a newspaper report in English about the politics in her/his country the type of vocabulary used would convey and imply different mental frames for readers in different contexts. So a person in The US would have a different way of understanding what the writer means than a person in Egypt, even if they both know English, because their mental spaces have been developed in different cultural settings. 

In my opinion, these are just some issues that should be included in contrastive rhetoric analyses. Apart from the ethnographic, textual and pragmatic parts of the research studies there should also be a cognitive one that deals not only with "problem-solving" issues or "the writing process" (Connor 1996: 75) but also with how a text/discourse is deconstructed by the audience when that audience does not share the same cultural background with the author.
Regarding translations tudies, it is not very clear how to link them to intercultural rhetoric studies. Should research in translations be included within the analysis of the production of a discourse in a L2? Could discourse analysis in translation texts be considered a part of contrastive/intercultural rhetoric? Would the analytical criteria described by Connor be suitable for analysing translated texts?