Genre Transformation

It is eight in the morning on a beautiful Monday morning. Like all mornings, Dan starts

his day with a coffee and a bagel. Dan Melzer is your average 20-year-old college student on

summer break. The only thing different about Dan is that he works as a bike mechanic at his

local bike shop during his summers. He has done this for the past three summers and he enjoys

every minute. This is because he has made some of his best friends while working at the bike

shop and because he likes bikes. The bike shop Swales Bikes is the best bike shop in town

because of the people that are working there.

When Dan arrives at the bike shop he is always there thirty minutes before it opens, so

that he can help get the store ready for the day and start working on his projects for the day.

Because of the coronavirus, Swales Bikes is busier than ever so starting work before customers

arrive gives dan and other mechanics time to work on bikes without being interrupted. Dan is

one of six mechanics that work at Swales Bikes, while he likes everyone that works at the bike

shop he enjoys being around the mechanics more than the others. There is nothing wrong with

the other people that work at the bike shop, it’s just that the mechanics are always together and

they speak the same language.

After putting his stuff down and finding a project to start working on it is about 9:40 am

and everyone starts to come in, the salespeople go to the floor and start to bring out bikes and the

mechanics start looking for things to work on. Once everyone is settled it is about 10:00 am and

it is time to start greeting customers. Like most days there is already a line of people waiting so

Dan and the other mechanics bring in all the new bikes and start to work on them, they ask for
each other's opinion on what to do and by 10:30 they have helped all the customers and they get

back to there projects and start chatting.

The head mechanic Nathen askes Dan, “what did you and Dayne ride last night”, Dayne

is one of the other mechanics. Dan says to Nathen, “Um, we rode this new trail called sleigh ride.

It's a flow trail with a couple of technical sections. It was pretty fun and the climb was only five

minutes.”, Dan isn’t a fan of climbing so he tries to find trails with little to no climbing on them.

“That sounds sweet, maybe we will do it after work later this week,” Nathen said.

At this point, Dan was done with his first project and ready to do another. “Nathen, is

there anything I should work on.”

Nathen goes to the computer and says, “ we are down to about thirty projects to do. We

should try to each do about three today. You can do this one, it is a brake bleed and new brake

pads.” The goal was to finish all thirty projects by the end of the week. Nathen handed the work

order for the bike that Dan would work on, and Dan started to look for the bike.

Because Dan wasn’t as experienced as Nathen was he would ask him a lot of questions

when he would get stuck. Nathen has been at Swales bikes for over ten years and has become

one of the best mechanics out there.

It is about lunchtime now so some of the salespeople will take their lunch and talk with

the mechanics about their bikes or ask them questions about what they are doing, or just ask

them about there day. While this distracted Dan and the other mechanics they were fine with it

because this is one of the few times they two groups would talk to each other. The two groups

had formed two communities you might even call the discourse communities. because they each
have goals to try to get to, they have different ways of communicating with each other, and they

have different levels of experience.

After helping about thirty more customers and finishing the projects that Nathen gave to

Dan it was almost time to head home. So that Dan could have time to work on his homework for

his online class that he decided to take during the summer, and still have time to get a good eight

hours of sleep.

Analytical Essay

I chose to translate the article, “Understanding Discourse Communities”​ b​ y Dan Melzer,

this is an academic article that explains discourse communities to college students and college

professors. The original and the translation tell a story the difference is in the language used.

While both tell a story the original goes deeper into the analytics of what a discourse community

is and talks about the relevance in a college setting. That is the difference between non-academic

and academic writing. Many things can make an article academic or not, but having the intended

audience be college students and professors, is one of the main requirements. While most

non-academic articles are meant for a wide audience that doesn’t mean that having a specific

audience makes it academic. The idea that non-academic articles are for the general public

doesn’t mean that there can’t be a specific audience, I believe that it means that the general

public could understand that piece of writing. For this translation, I was trying to make the

transition from an academic text to a non-academic text clear, by showing the difference in the

vocabulary, the intended audience and the organization.

I chose to translate the article into a third-person fictional story because I thought is a

good way to convey the fact that discourse communities are everywhere in our lives. Another
reason I did a third-person story is so I could translate the original and not lose the message that

it tries to show. This story, while fictional, gives a good idea about what working in a bike shop

is like, and for the people that are reading it shows the information that the original article has as

well as information that is interesting to the targeted readers. Both the translation and the original

are centred around a place, for the original it is a guitar shop and for the translation, it is a bike

shop. This was another change that separates the two, but also keeps the general feeling the

same. The goal of the translation is to show that discourse communities are everywhere and a

part of everyone’s life, even if they do not know it. It also shows that everyone belongs to a

discourse community even if they do not know it.

According to the article, “shitty first drafts”, by Anne Lamott, even the most successful

writers don’t make perfect first drafts. In the article, Lamott writes, “Almost all good writing

begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”(Lamott, p.25). For me, the key

part of this quote is, that you have to start, and with this translation project, I did not know how

or where to start. My first step was to look back at the articles to see if I could find something

helpful or to see if I could find something to translate. When I re-read the essay ​An Introduction

to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing b​ y Melanie Gagich, I found five steps on how to

write a multimodal text, I focus on the third and fifth step, “Gather content, media, and

tools”(Gagich, p.74), and, “Begin drafting your text.”(Gagich, p.74). When I started thinking

about writing this did not know how to go about it, so I looked at examples of what other people

were doing for this assignment and realized that most people were writing a story. Once I figured

out what to do I started to draft my translation. The first draft of my translation was rough but at

least I had something to work from.

 My goal with this translation was to keep the general message but to change the content

so I kept some parts of Swales’ definition of discourse communities. I also kept the fact that Dan

Melzer is the main character in both the original and the translation. The main challenge was to

figure out a new story that would give an example of what discourse communities are. To get

started I thought about what discourse communities are in my life and I tried to make stories out

of them. When I realized that the bike shop I work at has multiple discourse communities, I

decided to make the story about it. While the stories might not be that different the changes

made in the organization, language, and intended audience make the translation a non-academic

article and the original an academic article.

If Melzer only had his story about learning to play the guitar then his article would be

non-academic, while it would keep the same message, the main reason it is an academic article is

that it is not just a story. Melzer includes the definition of discourse communities, as well as a

thorough explanation of each part of that definition. He then goes into the importance of

understanding discourse communities for college students. This means that the author is

directing this article and people at the university. The translation is for kids around fifteen that

have an interest in the bike industry and working in a bike shop while also showing the

communities that form within them. The translation while it only talks about two main discourse

communities, it also shows that there are communities that you would think about. For example,

at a bike shop, there is a community of managers, a community of road bikers, a community of

mountain bikers, and the ones stated which are the salespeople and the mechanics. These are just

the communities that are formed within the bike shop, but there are even more that surround it.
 When looking at the original article I realized that Melzer took each part of the definition

and put it into his real-life story, so that is what I did. I did not format it in the same way though,

Melzer put the definition as a heading for a little part of the story that demonstrated it. I tried to

keep them two similar enough so that it is easy to tell what article I was transforming. While I

did put some parts of the definition in the translation I changed the wording so that it is easier for

the target audience to understand. With the actual definition, I tried to put examples into the

writing to show what the parts of the definition look like in a real-life setting. This is what the

original article did too, but it was very specific in what part of the definition was being shown in

the story. That style works well for college students because it is the common style for these

types of articles. For a high school student, this style is boring and would lose their attention.