a theoretical account of translation - without a translation theory

8/4/2019 A Theoretical Account of Translation - Without a Translation Theory

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A theoretical account of translation -without a translation theory

Ernst-August GUTT

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the phenomenon commonly referred to as "translation" can beaccounted for naturally within the relevance theory of communication developed by Sperberand Wilson (1986a): there is no need for a distinct general theory of translation. Most kindsof translation can be analysed as varieties of interpretive use. I distinguish direct fromindirect translation. Direct translation corresponds to the idea that translation should conveythe same meaning as the original. It requires the receptors to familiarise themselves with thecontext envisaged for the original text. The idea that the meaning of the original can becommunicated to any receptor audience, no matter how different their background, is shownto be a misconception based on mistaken assumptions about communication. Indirecttranslation involves looser degrees of resemblance. I show that direct translation is merely aspecial case of interpretive use, whereas indirect translation is the general case. In all casesthe success of the translation depends on how well it meets the basic criterion for all humancommunication, which is consistency with the principle of relevance. Thus the differentvarieties of translation can be accounted for without recourse to typologies of texts,translations, functions or the like.

1 Introduction

The amount of literature on translation is vast - people have written on this subject for abouttwo millennia. However, the bulk of the literature that came to be written over the centuriesdoes not necessarily indicate the depth of understanding that has been reached on this topic.Thus Steiner states that "despite this rich history, and despite the calibre of those who havewritten about the art and theory of translation, the number of original, significant ideas in thesubject remains very meagre" (1975, p. 238). Levy observed that the penetration of subjectmatter was lacking especially on the theoretical side:

"Only a part of the literature on the problem of translation moves on thetheoretical plane. Until today most studies and book publications, especially on


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literary translation, have not gone beyond the limits of empirical deliberations oressayistic aphorisms." (Levy 1969, p. 13; translation my own)

About half-way through this century things began to change. Scholars increasingly began tocall for a well-founded scientific study of translation. At first linguistics seemed to offer theframework needed, but it soon became clear that it would not be adequate on its own. Sotoday there is a strong call for a multidisciplinary investigation: linguists, psycholinguists,sociolinguists, semioticians, anthropologists, teachers and, of course, translators are all calledupon to tackle the problem together.

The approach generally advocated for this multidisciplinary research is essentially aninductive-descriptive one: by examining the phenomena found in translation, one aims todiscover regularities that can be stated and will then form the science of translation.

However, even at this early stage questions have arisen about the value of the likely outcomeof this effort. Firstly, translations seem to be so varied and the number of factors on whichthey depend so large that it is not clear that more than statistical generalisations can be made.Secondly, given the variety of domains that need to be considered, what sort of a science islikely to evolve from this enterprise - will it be anything coherent at all? Thirdly, since theoutcome of such inductive investigations will be crucially determined by its input, how canone avoid the risk of circularity? In other words, how can one avoid the danger that theconcept of translation to be developed will be merely a reflection of what one took it to be inthe first place - that is, something dependent on the investigator's opinion?

Related to this last point is the problem of evaluation and decision-making in translation: it isdifficult to see how an inductive-descriptive approach can deal adequately with the problemof evaluating translation since by nature it describes what is rather than what should be. Yetthe concern for quality control in translation seems to be one of the major driving forcesbehind the search for systematic accounts or theories of translation: it is hoped that the

explicit and systematic treatment of the subject matter will make possible the setting of objective standards.

Most of these attempts at the scientific treatment of translation have followed the structuralistapproach to language, relying heavily on categorization, especially of text and translationtypes. While this in itself proved to be a major challenge, matters became more complex stillwhen extra-linguistic factors like the function and purpose of a text, and even particularinterests of the target audience had to be considered.


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The following example from Neubert (1968), discussed in Wilss (1982), gives an idea of thedifficulties involved in capturing all these factors in a single theory of translation. Theexample concerns a passage from John Braine's novel "Room at the Top" where the colour of the sky is described as "the grey of Guiseley sandstone". Summarizing Neubert's discussionof this example, Wilss points out that the expression "Guiseley sandstone" could be translated

into German either as "Guiseley-Sandstein" or simply as "Sandstein", and he claims that thedecision as to which rendering is the right equivalent will depend on the interest of thereceptors:

"If this interest is exclusively focussed on literary aspects of the original, thetranslator can confine himself to the reproduction of 'Guiseley sandstone' by'Sandstein', ... . If, on the other hand, the translator must reckon with additionalinterests of the reader in area studies, he must react accordingly, because in a case likethis only a translation containing an explicit reference to 'Guiseley sandstone' wouldmeet TE [=translation equivalence] expectations." (Wilss 1982, p. 145)

Wilss concludes from such examples that "TE [= translation equivalence] cannot possibly beintegrated in a general translation theory (...), but must be looked upon as part of specifictranslation theories which are at best text-type-related or, even more restrictedly, single-text-oriented" (1982, p. 135)

It is interesting that Wilss does not discuss the fact that this view entails a reductio adabsurdum as far as theoretical concerns go; after all, one of the main points of theory-construction is that it should allow us to explain complex phenomena in terms of simplerones, that is, one of its main motivations is to make generalisations about phenomena. But if it turns out that each individual phenomenon, that is, each text, or even each instance of itsuse with a particular audience, may require its own theory, then this means that thephenomena in question are not accounted for in terms of generalisations at all, but that theyactually fall outside the scope of theory.

One recent reaction to this development is Snell-Hornby's "integrated approach" totranslation (1988). She feels that the category-based approach is more of a hindrance than ahelp because "In its concrete realization language cannot be reduced to a system of static andclear-cut categories" (p. 31) Therefore in her integrated approach "... the rigid typology of theobjectivist and reductionist tradition will therefore be replaced by the prototypology, adynamic, gestalt-like system of relationships, whereby the various headings represent anidealized, prototypical focus and the grid-system gives way to blurred edges andoverlappings" (p. 31).


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While one sympathizes with Snell-Hornby's criticism and rejection of category- andtypology-based approaches, it is not clear what is gained, in the final analysis, by thechangeover to prototypology. Recognizing the existence of "blurred edges and overlappings"is commendable, but without further explication the translator is left to his own devices ashow to move along the cline between the prototypes.

Furthermore, one wonders what the theoretical or practical value of the prototypesthemselves is. Consider the following statement:

"In this concept the historical dichotomy has been replaced by a fluid spectrum,whereby, for example, prototypically literary devices such as word-play and alliteration canbe accommodated both in 'general' newspaper texts (...) and in the language of advertising,and conversely prototypically technical terms from the language of science or culture-bounditems from the 'general' area of politics or everyday living can be explained and interpreted asliterary devices (...)." (Snell-Hornby 1988, p. 33)

There seems to be little point, apart from descriptive convenience, in labelling word-plays oralliterations as a 'prototypically literary device' when these labels do not predict theirdistribution in texts, but actually cross-cut the prototypology of texts. If anything, such cross-cuts suggest that factors other than prototypology are at work.

Snell-Hornby is right when she calls for "a basic reorientation in thinking", but she does notgo to the core of the problem when she sees this as "a revision of the traditional forms of categorization" (op. cit., p. 26). The problem is not the form of categorization used, butreliance on categorization as such. Categories - whether they are rigid as in traditionaltypologies or 'blurred' as in 'prototypologies' - are helpful for the organisation of data and thedescription of phenomena, but explanation and theoretic penetration require an understandingof the properties in virtue of which the phenomena interact.

As Snell-Hornby herself says, translation is a cross- cultural event - it is part of cross-culturalcommunication, and communication is an event in which people share their world of thoughtwith others. Therefore, the account of translation I propose is embedded in an explanatorytheory of communication that focuses on how people share thoughts with one another.1 Thistheory is the relevance theory of communication developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986a).2

2 The framework


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In the space given, I have to limit myself to a brief sketch of those ideas of relevance theorythat have a bearing on the topic in hand.

The theory offers an empirical, cognition-based account of human communication.3 It viewscommunication as primarily an inferential process: the central task of the communicator is toproduce a stimulus - verbal or otherwise - from which the audience can infer what set of thoughts or assumptions the communicator intended to convey.

Since the range of inferences one can make from any phenomenon is huge and open-ended,there needs to be some constraint that helps the audience to identify those assumptions whichthe communicator intended to communicate.

This constraint is provided by the principle of relevance, which amounts to the following,twofold presumption: the set of assumptions which the communicator intends to convey willbe adequately relevant to the audience, and the stimulus produced is such that it avoidsgratuitous processing effort on the audience's part.

This presumption of optimal relevance is necessarily communicated by every instance of ostensive communication - it is part of our human psychology. Thus whenever acommunicator claims someone's attention indicating that he intends to communicatesomething, it is assumed by both parties that the communicator is not putting the audience towork gratuitously, but that he believes a) that what he intends to communicate is adequatelyrelevant to the audience, and b) that the audience can recover it without unnecessaryprocessing effort. In effect this means that the audience is entitled to assume that the firstinterpretation of the stimulus found to be consistent with the principle of relevance is the oneintended by the communicator.

The notion of relevance itself is defined as a cost-benefit relation: the cost is the amount of mental processing effort required to interpret the stimulus, and the pay-off consists in thecontextual effects derived from it. Hence the less effort the processing of a stimulus requiresand the more contextual effects it has, the more relevant it will be.

Contextual effects result when information conveyed by the stimulus is inferentiallycombined with contextual assumptions, that is, with information already available to theaudience, perhaps from memory or perception. This accounts for the intuition that for


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successful communication it is not enough for the information conveyed to be new; rather itmust lead to some alteration of the knowledge possessed previously.

Thus suppose I told you out of the blue:

(1) There is butter available at the foreign currency store.

While I am quite sure that this information would be completely new to most of my readers, Ithink that they would have problems in making sense of my utterance. Firstly, you would notknow which store I am talking about, and secondly you would not know what to do with thisinformation. Relevance theory accounts for this reaction: for most readers utterance (1) doesnot link up with any other information readily available to them, so no contextual effects areachieved, and the utterance is felt to be irrelevant.4

By contrast, if I told (1) to a colleague in the capital of a certain African country, he wouldfind this information very relevant: butter is not always easy to get there, and therefore (1)would readily link up with information already known to him, yielding a number of contextual effects:

(2) Information already known:

(a) Butter is in short supply.

(b) When something is in short supply, one needs to buy itquickly when it is available.

Combined with the information contained in (2), the information supplied by (1) yieldsassumption (3) as a contextual effect, more specifically, as a contextual implication:5

(3) One needs to buy butter quickly from the foreign currency store.


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It is important to note that not all contextual assumptions are equally accessible to theaudience at all times; for example, as you read this paper, the information contained in thelast sentence or so will be highly accessible to you, whereas information you read at thebeginning of the paper might be much less so. You may be able to recall that information too,but it would require greater effort. This relationship between accessibility of contextual

information and processing cost is important for the process of context selection: under theprinciple of relevance it induces the audience to work with the most highly accessiblecontextual assumptions that will yield adequate contextual effects.

As mentioned above, relevance theory applies to both verbal and non-verbal communicationalike. Verbal stimuli differ from non-verbal ones in that they typically encode semanticrepresentations in virtue of their linguistic properties. However, these semanticrepresentations are usually incomplete - they provide schemas or "blueprints" (Blakemore1987) for propositions which need to be inferentially enriched and developed through the useof contextual information in order to yield mental representations with a fully propositionalform. This process includes such aspects as disambiguation, reference assignment,interpretation of semantically vague expressions like "soon" or "some" and so forth. Again,this process of developing the semantic representation of an utterance into a propositionalform is controlled by the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance.

Thus utterance (1) does not by its semantic properties specify which foreign currency store isbeing talked about; it is the hearer's task to find the intended referent. He will do this bysearching the contextually available information for a referent that is highly accessible in hismind and that will yield an interpretation with adequate contextual effects.6 As soon as hefinds a referent that meets these two criteria he will assume it to be the speaker-intended one.

Returning to our concern with translation, let us start from the hypothesis that all instances of human translation can be accounted for as instances of ostensive-inferential communication.As we consider different kinds of translation, we will be testing the validity of thisassumption.

3 "Incidental" translation

The first kind of translation we want to look at is one that we encounter very frequently in ourdaily lives, for example, when we read the English text on the label of a foreign product, theEnglish instructions for a machine manufactured abroad, or an English tourist brochure in aforeign country. Very often these texts are produced on the basis of an original text in theforeign language, hence they are normally considered translations, and dealt with in writings


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on translation, as, for example, in House (1981), H nig and Ku maul (1984), or Picken(1983).

However, it seems doubtful that we need to refer to a theory of translation to account for suchcases. Suppose, for example, that your company has produced photocopiers for export to anEastern African country, and produces an operating manual in, say, Swahili. Now looking atit first from the customers' point of view, what counts for them is that the Swahili manualtells them clearly all they need to know for operating the photocopier. It is completelyinconsequential to them whether there was an English original of this manual and whether theSwahili manual faithfully represents the information of that original. In fact, they may need tobe given more or different information than the customers in England, perhaps because theconditions under which they use the copier differ from those in England, or because thebackground knowledge they bring to the machine differs from those of the average customerin England and so forth. Thus the customer's criterion for the quality of the manual will behow well it enables them to operate the copier.

Similarly from the producer's point of view: he wants his customers to be satisfied with theproduct, and this again requires that the customers know how to handle that product. So theaim of the producer, too, is that the manual provide all the information which that particulargroup of customers needs to operate the copier appropriately. It is not his primary interest toinform them of what the English manual says. Of course, the producer may find it veryconvenient to use the English original as a starting point for the Swahili manual, but this factis incidental rather than essential for the success of the Swahili manual: he could just as wellappoint a Swahili-speaking technician to produce a Swahili manual for that copier fromscratch, and again the quality of the manual would be judged by how helpful it proved to thecustomers.

Put in general terms, such instances are characterized by the fact that the receptor languagetext is produced and presented to the target audience not because it faithfully represents thecontents of some source language original, but in its own right; the existence of a sourcelanguage text in such situations is incidental rather than necessary for the interlingual

communication act to succeed.

These cases are clearly instances of ostensive-inferential communication: a communicatorwants to communicate certain thoughts to a target audience - the only complication is that thesource language communicator does not master the receptor language. Therefore he needs thehelp of a bilingual person to produce a receptor language stimulus that will communicate hisinformative intention. In other words, the process of stimulus production is shared between(at least) two individuals, but there is only one stimulus that is significant, and that is thereceptor language one.


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Seeing that such cases of interlingual communication the source language stimulus plays anauxiliary rather than a central role, one wonders how appropriate it is to refer to them as'translation' at all.

4 Conveying the original message

If one were to ask around what people think a translation should achieve, the most frequentanswer would probably be that it should communicate the meaning of the original. This hasnot always been so, but since the middle of this century this view has been adoptedincreasingly by translation theorists. Accordingly, the quality of a translation is now often

judged in terms of its comprehensibility and impact on the receptors.

This re-orientation has probably found its fullest development in circles concerned with thetranslation of the Bible, though it is not limited to this enterprise. The first and probably mostinfluential approach along these lines is that of "dynamic equivalence" translation developedby Nida and Taber (Nida 1964; Nida and Taber 1969). These scholars state clearly that forthem the meaning, or "message" of the original takes first priority:

"Translating must aim primarily at 'reproducing the message'. To do anything else isessentially false to one's task as a translator." (Nida and Taber 1969, p. 12)7

This commitment to reproducing the "message" of the original was taken up by others, forexample in the "idiomatic approach" of Beekman and Callow (1974) which has beenextended by Larson (1984) to cover the translation of non- biblical literature as well.

What do these approaches mean by the "meaning" or "message" of the original? There are noexplicit definitions given, but it is clear from what is said that the notions held are verycomprehensive; they include both the "explicit" and "implicit" information content of theoriginal, and extend to connotations and other emotional aspects of meaning as well.8 Forreasons of space, I shall concentrate here on the idea that a translation should convey thesame information as the original.

According to relevance theory, the assumptions the communicator intends to communicatecan be conveyed in two different ways: as explicatures or as implicatures. Explicatures are a


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subset of assumptions that are analytically implied by a text or utterance; more specifically,explicatures are those analytic implications which the communicator intended tocommunicate.9 Implicatures are a subset of the contextual assumptions and contextualimplications of an utterance or text - again that subset which the communicator intended toconvey. Both explicatures and implicatures are identified by the audience on the basis of

consistency with the principle of relevance.

With this framework in mind, the demand to preserve the information content of the originalamounts to the demand that the explicatures and implicatures of the translation should be thesame as the explicatures and implicatures of the original.

Straightforward as this demand may sound, there is a rather serious problem here, and thislies in the logical interdependence between explicatures, implicatures, and the potentialcontext - or, more technically, the cognitive environment - in which a text or utterance isprocessed. This is, of course, one of the most basic characteristics of inferentialcommunication. For example, the statement "There is a police car over there" could be usedto communicate rather different ideas on different occasions: in a context where people arelooking for help with a broken-down car it may be used to imply, "Let's go there and ask forhelp"; by contrast, in a context of someone driving a car with only one headlight working itmight mean "Let's turn off this road quickly before they see us".

In both cases, the propositional form of the utterance and its explicatures may be the same,indicating that there is a police car at a certain distance in the environment; the implicatures,however, can be very different indeed, depending on what contextual assumptions areaccessible in the mutual cognitive environment of speaker and hearer.

One consequence of this is that whenever a given stimulus is interpreted in a potential contextthat differs in information content from the one envisaged by the original communicator,misunderstandings are likely to arise. Let us use the term secondary communication situation

for such instances. Since most translation is done in secondary communication situations, it isnot surprising that it has run into difficulties along these very lines.

For example, the Gospel of Mark reports an incident where four men lowered a paralyzedman through an opening in the roof in order to get him to Jesus; in one language it was foundthat a translation of this passage implied a miracle: "Since no indication was given of howfour men, carrying a paralyzed friend, could get onto a roof (and the language helper tended,naturally enough, to think in terms of his own familiar steep thatched roof), the languagehelper assumed a miracle, ..." (Beekman and Callow op. cit., p. 47) Many such problems have

been reported.


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Unfortunately, the approaches advocating "same-meaning- translation" have failed tounderstand the inferential nature of this problem; mistaking it for a language problem ratherthan one of mismatch in contextual knowledge, they have proposed that the principle of

keeping the meaning constant obliges the translator to express himself in such a way thatmisunderstandings will not arise. In practice this has meant one of two things: either thetranslator can "explicate" the implicit information needed to arrive at the correctinterpretation of the text; thus in the example given it is suggested that he may have to addthe information that the men climbed up stairs that led to the roof. That is, he would expressin the translation a contextual assumption of the original. Or he can, in certain cases at least,change the meaning expressed in the text. This latter practice is subject to some otherconstraints and is mostly suggested for the rendering of non-literal uses of speech, such asmetaphors or irony.

As it has turned out, these solutions have succeeded only in part: it has not always beenpossible to prevent misinterpretation by either explication or semantic changes in the text. Inthe light of relevance theory, this is not surprising because the demand that a translationshould convey the same interpretation as the original in secondary communication situationsis at variance with one of the most basic requirements of successful communication; this isthe requirement that to be communicable an interpretation has to be consistent with theprinciple of relevance. Since consistency with the principle of relevance is always context-dependent, what this means is that it is not necessarily possible to communicate a given set of assumptions to any audience, regardless of what their context might be.10 Communication isnot just a matter of finding the right stimulus for what one wants to say - it crucially involvesdetermining what one can communicate to a particular audience, given their particularbackground knowledge.

We see, then, that the idea that the basic characteristic of translations is that they convey themeaning of the original to the target audience is too simplistic. It has already been variouslyquestioned in the literature (cf. e.g. Reiss and Vermeer 1984, Frawley 1984), but relevancetheory helps us to see why it cannot be upheld as a general condition: it does not meet therequirements for successful communication in secondary communication situations.

The point we have reached in our discussion so far, then, is the following: it seems essentialthat a translation represents an original text in another language, but the demand that itcommunicate the meaning of that original to the target audience runs into problems insecondary communication situations. Does relevance theory provide some more appropriateway of characterizing what translation is about?


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A Theoretical Account of Translation -Without a Translation TheoryAuthor: Gutt, Ernst-August

Source: Target , Volume 2, Number 2, 1990 , pp. 135-164(30)

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

5 Translation as interpretive use

The obvious place to look for an answer to this question within relevance theory is the notionof interpretive use. As Sperber and Wilson (1986a) have shown, there are two fundamentallydistinct ways in which utterances, and representations more generally, can be used:11 theycan be used descriptively, that is, as true descriptions of some state of affairs, and they can beused interpretively, and this means they are used in virtue of their resemblance with someother representation.12

As an example, take a book review. Reviewers often start out with summarizing the essentialideas of the book, as the original author presented them, and in many cases these ideas aregiven in the form of simple affirmative statements rather than being embedded every time ina matrix clause like: "X thinks that ..., X writes that ..., X claims that ..." etc.. This is doneeven where the reviewer actually disagrees with these claims, as his comments in theevaluative section may show.

In terms of relevance theory, the presentation of the ideas of the book author is an instance of interpretive use: the statements that summarize those ideas are presented because theyinterpretively resemble the statements of the original author, that is, because they shareexplicatures and/or implicatures of the original work.

This contrasts with descriptive use, where the statements are presented because thecommunicator believes them to be true of some state of affairs. Take, for example, ageography teacher giving his class a lesson on China. Though the information he passes on tohis class will have come out of books he has read, he is not presenting it to the class as'something the books say', but as facts that he himself believes to be true. Again, he will notintroduce each statement by an explicit claim like, "It is true that ...".
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Since the distinction between descriptive and interpretive use need not be markedlinguistically, one of the tasks of an audience is to determine whether the utterances made arepresented interpretively or descriptively.

The potential importance of this distinction can be seen from an incident that took placerecently in West Germany. There Jenninger, then president of the West German parliament,delivered a speech on the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. In this speech he outlined some of the Nazi thinking, without, however, alwaysmarking these statements as quotations. This invited the misunderstanding that he was, infact, voicing his own opinion - in other words, that these statements were instances of descriptive use, expressing what he himself believed to be true. Not surprisingly, his speechcaused considerable uproar, and in the end Jenninger had to resign from his presidency,though not only for this reason.

Thus the distinction between interpretive and descriptive use is an important one. Direct andindirect speech quotations, irony, and many other uses of language all rely on interpretiveresemblance: the utterances in question are always presented in virtue of the fact that theyinterpretively resemble another representation, be it a text or thought. Since translations arealso texts presented in virtue of their resemblance with an original, it seems they fall naturallyunder the category of interpretive use.

From a purely theoretical point of view, the ideal solution for translation theory would be thenull hypothesis - that is, that translation simply is interpretive use, the only difference fromother instances of interpretive use following from the fact that the original and its reporthappen to be in two different languages.

Now one important point about interpretive resemblance is that it is not an absolute, but acomparative notion: that is, utterances can interpretively resemble one another to varyingdegrees, and this will depend on the number of implicatures and/or explicatures they share.

Suppose I had been stopped by a stranger in the street and had talked with him briefly whilemy friend walked on slowly. After a brief conversation, I would catch up with my friend, andhe might ask me what it was all about. Now if it was a reasonably short conversation, I mightgive my friend a verbatim report. My report would be an instance of interpretive use thatinvolved a very high degree of resemblance, where the report would share virtually allimplicatures and explicatures with the original.


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On the other hand, I might answer my friend with one very brief statement like, "Oh, hewanted some money." Now as long as this statement shared at least one explicature orimplicature with the original, it would interpretively resemble it. It could, for example, be thatthe stranger had not actually said anything like, "I want money from you." Perhaps he haddescribed in very vivid terms his current financial problems, only implicating that I should

help him with some money. In this case my summary statement would still resemble theoriginal in that it shared one of its implicatures.

In other words, interpretive use is a very flexible notion, covering, for example, the verbatimreport of a conference session just as much as a ten-line summary of it in a newspaper.

From one point of view, this flexibility seems desirable for a theory of translation - after all,in the course of time the term "translation" has been applied to virtually any kind of speechreporting across languages, including summaries.

However, the fact that it does cover such a wide range of texts may be seen as a disadvantage,in that it would not allow us to account for the common intuition that somehow a"translation" is something different than a "paraphrase" or an "abridgment". It is, of course,possible that this intuition will turn out to be elusive, but it seems worth examining.

The question, then, is: considering that the idea of translation as "interlingual interpretiveuse" may seem too wide for this purpose - can we narrow down the notion of interpretiveresemblance in a way that will make translation clearly distinct from freer forms of interlingual communication?

From a theoretical point of view, the problem is that interpretive use as such seems too lax inthe kind or degree of resemblance it demands with the original: the sharing of but one

implicature or explicature would be sufficient for a receptor language text to interpretivelyresemble the original.

What one would like to demand is the sharing of all explicatures and implicatures, but, as wesaw above, this is not possible in secondary communication situations, the problem being thatutterance interpretation is context- dependent. Is there any other way in which translationcould be defined in a more definite way?


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6. Translating communicative clues

It will be recalled from section 2 that not the whole meaning of an utterance is context-

dependent; we said that in the interpretation process contextual information is used to enrichand develop a semantic representation that is determined by the linguistic properties of theutterance. Would it not, therefore, be possible to set up a theory of translation aimed atreproducing the linguistically determined, semantic properties of the original utterance ortext?

Something very close to this has, in fact, been proposed, for example, by Kade (1968) of the"Leipzig School" of translation, and I myself proposed a solution along these lines in Gutt(1987, 1988). However, the problem is that such a definition does not capture all that onewould need to take care of in translation; one reason for this is that not all expressions of natural language have a semantic representation in the linguistically specified sense; forexample, proper names, greetings like hello, discourse connectives like so or therefore (cf.Blakemore 1987), and onomatopoeia would not be covered.

The same would be true of a number of stylistic features, such as foregrounding andbackgrounding, the connotative "meaning" of words like "daddy" as compared to "father", oreven the distinction between assertions and yes-no questions: none of these aspects would becovered by such a definition, and yet they would normally be considered important aspects of translation.

The problem is that these other aspects make themselves felt in the contextual implications of the translation - but as we have seen, the involvement of contextual information creates aproblem in all secondary communication situations.

However, is it not possible to widen the theoretical base of such a translation theory toinclude these additional features? Could not, for example, direct quotation serve as a model

for a constrained translation theory? As Sperber and Wilson (1986a) have pointed out, indirect quotations one produces another token of the original sentence (p. 227f). Is it not, insome sense, possible to produce in the target language another token of the source languagesentence, that is, to produce a target language sentence that has all the intrinsic properties of the original sentence?

It does not take too much to see that such a demand cannot be upheld generally. For example,English has contrastive stress, but other languages, like Amharic, do not. Therefore, theAmharic translation of an English sentence cannot share with it the property of contrastive

stress. Thus it is immediately clear that this notion of sharing all the intrinsic properties of the


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original will not do for a narrow definition of translation - the two stimuli will not be thesame precisely because they belong to two different languages.

Yet if what we said just now is right, then the importance of preserving the properties of theoriginal does not lie in their intrinsic value, but in the influence they have on theinterpretation of the stimulus. Thus although English and Amharic do not share the propertyof having contrastive stress, the clue which contrastive stress provides for interpreting theEnglish utterance, that is, that the stressed constituent is foregrounded, can also be providedin Amharic by the syntactic means of clefting. In fact, it seems that one of the remarkablethings about languages is that while they do differ in their concrete properties, they resembleeach other with regard to the clues they are able to provide for the interpretation of anutterance. Let us refer to such clues as communicative clues.

These considerations open up the possibility of defining translation in terms of thecommunicative clues shared between the original and the receptor language text; the moststringent condition possible would be that a translation must provide the same communicativeclues as the original. In view of its relatedness to direct speech quotation, let us refer to thiskind of translation as direct translation.

The virtue of direct translation, like that of direct quotation, would be that it provides for thetarget audience all the communicative clues needed to arrive at the intended interpretation of the original.

An important question is, of course, what sort of things the notion 'communicative clue' cancover. Gutt (1989) surveys a number of aspects. To take just one example, let us have a look at the opening paragraph of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities.

(4) "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, itwas the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was thespring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we hadnothing before us, we were all going to heaven, we were all going direct the otherway ..."

On this passage Chukovskii comments: "There is an almost poetic cadence in this excerpt.The sound symmetry conveys its ironic tone extremely well" (1984, p. 144). By contrast, hefeels that a translation into Russian along the following lines misses these effects:


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(5) "It was the best and worst of times, it was the age of wisdom and foolishness, theepoch of unbelief and incredulity, the time of enlightenment and ignorance, thespring of hope and the winter of despair."13

Chukovskii feels that the problem is that "... [the translators] did not catch the author'sintonations and thus robbed his words of the dynamism stemming from the rhythm" (op. cit.,p. 144). Chukovskii apparently attributes the special effect achieved by the original to suchphonological properties as "sound symmetry" and "rhythm".

While it seems unlikely that the "ironic tone" and the "dynamism" here are phonologicallyconditioned, we can give an explicit account of these effects if we pay attention to thesyntactic structures involved, the main difference here being that the translation combinesinto single, coordinated sentences what were independent pairs of sentences in the original.One of the effects of using such a string of independent sentences is that each can beinterpreted as a separate statement, "echoing" perhaps the opinion of a particular group of people.

In fact, such an echoic interpretation seems to have been intended here for two reasons;firstly, it resolves the apparent contradictions between Dickens' statements; secondly, asSperber and Wilson (1986a) have shown, the thrust of echoic utterances is not only to reportwhat someone thought or said but typically to express an attitude towards it. Here both theexaggerated form of the statements and the fact that each is followed by its exact oppositesuggest that Dickens' considered these evaluations ridiculous - hence the note of ironyperceived by Chukovskii.

If this is correct, then we can understand why the translation cited does not get the ironyacross: the coordinated form gives the impression that each pair of evaluations constitutes a

single, paradoxical statement, and hence fails to provide an important clue to the intendedironical interpretation.

The survey in Gutt (1989, forthcoming) deals with clues arising from a wide range of properties: semantic representations, syntactic properties, phonetic properties, discourseconnectives, formulaic expressions, stylistic properties of words, onomatopoeia and phoneticproperties that give rise to poetic effects. The overall result of the survey seems to be thatwithin the framework of relevance theory, the notion of direct translation, defined in terms of shared communicative clues, is helpful and allows explicit treatment of many problems of

translation, including the more subtle ones, like poetic effects, that have often been claimedto be beyond the scope of objective analysis.


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7 Translation, faithfulness and successful communication

Thus it seems that we have arrived at two possible ways of defining translation: on the onehand there is the comparatively narrow, stimulus-oriented notion of direct translation; on theother there is the much wider interpretive-use notion, which we might want to refer to asindirect translation, in contrast to direct translation.

This state of affairs might be considered acceptable from a practical point of view, but fromthe theoretical point of view at least two important problems remain: firstly, the notion of "communicative clue", though useful, lacks an explicit definition, and secondly it remainsunclear why there should be two such ways of defining translation, rather than three, four ortwenty five.

To answer these questions, let us first have another brief look at direct and indirect speechquotations. This time we shall ask what the conditions are under which they can lead tosuccessful communication.

Beginning with indirect quotation, as an instance of interpretive use, any indirect speechquotation creates a presumption of faithfulness; as Sperber and Wilson (1986a) have shown,the speech reporter creates a presumption that the interpretation he intends to conveyresembles the interpretation of the original closely enough in relevant respects. Thispresumption of faithfulness is a derived notion. It follows from the nature of interpretive useon the one hand and the principle of relevance on the other; as an instance of interpretive use,an indirect quotation is used in virtue of its interpretive resemblance with the original; by theprinciple of relevance it creates a presumption that the interpretation offered will be

adequately relevant under optimal processing. Thus we see that relevance theory comes witha ready-made notion of faithfulness, that exists independently of translation.

Hence when a communicator engages in indirect quotation, he will tend to communicatethose thoughts of the original interpretation that he believes to be adequately relevant, and hewill express himself in such a way that the audience will be able to recover those thoughts inconsistency with the principle of relevance. All the audience needs to do is to go ahead withprocessing: it can expect that by using the contextual assumptions to hand, the firstinterpretation consistent with the principle of relevance will be the one intended by thespeech reporter.14


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With direct speech quotation matters seem rather different: the audience cannot simply usethe most accessible contextual assumptions to arrive at an authentic interpretation; rather, inorder to recover the intended interpretation of the original, it will have to use the contextual

assumptions envisaged by the original communicator. This point is not only common sense,but also well-recognized in literary circles; one of the preconditions of authentic literaryinterpretation is a reconstruction of the historical, cultural and sociological backgroundagainst which that piece of literature was created.

Correspondingly, one would expect this same principle to be applied to translated works,especially those that aim to follow the original very closely. Strangely, in translation circlesthe importance of this requirement has not really been understood. Translated works areregularly criticized for failing to convey implicatures that really depend on the availability of the original context.

If the same requirements were made of direct quotations, then someone wanting to quotefrom Shakespeare should word the quotation in such a way that the audience could interpret itcorrectly, no matter how different their background might be from that of the originalaudience.

I want to suggest that this somewhat absurd situation has arisen from an inadequateunderstanding of the nature of language and communication; more specifically, theseassumptions seem to be rooted in the code-model view of language and communication; inthat view successful communication of the original message would depend on the proper useof the code (except for "noise" in the channel), and so, if the translation led tomisunderstandings, the most likely cause would be a coding mistake on the translator's part.

However, even if the stimulus used is a coded one, in human communication it does not

convey an interpretation except by inferential combination with a context. In ostensivecommunication, there is a causal interrelation between stimulus, context and interpretation,established by the principle of relevance, and I believe that the failure to see thisinterdependence has been one of the main reasons for the stagnation in the translation debate,if not its main cause.

In fact, a clear recognition of this causal relation opens the way to a coherent, explicit accountof translation, and this account will integrate the notion of direct translation into theframework of interpretive use.


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Let us approach this solution via the following new definition of direct translation:

(6) Direct translation

A receptor language utterance is a direct translation of a source language utteranceif and only if it purports to interpretively resemble the original completely.

In order to see how this definition relates to our earlier notion of direct translation, let us takea closer look at what it entails.

First of all, it defines translation independently of the potential context of the receptors - infact, it defines it with regard to the context envisaged by the original author. This followsfrom the fact that the intended interpretation of a given text cannot be arbitrarilycommunicated to any audience regardless of their cognitive environment, but requires thatthe target audience process it with regard to the originally envisaged context. This means thatthe presumption of complete interpretive resemblance can be taken to hold only with regardto the original context, and we just saw that this is no extraordinary requirement, though atvariance with a widely accepted view in the field of translation.

This first entailment has two very important effects. From the receptor audience's point of view it means that they can expect to derive an authentic interpretation of the translation onlywith regard to the original context; in other words, if they want to find out the originalinterpretation, the onus is on them to familiarize themselves with the cognitive environmentof the original. Thus it is possible in principle to communicate the originally intendedinterpretation by translation, as the approaches discussed in section 4 had thought, but itrequires that the translation is processed with regard to the originally envisaged context. Inpractical terms this means that generally direct translations may need to be interpreted in avery different way from indirect translations, just as direct quotations may need to beinterpreted differently from indirect quotations.15

Correspondingly, from the translator's point of view it means that he need not adapt thetranslated text to avoid misunderstandings likely to arise from contextual differences, becausehe can work on the assumption that the translation will be interpreted with regard to theoriginal context. In fact, he should not make such adaptations because if processed in theoriginal context, such adaptations would lead to an interpretation different from that of theoriginal. Thus, the presumption of complete interpretive resemblance rules out the explicationof implicit information, summarizing and other changes in explicit content.


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However, direct translation constrains not only the explicit content - it also determines theother properties of the translated text; again this follows from the causal interdependence of stimulus, context and interpretation: in order to achieve complete interpretive resemblancethe translated text will have to convey not only the same explicatures as the original but alsoits implicatures, and so it will have all the properties needed to convey these implicatures as

well.

And here we have the link-up with our earlier definition of direct translation: what we tried tocapture intuitively with the notion of "communicative clue" is just this causal aspect of thestimulus, that is, its potential to convey the intended interpretation of the original in theoriginal cognitive environment. Thus we wanted the "communicative clues" to take care of all those properties of the original that affected its interpretation without, however,demanding identity in those properties, and we also wanted them to be independent of thereceptor language context. Our new definition of direct translation captures all of thesecharacteristics, and it does so without reliance on the notion of "communicative clue". Thismeans that the notion of "communicative clue" has no theoretical status, though it may wellprove helpful to the translator as an auxiliary concept for his practical work. Thus he maywant to evaluate his translation by a comparison of communicative clues.

Our new definition allows us also to bring out a very important difference between directquotation and direct translation that we have not commented on yet. Direct quotations can, inprinciple at least, be produced without a full understanding of the originally intendedinterpretation - simply by producing another token of the same sentence type. Thus a childcan report an utterance verbatim without a full grasp of what it was intended to convey.

In direct translation this is not possible - the translator cannot produce a target language textthat interpretively resembles the original completely without having first recovered the fullinterpretation of that original himself. This is true even of the communicative-clue-basedaccount of direct translation. The translator cannot determine whether a given property of theoriginal is a "communicative clue" without knowing what, if any, effect it was intended tohave on the original interpretation; this, in turn, means that he has to first find out what the

originally intended interpretation was. To return to Chukovskii's translation example: itseems that the translator had missed the echoic nature of the intended interpretation, thereforehe failed to recognize the communicative clue provided by the syntactic structure of theoriginal, and so he bungled the translation.

Thus we see that our relevance theory account explains the common demand in translationthat translation presupposes a good grasp of the intended interpretation of the original. It isnot difficult to see that this demand applies also to indirect translation - as we said above,indirect translation is based on the notion of interpretive resemblance, hence also presupposes

a grasp of the originally intended interpretation.


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And now we can see that indirect and direct translation are not as different as they looked atfirst: they both turn out to be instances of interpretive use; in other words, the notion of interpretive use provides a unified account for both direct and indirect translation. The

essential difference between them is that direct translation is committed to completeinterpretive resemblance, whereas indirect translation presumes only adequate resemblance inrelevant respects.

It would seem to me that the recognition that translation is dependent on interpretiveresemblance has far-reaching consequences for people involved in machine translation whowork largely on the basis of transcoding. If relevance theory is right, then the progress towardfully adequate translation will require programs that can derive and compare interpretationsof texts, which presupposes, among other things, that they can handle considerations of relevance.

As to the question why there should be just these two explicit notions of translation, theanswer would seem to follow straightforwardly from the framework of relevance theory: asSperber and Wilson (1986a) have pointed out, interpretive resemblance covers the full rangefrom no resemblance at all to complete resemblance; however, while there is no principledcut off point at the lower end, the upper limit is clearly definable in principle: that is, ascomplete resemblance. Hence it is not surprising that there should be two distinct notions of translation, corresponding to the general notion of interpretive resemblance and its limitingcase respectively.

One problem that we raised above, but have not really answered concerns the apparentvagueness of the notion of indirect translation: how can one work with a notion of translationthat comprises anything from a summary statement to an expanded presentation of theoriginal interpretation? Should one not break up this continuum by setting up appropriatesubtypes?

To this question two answers can be given; firstly, while one can no doubt try to distinguishdifferent types of indirect translation, such a typology would always be arbitrary, becausethere is no non-arbitrary way of breaking up a continuum.

Secondly, while such a typology may be interesting from a descriptive point of view, it isunnecessary for ensuring communicative success by indirect translation. Indirect translation,like any other instance of interpretive use, comes with a presumption of faithfulness: the

translator presents his translation on the presumption that its interpretation adequatelyresembles the original in respects relevant to the target audience. The communication act


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succeeds where the translation lives up to this presumption, and it turns out to be inadequatewhere it falls short of the presumption.

What the translator has to do in order to communicate successfully, is to arrive at theintended interpretation of the original, and then determine in what respects his translationshould interpretively resemble the original in order to be consistent with the principle of relevance for his target audience with its particular cognitive environment. Nothing else isneeded.

Thus our relevance-theoretic account provides a principled answer to problems like the"Guiseley sandstone" example we discussed in the introduction above: the answer whether ornot the translator will include the geographical reference or not is determined byconsiderations of relevance with regard to the particular context which the audience brings tothe translated text.

In fact, it seems that the various rules, principles, and guidelines that have been proposed fortranslations of different sorts are all applications of the principle of relevance. Consider e.g.the following overview given by Newmark:

"A technical translator has no right to create neologisms..., whilst an advertiser orpropaganda writer can use any linguistic resources he requires. Conventionalmetaphors and sayings ... should always be conventionally translated (...) but unusualmetaphors and comparisons should be reduced to their sense if the text has a mainlyinformative function.... The appropriate equivalents for keywords... should bescrupulously repeated throughout a text in a philosophical text. ... In a non-literarytext, there is a case for transcribing as well as translating any key-word of linguisticsignificance, ..." (1988, p. 15)

It is not difficult to see that each of these rules is an application of the principle of relevance,spelling out what aspects of the original the translator should preserve for a particularaudience in order that his translation adequately resemble the original in respects relevant tothem. Perhaps this is one of the most important features of the solution proposed here: thenotion of translation simply as "interlingual interpretive use" makes clear predictions aboutwhat translation would be appropriate in any given situation, without reliance on typologicalprops.16


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8 On the limits of direct translation

Now from a theoretical point of view it may seem fine to define direct translation in absolute

terms - but what about the "messy" reality of natural languages? Can we assume that directtranslation is generally achievable, that is, that it can be achieved for just any text or utterancebetween any pair of languages? If not, of what use is this notion?

This question brings us to the issue of translatability - which in turn would lead on to thequestion of effability; we cannot go into this here because it would seem to require adissertation of its own. Personally I believe that Sperber and Wilson (1986a, pp. 191f) areright in arguing that effability in the strong sense does not exist, and I think there are goodreasons to assume that translatability does not generally exist either, at least not in the strongsense entailed by direct translation.

However, it would seem to me that little depends on the answer to these questions as far asour account is concerned, because our definition relies on a presumption - not a guarantee of success. As Sperber and Wilson (1986a) have pointed out, "the principle of relevance doesnot say that communicators necessarily produce optimally relevant stimuli" (p. 158) - in otherwords, it does not guarantee the success of an act of communication; however, it does laydown the conditions for successful communication.

By the same token, the presumption of complete resemblance in direct translation does notguarantee its success - but lays down the conditions for its success. Put in concrete terms, itspecifies that a direct translation will be successful if and only if it conveys the interpretationof the original when interpreted with regard to the original context. To the degree that it doesnot, it will have fallen short of its presumption, and risk misinterpretation.

In this way, our definition of direct translation provides the frame of reference for its ownevaluation, and at the same time it spells out clearly the risks involved in direct translation:the presumption of complete interpretive resemblance entitles the receptors to maximalassumptions about resemblance, hence they will be likely to draw inferences from all sorts of stylistic and other details of the translated text. At the same time, language differences maymake it impossible to achieve complete interpretive resemblance - and hence our accountpredicts that in such instances some of the inferences of the receptors will be mistaken, andthat without knowledge of the source language the receptors will not be able to spot suchmisinterpretation, unless the translator alerts the receptors to such problems.


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This prediction seems to capture exactly what happens in practice: to the extent that linguisticdifferences between receptor language and source language make complete interpretiveresemblance impossible, the interpretations of translations will always differ from the originalinterpretation, even if the receptors have taken the greatest care to familiarize themselveswith the historical, cultural, etc. context of the original, and hence the receptors generally

need to remember that a translation is not an original, even in direct translation.17

It should be noted that within the framework of ostensive- inferential communication, theframe of reference extends also to the manner of expression, presuming that the stimulus usedis the most economical one to get the intended interpretation, that is, that of the original,across. This would account for certain intuitions about "unnaturalness" or "literalism"; forexample, the use of unusual or even ungrammatical syntactic structures tends to make thereceptor language stimulus more costly to process; if these complications were notoutweighed by an increase in relevance with regard to the intended interpretation, they wouldmake the stimulus less than optimally relevant.

Similarly, where the translator cannot preserve all the explicatures and implicatures but has toselect, consistency with the principle of relevance would require that he give priority to arendering that will achieve an optimum of relevance. Thus even in situations where fullsuccess is not possible due to language differences, our account makes predictions about theoptimal translation.

In fact, there is no a priori reason why a translator should follow, for example, the directtranslation approach consistently throughout a text. Thus he may aim for completeresemblance in some parts of the text, but be less ambitious in others. What he needs toconsider all the time, though, is that, whatever he does, it will have affect the success orfailure of his translation - this follows from the causal interdependence of cognitiveenvironment, stimulus and interpretation.

This means that the account of translation provided here is not normative - it does not tell thetranslator what to do. Neither is it descriptive - it is not interested in how different kinds of translation can be characterized. Rather it is meant to be explanatory: it aims at explaininghow people can communicate via translation, and what the conditions for communicativesuccess are. A better understanding of these conditions will help the translator to be moresuccessful in his task; it will help him to anticipate potential misunderstandings, and to takemeasures to counteract them effectively.

In Gutt (1989, forthcoming) a number of such measures are discussed. Suffice it here to

mention just one obvious means the translator can use to work for communicative success;this is to inform his audience clearly of what he is trying to achieve. It seems that much of the


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criticism leveled against translations stumbles on this very point: the intentions of thetranslator do not meet the expectations of the target audience, and so miscommunicationresults. Thus rather than relying on the label "translation" somewhere in the front of the book - a label that has no generally agreed content - the translator can increase the prospects forcommunicating successfully if he takes care to explain to his audience what he is trying to

achieve.

9 Conclusion

In conclusion, we see that relevance theory enables us to provide what translation theoristshave been looking for - an explicit framework for accounting for the phenomena commonlysubsumed under the term 'translation'. We saw that it covers 'incidental' translation, that isinstances of translation where the existence of a source language original is not essential tothe communication process. The other instances are covered by relevance theory as twoclearly distinct instantiations of interpretive use: indirect translation is simply interpretive usebetween stimuli from two languages; direct translation, on the other hand, is the special caseof interpretive use that creates a presumption of complete interpretive resemblance betweenstimuli from two languages. Placed in a historical perspective, these two notions couldperhaps be seen as the spelling out of the century-old intuition that there is a dichotomybetween "literal" and "free" translation.

10 Notes

1 This article is based on my doctoral dissertation (Gutt 1989),which is to be published as Gutt (forthcoming).

2 Sperber and Wilson (1986a) contains the fullest presentation of relevance theory as a whole; specific issues have been dealt with in Sperber andWilson (1986b), Wilson and Sperber (1988a) and (1988b). For a brief introduction,peer comments and a reply by the authors see Sperber and Wilson (1987).

3 More precisely, relevance theory is concerned with ostensivecommunication, where ostensive behaviour is defined as "behaviour which makesmanifest an intention to make something manifest" (Sperber and Wilson 1986a, p. 49)


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4 Of course, (1) is not actually irrelevant - the subsequentexplanation provides a context in which it does achieve contextual effects as anexample. This illustrates another important characteristic of human communication:

the relevance of an utterance, hence its intended interpretation, need not beimmediately obvious upon first encounter, but may be recovered with the help of subsequent information.

5 Contextual effects can be achieved in three different ways: theinferential combination of the information expressed in the utterance and of somepreviously known information can yield an implication not obtainable from theutterance alone nor from the previously known information alone, but only by thecombination of the two; such implications are called contextual implications, like theone in the example just given. Secondly, the inferential combination of utterance andprevious knowledge can also lead to the cancellation of information previouslybelieved - in other words, a previously held belief gets corrected. Thirdly, theinferential combination can strengthen a previously held belief, so that one is morecertain of its being true. For more details see Sperber and Wilson (1986a).

6 More precisely, he will look for a referent that thecommunicator could reasonably have believed to be highly accessible in his mind, and

to yield an interpretation with adequate contextual effects.

7 In fact, Nida and Taber demanded that equivalence should notbe restricted to the information content alone, but also to the "dynamics" of the texts,and these dynamics were to be measured in terms of audience response. It is thisnotion that gave the approach its name - "dynamic equivalence translation".

8 Nida and Taber gloss the term "message" as follows: "Message:the total meaning or content of a discourse; the concepts and feelings which the authorintends the reader to understand and perceive." (op. cit., p. 205)

9 Analytic implications are characterized by the fact that theyhave been derived by analytic inference rules only; an analytic inference rule isformally defined as a rule that "takes only a single assumption as input" (Sperber andWilson 1986a, p. 104). The analytical implications of an utterance are determined byits propositional form. In practical terms, "the analytic implications of a set of assumptions are those that are necessary and sufficient for understanding it, forgrasping its content." (Sperber and Wilson 1986a, p. 105)


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10 For a more extensive discussion and illustrations of this point seeGutt (1989) or forthcoming.

11 These two different usages are assumed to reflect two different waysin which our minds entertain representation.

12 More correctly, this applies to representations with logical properties.See Sperber and Wilson 1986a for more information.

13 Bobrov, S.P. and M.P. Bogoslovskaja, Povest' o dvukh gorodakh,Sobranie sochinenii, 1957-63; vol XXII, p. 6, as cited in Chukovskii (1984, p. 144)

14 Note that in interpretive use the contextual assumptions available tothe audience may well include assumptions about the original representation.

15 How different the processing of direct translations will be willdepend on how different the cognitive environment of the target audience is from thatof the originally envisaged audience.

16 This is not to say that translation rules that make e.g. text-typologicalgeneralisations cannot be helpful, especially for the training of translators. However,what must be clearly borne in mind is that such rules do not have a value of their ownbut are valuable only in so far as they are valid applications of the principle of relevance. In other words, any such rule may need to be set aside if consistency withthe principle of relevance for a particular audience requires this.

17 It might seem more realistic to re-define direct translation aspresuming maximal rather than complete interpretive resemblance; however, thenotion of "maximal" interpretive resemblance is undefined, and such a redefinitionwould seem to obscure the very point just made: that misinterpretations are likely toarise in direct translation wherever linguistic differences make complete interpretive

resemblance impossible.


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11 References

Beekman, J. and J. Callow (1974) Translating the Word of God, vol. 1, Zondervan, GrandRapids, Mich.

Bassnett-McGuire, Susan (1980) Translation Studies, Methuen, London.

Blakemore, Diane (1987) Semantic constraints on relevance, Blackwell, Oxford.

Chukovskii, K. (1984) The Art of Translation, (trl. & ed. Lauren G. Leighton), University of Texas Press, Knoxville.

Frawley, William (1984), 'Prolegomenon to a theory of translation'. In W. Frawley (ed.),Translation: Literary, linguistic and philosophical perspectives. Associated UniversityPress, London, pp. 159-175.

Gutt, Ernst-August (1987a), 'What is the meaning we translate?' Occasional Papers inTranslation and Text- linguistics no. 1, January 1987, pp. 31-58.

Gutt, Ernst-August (1988), 'From translation to effective communication'. Notes onTranslation vol. 2, no. 1. pp. 24-40.

Gutt, Ernst-August (1989), Translation and relevance. University College London doctoraldissertation.

Gutt, Ernst-August (forthcoming), Translation and relevance. Blackwell, Oxford.


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Hnig, Hans G. and Paul Ku maul (1984), Strategie der bersetzung. Narr, T bingen.

House, Juliane (1981), A model for translation quality assessment. Narr, T bingen.

Kade, O. (1968) Zufall und Gesetzm igkeit in der bersetzung, VEB VerlagEnzyklop die, Leipzig.

Krings, H.P. (1986) Was in den K pfen von bersetzern vorgeht, Gunter Narr Verlag,Tbingen.

Larson, Mildred L. (1984) Meaning-based translation: A guide to cross-languageequivalence. University Press of America, New York.

Levy, Jiri (1969), Die literarische bersetzung: Theorie einer Kunstgattung. Athen um,Frankfurt.

Lyons, John (1969), Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge.

Newmark, P. (1988) Approaches to Translation, Prentice Hall, Hemel Hempstead.

Nida, E.A. (1964) Toward a Science of Translating. With Special Reference to Principles andProcedures Involved in Bible Translating, E.J. Brill, Leiden.

Nida, E.A. and C. Taber (1969) The Theory and Practice of Translation, E.J. Brill, Leiden.

Picken, Catriona (1983), The translator's handbook. Aslib, London.


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Reiss, Katharina and Hans J. Vermeer (1984), Grundlegung einer allgemeinenbersetzungstheorie. Niemeyer, T bingen.

Schulte, R. (1987) "Translation Theory: A Challenge for the Future", Translation Review, no.23, (Special Theory Issue), 1987.

Snell-Hornby, Mary (1988) Translation Studies: An integrated approach, John Benjamins,Amsterdam.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson (1986a) Relevance: Communication and Cognition,Blackwell, Oxford.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson (1986b), 'Loose talk'. Proceedings of the AristotelianSociety 1985/6, vol. 86, pp. 153-171.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson (1987), 'Pr cis of Relevance: Communication and

Cognition'. Behavioural And Brain Sciences vol. 10, pp. 697-754.

Steiner, George (1975) After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford.

Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber (1988a) "Representation and Relevance" in R.M. Kempson(ed), Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality, Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge, pp. 133-153.

Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber (1988b), 'Mood and the analysis of non-declarativesentences'. In J. Dancy, J. Moravcsik and C. C. W. Taylor (eds), Human agency:language, duty and value. Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 77-101.

Wilss, W. (1982) The Science of Translation. Problems and Methods, Gunter Narr Verlag,Tbingen.


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Wilss, W. (1988) Kognition und bersetzen. Zu Theorie und Praxis der menschlichen undder maschinellen bersetzung. Max Niemeyer Verlag, T bingen.

a theoretical account of translation - without a translation theory

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