Challenges of metarepresentation to translation competence.

One of the outcomes of the inferential framework of communication developed by Sperber and Wilson (1995) is the pursuit of competence-oriented research on translation (CORT), as proposed in Gutt 2000. CORT focuses on the discovery of the mental capabilities involved in the translation task.\ud \ud One of the key concepts recently being explored in the inferential framework is that of metarepresentation. It involves the capability of people to represent in their minds not only the external world but the thoughts (mental representations) other people entertain about that world. Metarepresentations can involve several levels of embedding: thus persons can metarepresent to themselves the thoughts of others about their own thoughts about a certain subject matter etc.\ud \ud While metarepresentation is an important mental faculty for successful communication in general, it is of eminent importance in the translation task where the translator may have to metarepresent several different worlds of thoughts (cognitive environments) and their interaction with one another as mutual cognitive environments in cross-cultural communication events.\ud \ud This paper first briefly outlines the inferential model of translation, including the notions of cognitive environment, context and metarepresentation. The main part of the paper surveys five distinct constellations of mutual cognitive environments found in translation situations. The first – and ideal – constellation is where original author, translator and receptor audience all share essentially the same mutual cognitive environment. More commonly, however, this condition is not fulfilled and the other four constellations can present considerable challenges to the metarepresentational capabilities of the translator. Furthermore, the translator needs to develop strategies that will overcome differences in cognitive environment that would negatively affect the communication process. (This is in addition to the task of overcoming problems caused by language differences.) Suggestions are made about directions in which these problems, which can seriously undermine the success of the translated text, can be sought.\ud \ud References\ud Gutt, Ernst-August 2000 Translation and relevance: Cognition and context. Manchester: St. Jerome.\ud Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson 1995 Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.\u

Textual properties, communicative clues and the translator

This paper builds on the relevance-theoretic account of communication. It attempts to show that the question whether a textual feature of the original should be represented in the translated text as a "communicative clue" depends on a) the intentions of the original communicator and b) the translator's notion of what his or her task is. Regarding the impact of the translation, it also depends on how well the translator's intentions match the expectations of the audience

Implicit information in literary translation: A relevance-theoretic perspective

As an instance of human communication, literary translation operates by certain laws and principles assumed to be built into our human make up. These 'natural laws' of communication give rise to implicit information and are responsible for its special characteristics, such as graded strength of communication and its correlates, including poetic effects. They furthermore determine the interdependence of text, context and successful communication, and limit communicability in incompatible contexts. One important contextual factor consists in what kind of interpretive resemblance the audience expects there to be between original and translation. The ultimate test for a translation is whether or not it achieves with the target audience what the translator intended it to achieve, rather than whether it conforms to some translation-theoretical notion of equivalence

A theoretical account of translation - without a translation theory

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

Logical connectives, relationships and relevance

This paper was written in the context of a workshop (held in 1989) on logical connectives in discourse. It addresses difficulties that arise from attempts at analysing logical connectives by assigning logical relations to them, taken from a typological listing. As the workshop itself showed, such attempts typically face the problem of on the one hand needing to be broad enough to cover all the instances of relations found in texts and on the other hand needing to be specific enough to differentiate types of relationships from each other. Applying the relevance-theoretic framework proposed by Sperber and Wilson, this paper argued that the root of the problem is that (logical) connectivity in discourse is not created by a fixed set of interpropositional or rhetorical relations, but by the search for relevance, through the inferential interaction between a given utterance and its context. This explains the virtually unlimited variety of relations that can and do arise in texts, without reliance on any defined set of relations. After a brief introduction to the relevance-theoretical framework, the paper applies it to the analysis of the connective –m in Silt’i, an Ethio-Semitic language. It attempts to show how the variety of relations associated with this connective can be explained in terms of the interaction of a simple semantic property with different pieces of contextual information, accessed in the search for relevance. The paper then proposes and illustrates three methods of testing the validity of such relevance-theoretic analyses of connectivity, two of which can be carried out experimentally