Translation Theories 1

ENG372

Week 13: Pragmatic equivalence

Dr Arwa Alsaleh
This week’s agendas:

 Coherence, implicature and translation strategies

 Conventional meaning of words and structures
 ‘Be Polite’ and ‘Be Brief’ maxims
 Context, implicature and coherence

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Conventional meaning of words and structures

 In order to grasp the meaning in the ST, including implicature, readers must fully
understand the ST’s words and structures. Sufficient knowledge.
 Misunderstanding the meaning of word(s) leads to loosing the implied meaning in
the TT.
 Semantic prosody ‘gives rise to very subtle implicatures which are often processed
subliminally, without the speaker or hearer necessarily being conscious of the
attitude being expressed by the item in question’ (Baker, 2011, p. 241).
 Semantic prosody is subtle but it implies meaning and distorting it can create
sarcasm and irony.

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Conventional meaning of words and structures

 Examine the following examples of ‘happen’:

1. ‘Something is going to happen to him unless he pulls himself together.
2. I knew something terrible would happen.
3. Accidents can happen in spite of rules and regulations.
4. What I had feared might happen was happening.’ (Baker, 2011, p. 241)
 Examine the following examples of ‘naked eye’:
1. ‘Her eyesight was so strong that she was able to extract a tiny piece of glass, hardly
visible to the naked eye,’ (Baker, 2011, p. 241)
2. ‘They’re obviously mean. God help us! You can count the cardamon pods and cumin
seeds with the naked eye.’ (Baker, 2011, p. 242)

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Conventional meaning of words and structures

 Typographical features can imply meaning as well and this could be different
from one language to another: converted commas, for example, can imply the
meaning of disagreement, emphasis, irony and tentativeness in English.
 In Japanese, marking a direct speech by inverted commas is regarded as
unrefined, one would use conjunctions as ‘nevertheless’ to indicate the end of
speech. How would that affect English and Arabic readers if literally translated?
 Adding presupposition to the TT to aid the understanding of the text and any
implied meaning it might have.

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The Co-operative Principles
 Abiding or violating them can indicate implicature. Always? Quantity in court setting?
 Are the co-operative principles universals across languages/cultures?
 The maxims themselves are not but implicature and violating existing maxims to
convey implicature is.
 Fifth maxim, i.e. Be Polite, in some cultures to override other maxims. E.g. ‘no’ in
Japanese culture as almost as a term of abuse where lying is preferred over it.
 Culture differ when it comes to what is acceptable and what is not (taboos). In many
societies, topics around sex, religion and defecation are considered taboos.
 In such cases, translators might want to consider abiding by these norms as they are far
more important that being accurate.
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The Co-operative Principles

 Arabic uses repetition quite extensively as a rhetorical device, how could an

English translator deal with this?
 Calendars in translations and potential implicature.
 Japanese and Islamic calendars
 Violation of modes of address within a culture and its implicature, e.g. racism.
 Politeness across cultures: requests, modes of address, etc.
 Mr Dickins vs ‫ح‬CC‫ا‬C‫ص ل‬ C‫م‬CC‫ا‬
‫لع‬

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Context, implicature and coherence
 The context (including participants, co-text, linguistic conventions, etc.) can narrow down
the possible implicature, but is it universal?
 Get prescription and medical records: pharmacies in UK vs Hong Kong and China
 Size of house: bedrooms in UK vs rooms in Switzerland
 Translators need to link TT to the context of the its readers for them to draw the right
implicature/finds it coherent.
 Order of events or list of items (Manner) are constructed culturally, deviation from the
‘normal’ order – even small-scale regular deviations – could lead to an incoherent text or
suggest false implicature.
 English, French, German, Russian (EN ST) vs German, English, French, Russian (German TT)

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Context, implicature and coherence
 Reference known in the SC but not the TC. Intext addition or footnotes?
 Implicature might become explicit to ensure the target readers receive the meaning
implied, which they cannot decode due to their lack of background knowledge of the SC.
 Already known side information to the TR might be omitted, especially those in
footnotes (e.g. Zamzam). In deletion, do not over do it.
 What if the background knowledge of the world is clashing between the SC and TC, e.g.
Prophets’ stories in Quran and Bible.
 It does not affect coherence to challenge the readers expectations when such challenge is
motivated ‘interpretable’ and expected.
 Translation readers are expected to read something different.

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Any questions

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Thank You!

Reference:
The material used for this presentation is taken from:
Baker, M. 2011. In other words, A course book on translation. 2nd ed. USA and
Canada: Routledge.

To do for next week:

Read chapter 8 of the textbook ‘Beyond equivalence: Ethics and Morality’.

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