Rendering the pragmatic component of the message in translation

A. V. Panaskov

The main focus of the paper is the communicative nature of the translation process, the investigation of semantic and pragmatic aspects of translation as well as rendering the pragmatic component in various speech acts.

In order to exemplify and demonstrate the significance of the adequate rendering of the pragmatic component the semantic and pragmatic aspects of translation are investigated as well as the nature of a speech act.

Consider the fol­ lowing pair of sentences:

a) The councilors refused the marchers a parade permit because they feared violence.

b) The councilors refused the marchers a parade permit because they advocated violence.

These two sentences have identical syntactic structures, differing only in the choice of the verb in the second clause (feared in the first sentence vs. advocated in the second). Yet, the pronoun they is usually interpreted dif­ferently in the two sentences. Most people believe that they should refer to the councilors in a but to the marchers in b. These preferences seem to have nothing to do with grammatical rules. Rather, they reflect beliefs we have about different groups within our society—in particular, that coun­ cilors are more likely to fear violence than to advocate it.

In many cases, pragmatic knowledge is put to even subtler uses in the interpretation of sentences. Suppose, for example, that a CEO makes the following entry: The secretary was not late today. Although this statement says nothing about the secretary's punctuality on other days, a reader is likely to infer that he/she has a problem with coming in time. This inference does not follow from the literal meaning of the sentence, but rather from the way in which language is used to com­ municate. Ordinarily, the sentences we use are supposed to be informative and relevant. This is part of what has been called the Cooperative Principle for conversation. When an utterance appears to be uninformative or irrel­evant, the listener (or reader) assumes that he or she is to draw a conclusion that can restore its informativeness and relevance.

In the example we are considering, this involves taking what appears to be a relatively uninformative statement about someone (a secretary is expected not to be late) and inferring something informative from it (namely, that the individual's not being late on a particular day is some­ how exceptional). This conclusion follows not from the meaning or structure of the original sentence, but rather from the assumption that the CEO was trying to be informative when he made the entry.

In this respect we should mention the phenomenon called thematic structure , relating to what the speaker of a sentence assumes is the focus of information as opposed to what he assumes is background knowledge.

In English, this is not in general reflected in the syntactic structure but by the use of stress and intonation. Consider the difference between the sentence The lawyer called Mr. Johnston to witness at the first sitting of the court said with varyingly placed heavy stress (indicated by bold type):

(1) The lawyer called Mr. Johnston to witness at the first sitting of the court .

(2) The lawyer called Mr. Johnston to witness at the first sitting of the court .

(3) The lawyer called Mr. Johnston to witness at the first sitting of the court .

(4) The lawyer called Mr. Johnston to witness at the first sitting of the court .

One way in which this might be interpreted is that in (1) the speaker would be assuming that the hearer already knows that t he lawyer called Mr. Johnston to witness somewhere but that in saying (1) he is informing the hearer that it took place at the first sitting of the court , in (2) the speaker would be assuming that the hearer already knows that t he lawyer called someone to witness at the first sitting of the court and that in saying (2) he is informing the hearer that it was Mr. Johnston that t he lawyer called to witness at the first sitting of the court , that in (3) the speaker would be assuming that t he lawyer did something to Mr. Johnston at the first sitting of the court and that the point of new information in his saying (3) is that what the lawyer did to Mr. Johnston in at the first sitting of the court was call him to witness, and in (4) the speaker would be assuming that someone called Mr. Johnston to witness at the first sitting of the court and that the point of new information in his saying (4) is that it was the lawyer who did so. Accordingly we might say as a property of the sentence that with the stress assignment as in (1) the sentence invariably implies that it is already known to a hearer of this sentence that t he lawyer called someone to witness at the first sitting of the court , etc. This being so, we might incorporate an analysis of thematic structure along these lines into our semantic theory as part of the interpretation of sentences. We would then have to relinquish the hypothesis that the semantics of natural language is exclusively truth-conditional in favor of a weaker analysis in terms of a partially truth- conditional semantics. In my view, this move is not justified by data such as we have just considered. It certainly seems to be the case that speakers draw attention by stress or intonation to those parts of their utterance of a sentence that they feel are important in some way, but this cannot we think be reduced to the simple division between what is assumed by the speaker to be known by the hearer, and what is assumed by the speaker to be new to the hearer. However there are languages where this distinction seems to be structurally more clear-cut. In a number of languages - for example Latin, Ukrainian, Russian and Czech - the word order allowable in a sentence is extremely free; and in these languages there appears to be a systematic correspondence between linear order and thematic structure, left-most elements of the sentence tending to be assumed to be part of the background knowledge shared by speaker and hearer and right-most elements tending to be understood as new elements of information. And in some languages, this distinction between given background information and new information is said to be unambiguously marked structurally.

The question that is relevant at this stage is whether this information structure is best handled at the level of the structure of the language itself (i.e. as part of the competence model) or whether it is better handled at the level of performance analyzing the phenomenon in terms of factors such as perceptual ease and the pragmatic matter of speaker-hearer interaction.

Our study has been concerned about the significance of the pragmatic component of the message and its influence upon the reader's response. With increasing awareness of the psychological nature of human behaviour, the study of translation now has to be placed in an appropriate frame of reference which takes account of communication in general, especially literary communication based on cognitive information processes.

The goals of translation, then, with a special obligation to seek the equivalence of the ST, will be considered as of the same kind as those of any linguistic communication. Given that the purpose of such communicative activities is not merely to convey the communicator's information but often to persuade or even command the audience, the translation should be the transmission of such communicative dynamics between the author and the original readers into a new linguistic and cultural environment. In other words, the goals of translation should be to produce a text which performs a function like that of the ST but in a second language, in terms of the reader's response.

It is true that the reader's reaction basically acts upon a linguistic decoding of the given message, and thus a correct and natural encoding of the intended message is of primary importance in translation.

In order to help the readers react in the intended way, the translator may need to establish various cues in the text. Considering overall effect of reading and the reader's processing effort, however, this does not necessarily suggest liberal amendments of the ST structure and explanatory additions to be made for any figurative meanings.

One implication of this study for both teaching and assessing translation is that a successful translation in no sense can be achieved without a great deal of the target reader's support. This is not only because the reader's schemata are far beyond the translator's knowledge which is typically limited to some level of linguistic knowledge, but also because a real communicative translation aims at cognitive change in the reader, which is visible only by consecutive feedback of the readers throughout the translation process. In this sense, the translation task should involve teamwork between the translator as the mediator of the two worlds and consultants among the target readers.