(Ernst-August
Gutt, Summer Institute of Linguistics)[i]
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.
This study
builds on the conviction that human communication essentially relies on
inference. More specifically, I start from the relevance theory of
communication developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995). According to this
theory, communication can and often does involve the use of codes, such as
human language, but ultimately inference overrides coding. This is part of our
everyday experience. We often can correct a communicator's slip of the tongue
on the basis of "what makes sense". "Making sense"
crucially involves inference. Thus even if a person asks us quite distinctly to
pass them the "toffee", under certain circumstances we may be almost
completely sure that they actually want coffee and that's what we'll pass them.
Thus inference can override what is linguistically encoded.
According
to inferential accounts of human communication, a text is a verbal stimulus
designed by the communicator in such a way that the audience can infer from it
what the communicator intends to communicate. Put a different way, the
communicator builds properties into her text that will lead the audience to the
intended interpretation.[ii] In Gutt 1991 such properties were
referred to as "communicative clues" (Gutt 1991:127). As was pointed
out there, the notion of "communicative clue" is not essential for a
relevance-theoretic account of translation. On the other hand, this notion has
been found helpful by a number of people and there was a request to say more
about it here. The main purpose of this paper will be to emphasise that for
"communicative clues" to be helpful tools, other aspects of the whole
communication process need to be carefully considered. [iii]
One basic
point the translator needs to remember is that the notion of the
"interpretation intended by the communicator" in itself demands
careful consideration. On the one hand, there is not necessarily a sharp
dividing line between what a communicator did and did not communicate; rather,
information can be communicated with varying degrees of strength, moving along
a cline from strongly communicated to not communicated at all, with no
breakpoint in between.
On the
other hand, the expression "communicated" needs to be handled with
care. The primary focus of relevance theory as developed by Sperber and Wilson
(1986, 1995) and as applied to translation in Gutt (1991) is a particular kind
of communication, called "ostensive-inferential communication",
sometimes shortened to "ostensive communication". This is probably
the richest form of communication in that, as Sperber and Wilson point out, it
"may have social implications that other forms of information transmission
do not [have]" (Sperber and Wilson 1986:62). It not only transfers
information, but creates a mutual awareness between the communication partners
of what has been communicated between them. It brings about "… a change in
their possibilities of interaction and in particular, in their possibilities of
further communication" (Sperber and Wilson 1986:61f). Information I have
ostensively communicated to you, I can assume as shared between us from then
onward.
Here is an
illustration of the potential social difference between awareness and mutual awareness. This is an incident
the author experienced in a restaurant. One of the guests ordered soup with a
sausage in it; when trying to take the sausage out of the bowl onto his plate,
it slipped and dropped on the table. The author noticed it but quickly looked
away. When the man had managed to pick up the sausage from the table and put it
on his plate, he looked around if anybody had noticed his mishap. The author
gave no indication whatever that he had noticed.
Now, he
could have done so, perhaps by a brief smirk on his face, or by staring at the
spot on the table where the sausage had dropped. Had he given such an
indication, that mishap would have
become part of the mutual cognitive environment
of the author and the other guest, and most likely that would have changed their relationship: realising
that the author had noticed that the guest had dropped the sausage on the
table, and also that the author had noticed that he had noticed that the author
had noticed this, there could easily have been embarrassment between the two
persons. In the event, the author's discretion prevented a mutual awareness and
there was no embarrassment. So, mutual awareness can make a difference to
social relations.
However, as
Sperber and Wilson point out, information can be transferred between people
without the necessary creation of
mutual awareness. Suppose the communicator happens to feel angry with her
audience. Though she might not want to show her anger and hope that it went
unnoticed, the audience may still have picked it up, perhaps from voice
quality, intonation, facial expression or body language. In such cases the
audience would be aware of the communicator's feelings, but the communicator
would not have intended them to be; she might not even realise that they did
pick up her feelings. Hence there would have been a transfer of information
without the establishing of mutual awareness. In fact, the communicator could
have denied her anger, if questioned.
The amount
of information conveyed incidentally rather than ostensively can be large. One
can often tell from the way a person talks what educational background they
have, the social group they belong to, what kind of audience they believe they
are talking to, perhaps the geographical region they come from, their emotional
state, whether they are short-breathed, have a cold or not, and other kinds of
information. Very often the communicator may neither intend to convey all this
information nor even be aware of its accessibility. How much of this
information the audience actually picks up will very much depend on their
mental alertness, intellectual capabilities and experiences.
It may seem
tempting to set up some kind of typology of information to distinguish what is
ostensively communicated from incidentally transferred information. We might,
for example, assume that the semantic contents of verbal expressions are
usually part of what is ostensively communicated, but that the more
"associative" aspects of meaning - register, connotation, dialect
etc. - fall under incidental information.
However,
such a typological approach would not work. Take, for example, a novel where
the writer portrays one of his characters speaking a certain sociolect. At the
level of the writer, the features characterising that sociolect are certainly
meant ostensively: the reader is meant to notice those features and to use them
in his interpretation of the novel. At the level of the story itself, however,
that is, from the viewpoint of the person in
the story, these features would be incidental. Since the same set of properties
can be ostensive at one level, and incidental at another, a typological
distinction between ostensive and incidental textual properties will be doomed
to failure.
The
distinction rests rather upon the intentions
of the communicator. It is, therefore, part of the communicator's task to
make her intentions in this regard mutually manifest, so that the audience can
arrive at the intended interpretation.
As always,
the accessibility of the right contextual information plays a key role for
inferring the communicator's intended meaning. Imagine the following situation.
A colleague comes to you and tells you, in a broad Yorkshire accent, that the
manager of the company wants to see you. Now let us assume two different cases.
Case A: It is mutually known by you and your colleague that he is from
Yorkshire and that he always speaks with this heavy accent.
In this
case, you might notice the accent - though you might not, if that is the way
the person normally talks - but assume it to be incidental and of no
significance to the intended meaning of your colleague.
Case B: It is mutually known by you and your colleague that he normally speaks
standard English, but that he is good at imitating dialects. It is further
mutually known that the manager
speaks with a broad Yorkshire accent.
In this
case, you would probably notice the accent; knowing that your colleague does
not usually speak with that accent, you would have to conclude that he is using
it intentionally on this occasion, and you would look for its relevance. Since
he mentioned the manager, information about that person would be highly
accessible, and you could reasonably expect that your colleague expects you to
use that information for interpreting his message. You would probably interpret
his use of the accent as a parody, either friendly-funny in intent, or possibly
mocking or derogatory, depending on your colleague's relation to the manager.
Of course, the colleague may give further evidence of his intentions by some
facial expressions, but not necessarily so.
Thus, what
is acoustically or phonetically the same utterance, with the same textual
properties, can lead to rather different interpretations, depending on the
mutually manifest context, which is important for working out which of those
properties are to be taken as "communicative clues".
Note that
in case B it is possible that the utterance of your colleague is practically
identical with what the manager actually said to him. So your colleague could
not be accused of having distorted the manager's message by inaccurate
reproduction. There is a distortion,
but it resulted from the accurate reproduction of incidental features, which were irrelevant to the intended meaning
of the original message, and therefore must be relevant in some other way.
If one were
looking only at intra-lingual communication, one could simply say that
communicative clues are a subset of the textual properties that are significant
for the intended meaning. There would not be any difference in essence between a textual property
and a communicative clue.
However,
the situation changes when considering cross-lingual communication, and this is
where it seemed helpful to form a more abstract concept than textual property.
The reason is that languages differ in the inventory of linguistic features or
properties they have; hence property A of language X may simply not be found in
language Y. Nevertheless, one can very often find some means B in language Y
that achieves the same or at least similar effects as property A did in
language X, assuming identical contexts. Properties that can be linked in this
way are referred to as corresponding "communicative clues".
Take, for
example, the pronominal distinction of gender, which is so common in
Indo-European languages but does not exist in the Finnish language. This lack
of gender distinction in Finnish can sometimes be compensated by the use of a
noun that does include information about the gender of the referent. Thus, at a
place where the gender marking in the English pronoun she is important, one could, for example, use the Finnish noun äiti '(the) mother' which would make the
gender clear, instead of the gender-neutral pronoun hän.
Turning to
translation itself, here are a couple of examples.
The
following example is given by Brain Mossop (1987) in his article "Who is
addressing us when we read a translation?" He compares two translations of
a note, written in French by René Lévesque, former Prime Minister of Quebec, on
the occasion of his resignation.
Version A: I would appreciate if you could transmit for me
to the National Council this simple message: Thank you from the bottom of my
heart, thanks to you and to all those, who will recognize themselves, and who
have not stopped for so many years paying with their selves and their
pocketbooks in order to build, implant, maintain this project which is so
healthy and democratic and which we have designed together for our
people.(Mossop 1987:11)
This
English translation was given in the Globe
and Mail newspaper. Version B was apparently produced by Mossop himself to
illustrate the "idiomatic" type of translation:
Version B: I would appreciate if you could transmit this
message to the National Council for me:
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. My thanks to you personally and all
those men and women, - they know who they are - who have for years been devoting their energies and their
pocketbooks to the task of building,
and maintaining a healthy and democratic road to the future, a road
which together we have laid out for the people of Quebec. (Mossop 1987:11f)
Interestingly,
when evaluating the two versions, Mossop prefers version A because it avoids
two problems he sees with version B. In the first place, "… Canadians will
have heard Lévesque speaking English on television and they will know that …
Lévesque does not speak English idiomatically" (Mossop 1987:12).
Therefore, such "readers might wonder whether the 'voice' they are
'hearing' [in version B, that is E-AG] is that of the same person they have
heard on television" (Mossop 1987:12). Version A, by contrast, "…
captures (perhaps not always successfully) Lévesque's thought process - not just the force of what he says - and by its
unusual language it avoids assimilating Lévesque to English-Canadian
culture" (Mossop 1987:12).
The second
problem is, according to Mossop, that "… this resignation is a historical
document, and its translation should therefore indicate something of the
author's personal style" (Mossop 1987:12).
Applying
the notion of "communicative clues" to this example, we could speak
of the differences between versions A and B as differences in communicative
clues. More specifically, these clues are present in version A, but missing in
version B. The table below provides a summary of these "clues" and
their significance, as perceived by Mossop.
Clues in version A (lost in version B) |
Significance/relevance |
1 who will recognize themselves |
Odd expression in English |
2 implant |
Emotional involvement |
3 'build' and 'maintain' have an object that
does not 'go with' them |
Odd expression in English (unusual
collocation) |
4 paying with their selves |
Emotional involvement (notion of
self-sacrifice) |
5 juxtaposition of three clauses without
conjunction |
Abnormal grammar |
6 our people |
Emotional involvement (identification) |
Clues (1),
(3), and (5) are all "odd" English; clues (4), (2), and (6) might be
said to make version A emotionally more expressive than version B, though (4)
may also be judged at least unusual for ordinary English.[iv]
As
mentioned earlier, "communicative clues", are properties built into
the text to guide the audience to the intended interpretation. Clues (1), (3),
and (5) lead the audience to infer that the English of the communicator was
odd. According to Mossop, this is the very inference that should be conveyed,
in order to avoid "assimilating Lévesque to English-Canadian culture"
(Mossop 1987:12).
The problem
that Mossop does not discuss, however, is that the original message was
in French, not English, and that it was perfectly idiomatic French. Hence if
there was anything that the original audience could infer about the speaker's
language competence, it was that he mastered French; there was no clue about
his abilities in English whatsoever. It is therefore clear that the
communicative clues (1), (3) and (5), giving evidence about Lévesque's problems
with English, were introduced by the translator alone; they had no base
in the French original, and certainly did not support its originally intended
meaning.
How can one
evaluate such a practice? The most obvious question to ask is whether such
practice is legitimate for a
translator qua translator to carry out. This question is notoriously difficult
to answer because it all depends on what one takes translation to be, and there
simply is no consensus on this concept. What one could do is try to find out
which notions of translation would support such practice, and which would not.
Though an interesting study of an encyclopaedic nature, it would not
necessarily help any translator deal with the issue.
Another,
perhaps more useful, evaluation - and this is the one to be pursued here -
could examine how successful the translator would be likely to be in
communicating this particular information to the audience. Since that is the
point of providing such clues, this kind of evaluation seems to be only fair.
So the question to ask is what kind of inferences the audience would draw from
these clues. Like with all inferences, the premises, that is, the contextual
assumptions, that enter into them are of considerable importance. So let us
examine the influence different contexts would be likely to have on the
interpretation of version A.
Case 1
Assumed context: The knowledge of Lévesque's problem with
speaking idiomatic English is highly accessible in the audience's mind.
Interpretation: When reading version A in the newspaper and
noticing the unidiomatic expressions, they would most likely infer that this
was another instance of Lévesque speaking English. That is, they would probably
consider the text to be a verbatim quote of what the politician had said or
written in English.
Evaluation: The translator's intention of reminding the
audience that Lévesque speaks unidiomatic English would have been fulfilled,
but it would have been accompanied by a wrong conclusion about the
circumstances of this act of communication.
Case 2
Assumed context: Like in case 1, the knowledge of Lévesque's
problem with speaking idiomatic English is highly accessible in the audience's
mind. In addition, they happen to know that Lévesque wrote his note in French,
and that therefore the newspaper version must be a translation.
Interpretation: When reading version A against this context
and noticing the unidiomatic expressions, the audience could only attribute these
expressions to a translator; attribution to Lévesque would be excluded by their
knowledge that he wrote this message in French.
Turning
therefore to the translator's involvement, two different lines of further
interpretation would be possible. One line would start from the assumption that
the unidiomatic expressions were unintentional,
that they were slip-ups by the translator. This would probably lead to
dissatisfaction with a seemingly incompetent translation. In this case the
translator's intention of using the clues to remind the audience of the
politician's poor English would be lost.
The other
assumption could, however, be that those expressions were intentional. That is,
the audience could assume that the translator could have written idiomatic
English but purposely chose to deviate from it. Processing non-standard
language expressions requires more effort than processing standard ones, and so
the audience would expect the translator to have intended to communicate to
them more than standard language could have done. (This follows from the
principle of relevance, believed to be operative in ostensive-inferential
communication.)
What could
this extra information be? Again, there would be different options. One option
would be to assume that the non-standard language was necessary to bring out
subtleties in the meaning intended by the original speaker which would have
been lost by idiomatic expressions of English. People familiar with translation
matters would probably make this assumption quite readily. In the current text,
however, no such additional bonus-meaning seems to be available: virtually the
same contents could have been communicated in natural English.
So, if the
reward for the additional processing effort did not lie in a richer understanding
of the original meaning, then what other additional meaning could the
unidiomatic expressions serve to provide? At this point the audience would
perhaps take a wider look at the whole communication process, thinking of the
speaker, the surrounding circumstances etc. They might notice that the
unidiomatic expressions resembled those used by Lévesque when speaking English.
Hence they could conclude that the translator had used the non-standard
expressions to draw attention to Lévesque's inadequate mastery of English.
(Note that ordinarily these interpretation processes operate sub-consciously;
we are not usually aware of them.)
Whether
they would accept this interpretation as the intended message from the
translator would partly depend on their notion of "translation". As a
general policy, it seems rather odd to expect that the translation of someone's
speech should reflect the original communicator's knowledge of the target
language. This could lead to ridiculous or even unintelligible renderings, depending
on the original speaker's ability in the target language, and one wonders what
the translator should do if the original speaker had no knowledge of the target
language at all. In many contexts it would also raise serious questions of
propriety since the deliberate imitation of mistakes in someone's speech tends
to be shunned by society as mockery.
At the same
time, it seems the language ability of politicians in Canada was a topic of
public interest. Perhaps this is the key to Mossop's concern. Version B
appeared to present Lévesque speaking idiomatic English - which was contrary to
fact and therefore, Mossop felt, had to be corrected. Presumably there were
others who shared his concern. The size of this group would determine the
degree of success such a translation could count on in the receptor community.
Turning to
version B, we are dealing with communicative clues (2), (4), and (6), all of
which were arguably present in the original. In number (2), the metaphor of enraciner, 'implant', is lost
altogether. The rendering devoting their
energies is emotionally less expressive than the original payer de leur personne, and pour notre peuple clearly shows that the
speaker identifies himself with the cause of Quebec, whereas for the people of Quebec fails to show
this identification.
What is
interesting in this particular example, is that version B is Mossop's own work,
and one wonders why in version B he combined the choice of idiomatic English
with the omission of those expressive clues. This is certainly not a necessary
combination - one could well imagine a version C which did use idiomatic
English while at the same time maintaining the clues to the emotional
involvement of the original speaker.
From what
Mossop says, his choice seems to have been strongly influenced by two distinct
stereotypes: one was that of a French-speaking politician with certain strong
sentiments for Quebec and a French accent, and the other of an English-speaking
politician, leading one of the English-speaking provinces, who would have
idiomatic English but no strong sentiments for Quebec.
I think
within the scope of this paper, we shall have to leave it at that, though it
would no doubt be fascinating to further explore the intricacies of political
sentiments in Canada, which we find exerting subtle influences even on everyday
translation matters.
In 1995 a
new translation of the Bible into English, the Schocken Bible, appeared, prepared by Everett Fox, a professor of
Jewish studies (Fox 1995). In the words of Natalie Weinstein, Fox believes that
"… too many translations already try to "spoon-feed" the Bible
by using everyday, modern English that makes the reader feel comfortable. In
Jewish tradition, however, studying Torah isn't supposed to be easy."
(Weinstein 1997[v]) So, Fox himself characterises his
purpose as follows: "Our approach is that the Bible is difficult and
something that must be wrestled with. (…) This tries to give … a taste of
what's there." (Weinstein 1997)
Fox's
approach was inspired by the translation of the Bible by Martin Buber and Franz
Rosenzweig into German. These Jewish scholars were disturbed by the fact that
the existing translations of the Bible were "pulling the 'contents' of the
text over into another language, not necessarily abandoning a priori the
peculiarities of the elements, structure and dynamics, but abandoning them too
easily where the brittle 'form' seems to hinder the passing on of the
contents" (Buber 1954:4; translation my own, E-AG). To this practice Buber
objects: "As if a genuine message, a genuine saying, a genuine song
contained a 'what' that could be detached from the 'how' without damage,
…" (Buber 1954:4; translation my own, E-AG). No message can be completely
transferred from one language to another, but the translator must try to
approximate as best he can, "getting as close as the limits of the
language into which he translates will allow; but to these limits the
translator needs to penetrate" (Buber 1954:7; translation my own, E-AG).
In this
spirit, Fox translated Genesis 1,1-3 as follows:
At the
beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth when the earth was
wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering
over the face of the waters -- God said: Let there be light! And there was
light. (cited in Weinstein 1997)
One of the
major principles that would distinguish Fox's translation from most other
contemporary translation efforts is his explicit commitment to concordant translation, because, following
Buber and Rosenzweig, he believed that the repetition of the same Hebrew word
was important for making connections or for establishing a theme.
For example,
forms of the word avod, or
"serve," appear throughout the book of Exodus. The Israelites must
serve the Egyptians; they become "serfs," which is the word Fox uses
instead of the traditional translation of "slaves." Later in the
story, Moses uses the root word "avod"
in another context, asking the Pharaoh to free the Israelites so they can serve
God. That wording, Fox said, shows the transition of the Israelites from
serving humans to serving the Divine. (Weinstein 1997)
So here is
another instance where the translator uses unidiomatic expressions in the target
language as "communicative clues". Yet there are some important
differences to Mossop's case. These differences arise from differences in
contextual knowledge.
First of
all, it seems highly unlikely that the target language audience would assume
that the original might have been written in English by someone with a
less-than-perfect command of the language. More likely, English readers would
naturally attribute the noticeable "oddities" of English to the
translator, and they would again have the choice of taking them either as
accidental slips or as deliberate. Since Fox is rather explicit in explaining
his purposes, the careful reader would have to accept them as deliberate, and
it would also be clear that the oddities are meant to contribute to the intended
interpretation rather than provide information about the original writer.
What about
the prospects for the success of Fox's translation - success in the sense that
it will convey to his audience what he intended to communicate to them through
it?
From a
relevance-theoretic point of view, the use of unidiomatic expressions means
that the translated text demands more processing effort from its audience than
a rendering using the words, grammar and idioms of English in their normal way.
In order for Fox to succeed, the audience must a) be able to make sense of the
translated text, b) have access to the contextual information which Fox had in
mind and which will yield the promised gain in understanding, and c) be willing
to invest the additional effort needed for a) and b).
Interestingly,
the expenditure of this additional effort is one of the main effects Fox aims
at; as he said, he wants to give the English reader "a taste" of the
fact that "the Bible … must be wrestled with" (as cited in Weinstein
1997).
Reactions
seem to indicate that some people meet these conditions and share Fox's taste.
Thus David Noel Freedman, a professor of Hebrew biblical studies and editor of
the Anchor Bible Series, comments: "It's a very fresh approach. I'm
surprised it worked" (as cited in Weinstein 1997) Similarly Nahum M.
Sarna, a professor emeritus of biblical studies, who also worked on the Jewish
Publication Society's revised translation, writes: "It's extremely useful
conveying, to those who don't know Hebrew, the sense of the original" (as
cited in Weinstein 1997).
Others
apparently fail to meet those conditions. Rabbi Chaim Stern, himself a
translator from Hebrew into English, finds that it is "not a workable
proposition. … English doesn't like that kind of structure. It isn't native to
English. It's native to Hebrew." (as cited in Weinstein 1997) It seems to
me that Stern has a point here, if one considers the following. Granted that
the interpretation of the Torah is not an easy matter, even in the Hebrew
original, there is however, an important difference to Fox's English version
because in his translation the difficulty is often linguistic, resulting from
unusual or even ungrammatical English constructions; for the Hebrew original,
however, that is certainly not the main problem, though linguistic problems do
arise from textual corruptions and the like.
Furthermore,
one suspects that, contrary to Sarna's evaluation, it will mostly be readers
who already know Hebrew who will recognise Hebrew structure behind the
distortions of English, but surely they are not really the ones who will need
Fox's translation for that experience.
Robert
Alter, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature, calls Fox's text a
"bold and admirable" effort but objects that "The English too
often seems strange", an impression which he sees in conflict with the
"magnificent, literary Hebrew" of the original (as cited n Weinstein
1997). This comment shows, that for this critic the approach is mistaken
because it fails to lead to the conclusion that the original version of the
Bible was of high literary quality.
That is
also a concern when considering the purpose of preserving communicative clues
present in the original: the Hebrew writers certainly did not compose their texts
in order to communicate an awkward use of language. So, again it seems that the
clues the translator chose are not in line with the intentions of the original
author.
So, one
suspects that the group with whom Fox succeeds will be small compared to those
who prefer English translations which are more readable, even if they lose some
aspects of the original meaning. It is difficult to estimate what the overall
balance of gain and loss is, and Fox himself concedes that "… his method
sometimes loses the nuances found in other translations" (as cited in
Weinstein 1997).
What can we
learn from this study with regard to "communicative clues" and their
use in translation?
First of
all, in translation "communicative clues" need to be considered at
two different levels: the level of the original communication process and the
level of the translator communicating with her target audience.
Secondly,
the identification of "communicative clues" at neither level is
necessarily clear-cut or simple. This is partly due to the nature of ostensive
communication, which allows for indeterminacy, and partly due to the practical
problem of working out the particular intentions of the communicator in a given
instance of communication, especially when there are differences in the assumed
contextual information.
Thirdly,
the relationship between these two sets of communicative clues touches on the
essence of translation. Most contemporary translators would probably agree that
their primary, if not their only task, is the expression of clues found in the
original that will help the target audience recover the originally intended
meaning. Other translators would want to include communicative clues that give
access to information about the communication act - e.g. about the speaker or
the nature of the original language - even if these clues were not intended or
not even present in the original.
Fourthly,
the preservation of communicative clues from the original may increase the
processing effort, for example, by leading to unnatural or unidiomatic
expressions in the target language. The translator will have to carefully gauge
whether for her particular target audience this additional effort will be
rewarded by additional benefits. Where this is not the case, the translator has
no reason to expect success in her communicative effort with that particular
audience.
In
conclusion, this means that the notion of "communicative clue" cannot
be used in translation in any mechanical way. It requires a good understanding
of the inferential nature of communication. I therefore suggest that the
translator should check her purpose in translation against the following three
questions:
1) What does the audience expect from
the translation?
2) Do they have the contextual information
(background knowledge) required for the intended interpretation?
3) Can they be expected to invest the
effort necessary for processing the translated text?
Buber, Martin 1954 'Zu
einer Verdeutschung der Schrift'. Supplement to Buber and Martin 1954.
Buber, Martin and Franz Rosenzweig 1954 Die fünf Bücher der Weisung, Köln und Olten: Jakob Hegner.
Fox, Everett 1995 The Schocken
Bible: Volume I -- The Five Books of Moses;, San Francisco Jewish Community
Publications Inc., dba Jewish Bulletin of
Northern California.
Gutt, Ernst-August 1991 Translation and relevance: communication and
cognition Oxford: Blackwell.
Mossop, Brian 1987 'Who is addressing us when we read a translation?' TextconText vol. 2, pp. 1-22.
Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson 1986 Relevance:
communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd edition
1995).
Weinstein, Natalie, 1997 'New Torah translation: a radical approach'
(e-mail communication, July 1997)
[i] Paper presented at the Susanne Hübner Seminar, December 1998,
at the University of Zaragoza)
[ii] Following the practice of Sperber
and Wilson, in the unmarked case the communicator/translator is assumed to be
female, the audience male.
[iii] The author would like to draw the
reader's attention to the following two publications which raise interesting
questions about the notion of "communicative clue": Navarro Errasti,
M. P."Communicative clues and the cost/benefit balance in
translation" in M.P. Navarro Errasti and J. Martín (eds) Drunk with words: Perspectives on the English
lexicon. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza 1993, pp. 75-88; Navarro
Errasti, M. P. "Communicative clues in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight" in A. H. Jucker (ed.) Historical pragmatics: Pragmatic
developments in the history of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1995, pp.
187-194.
[iv] Mossop does not comment on clue no.
(2), but the notion of "implanting" seems to add emotional
expressiveness.
[v] The author thanks Natalie Weinstein
for her kind permission to quote from this e-mail.