Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 2,7, RWTH Aachen University (Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Romanistik der RWTH Aachen), language: English, abstract: Over time, pragmatics played an increasingly important role in different areas of language study. A particularly interesting instance of language use in this matter is translation. Thus, the decision to discuss the relation between pragmatics and translation came up. More precisely, the influence of a specific pragmatic field, namely Relevance Theory, on the study of translation will be analyzed below. It begins with a brief look into the history of translation studies and the reason why it is possible for pragmatic concepts to be applied to the study of translation. The most fundamental concept in connection to the respective study is Relevance Theory which was developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. A general overview of the theory will introduce the examination of this part of the research. It is mostly based on Sperber and Wilson’s work Relevance: Communication & Cognition (1995). Which role the relevance-theoretic notion plays with regard to translation will then be studied. In terms of translation and relevance, the efforts of Ernst-August Gutt are of major interest with his book Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (2000) being of primary attention. This chapter will furthermore focus on a few selected relevance-theoretic concepts. It starts with the notion of optimal relevance and continues with investigating the interpretive use of language in translation. Finally, my goal is to make use of the relevance-theoretic approach to translation by applying the respective concepts to an example. This will be the core area of the paper. The analysis is made up of scrutinizing a translated version of an online newspaper article from the UK edition of the Huffington Post with German as the target language. The article is about the British author J.K Rowling criticizing a supporter of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, better known as Brexit, in a referendum.

This book aims to investigate the process of decision-making in subtitling of feature films and entertainment series. The author uses Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson,1986) to argue that the technical, linguistic and translational constraints at work in subtitling result in a curtailed target text, and illustrates this argument by invoking examples drawn from the English-Polish subtitles of films and television series available through the subscription service Netflix. After introducing the current state of research on audiovisual translation within and outside the framework of translation studies, he presents the core concepts underpinning Relevance Theory and explains how it can be used to construct a model of the process of subtitling. This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of translation studies, audiovisual translation studies, and communication studies.

From the outset, this book has evoked strong responses. Its central claim is that given a comprehensive theory of inferential communication, there is no need for a special theory of translation. This has been praised by some as "wise and right" (Dell Hymes) and condemned by others as "astonishing, not to say perverse" (Kirsten Malmkjaer). Gutt's call to move from semiotics to an inferential paradigm of communication remains a challenge for many. The debate continues and so does the demand for the book, resulting in this second edition. There is a 'Postscript' entitled 'A decade later', where the author addresses peer criticism, especially from those involved in the movement of 'translation studies', and attempts to bring out more clearly the unique mandate of translation. New perspectives, such as authenticity, are also introduced. Marginal notes, some tongue-in-cheek, liven up the discussion and new references ensure its currency.

The present volume covers a variety of topics which are at the centre of interest in pragmatic research: understanding and believing, reference, politeness, communication problems, stylistics, metaphor, and humour. Next to innovative theoretical proposals, there are interesting analyses and discussions.

This volume is one of the first books to present a comprehensive view of lexical pragmatics, describing its origins, assumptions, scope, methodology and the various approaches to it, focusing specifically on the approach offered by relevance theory. In addition to theoretical considerations, the book discusses particular linguistic expressions and pragmatic phenomena, showing how the relevance-theoretic tools may be used to explore pragmatically motivated changes to lexically encoded meanings. The most recent developments are discussed and questions are asked to indicate directions for further research within this rapidly developing field.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics provides an overview of key concepts and theory in pragmatics, charts developments in the disciplinary relationship between translation studies and pragmatics, and showcases applications of pragmatics-inspired research in a wide range of translation, spoken and signed language interpreting activities. Bringing together 22 authoritative chapters by leading scholars, this reference work is divided into three sections: Influences and Intersections, Methodological Issues, and Applications. Contributions focus on features of linguistic pragmatics and their analysis in authentic and experimental data relating to a wide range of translation and interpreting activities, including: news, scientific, literary and audiovisual translation, translation in online social media, healthcare interpreting and audio description for the theatre. It also encompasses contributions on issues beyond the level of the text that include the study of interpersonal relationships in practitioner networks and the development of pragmatic competence in interpreter training. Each chapter includes many practical illustrative examples and a list of recommended reading. Fundamental reading for students and academics in translation and interpreting studies, this is also an essential resource for those working in the related fields of linguistics, communication and intercultural studies.

This book combines theoretical work in linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics with empirical work based on a corpus of London adolescent conversation. It makes a general contribution to the study of pragmatic markers, as it proposes an analytical model that involves notions such as subjectivity, interactional and textual capacity, and the distinction between contextual alignment/divergence. These notions are defined according to how information contained in an utterance interacts with the cognitive environment of the hearer. Moreover, the model captures the diachronic development of markers from lexical items via processes of grammaticalisation, arguing that markerhood may be viewed as a gradient phenomenon. The empirical work concerns the use of like as a marker, as well as a characteristic use of two originally interrogative forms, innit and is it, which are used as attitudinal markers throughout the inflectional paradigm, despite the fact that they contain a third person singular neuter pronoun. The author provides an in-depth analysis of these features in terms of pragmatic functions, diachronic development and sociolinguistic variation, thus adding support to the hypothesis that adolescents play an important role in language variation and change.

This book proposes a new model for the translation-oriented analysis of multimodal source texts. The author guides the reader through semiotics, multimodality, pragmatics and translation studies on a quest for the meaning-making mechanics of texts that combine images and words. She openly challenges the traditional view that sees translators focusing their attention mostly on the linguistic aspect of source material in their work. The central theoretical pivot around which the analytical model revolves is that multimodal texts communicate through individual images and linguistic units, as well as through the interaction among textual resources and the text's interaction with its context of reference. This three-dimensional view offers a holistic understanding of multimodal texts and their potential translation issues to help translators improve the way they communicate multimodally across languages and cultures. This book will appeal to researchers in the fields of translation studies, multimodality and pragmatics.

Pragmatics, often defined as the study of language use and language users, sets out to explain what people wish to achieve and how they go about achieving it in using language. Such a study is clearly of direct relevance to an understanding of translation and translators. The thirteen chapters in this volume show how translation - skill, art, process and product - is affected by pragmatic factors such as the acts performed by people when they use language, how writers try to be polite, relevant and cooperative, the distinctions they make between what their readers may already know and what is likely to be new to them, what is presupposed and what is openly affirmed, time and space, how they refer to things and make their discourse coherent, how issues may be hedged or attempts made to produce in readers of the translation effects equivalent to those stimulated in readers of the original. Particular attention is paid to legal, political, humorous, poetic and other literary texts.