Abstract: | The basic characteristic of translations is that they convey the meaning of the original to the target audience. It seems essential that a translation represents an original text in another language, but the demand that it communicate the meaning of that original to the target audience runs into problems in secondary communication situations. Does relevance theory provide some more appropriate ways of characterizing what translation is about? The obvious place to look for art answer to this question is the notion of interpretive use. There are two fundamentally distinct ways in which utterances, and representations more generally, can be used: they can be used descriptively, that is, as true descriptions of some state of affairs, and they can be used interpretively, and this means they are used in virtue of their resemblance with some other representation. Since translations are also texts presented in virtue of their resemblance with an original, it seems they fall naturally under the category of interpretive use. Translation simply is interpretive use, the only difference from other instances of interpretive use being that the original and its report happen to be in two different languages. Interpretive resemblance is not an absolute, but a comparative notion: that is, utterances can interpretively resemble one another to varying degrees, and this will depend on the number of implicatures and/ or explicatures they share. As both art and science, translation is a gift, a gift from gifted people to modern generations, a both intra- and interlingual transfer of worthy knowledge. |
