The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics

Rebecca Tipton, Louisa Desilla, Rebecca Tipton, Louisa Desilla

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351794398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

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.

Part I

Influences and intersections

1

Speech acts and translation

Silvia Bruti

Introduction

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistic and semiotic studies that deals with the relationship between signs and their users, or the use of signs, which is strongly bound to a contextual realisation. The first to mention the necessity of a pragmatic component in linguistics was the American philosopher Charles Morris, who in the 1930s claimed that the study of the relationships between signs (syntax) and between signs and their meanings (semantics) needed to be complemented by reference to users and contexts. The most important impetus to the development of pragmatics was given in the 1960s and the following decades by the studies of language philosophers such as Austin, Searle and Grice, who introduced pivotal concepts such as illocutionary acts and the speaker’s meaning and utterance meaning.

In pragmatics users are central together with some related parameters, that is their spatio-temporal setting, their social stance, but also other individual factors such as intentions, beliefs and mental states, behaviours and reactions to the behaviours of others. In other words, with Austin first and then the others later, language began to be considered not so much for its architectural organisation but for the way it is used to serve a purpose. The concept of use is in turn tied to that of context, the location in which a verbal exchange takes place.

It comes as no surprise that pragmatics and translation studies are closely interlaced, as context is a crucial notion in both domains. On the one hand, a broad definition of pragmatics includes all the “correlation[s] between linguistic units and their user(s) in a given communicative situation” (House, 2015: 22). On the other, translation is controlled by both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Among the latter there are, for instance, norms of use in the source and target lingua-cultural community, the attitude of the translator towards these norms, the commissioner’s requests, and the translator’s profile and background. Interactions like greetings, compliments, thanks, apologies, complaints, describing people and objects, narrating stories, giving orders, making invitations, assumptions, hypotheses, telling jokes, using idioms or figurative language are very language and culture-specific and might make translating from one language to another challenging.

For translators, it is of greatest importance to understand and locate words and phrases in specific contexts. In Mason’s words, “translating is an act of communication, involving texts as sets of mutually relevant intentions, in which users (including translators) pre-suppose, implicate and infer meaning” (Mason, 1998: 170). Baker (2011: 230) goes even further in pointing out that the pragmatic meaning that needs to be reconstructed when interpreting and then translating texts is not only the meaning “generated by the linguistic system but [the one] conveyed and manipulated by participants in a communicative situation”.

In order to avoid misinterpretation and hence mistranslation, it is essential to correctly identify the local context of utterances and speech acts, and how they are to be received by the intended audience in the source culture. A specific contextual environment may provide different readings and thus different meanings, which rely heavily on the distinct configuration of spatial and temporal elements. Just to take a concrete example, the adjective “wicked” in English has in the majority of its occurrences the meaning of “evil or morally wrong” and only a more peripheral meaning, in informal circumstances, of the opposite meaning, i.e., “excellent, wonderful”. In American English the same word can be used as an adverb with its positive meaning, being more or less an equivalent of “very, extremely”, as in the utterance “Wow, that game is wicked handsome” (UrbanDictionary, www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wicked). How the word “wicked” is to be interpreted can only be gleaned from the context and its collocates; then in case the positive meaning is used, an equivalent in the target language which is equally colloquial and slangy must be looked for. In the first film of the Harry Potter saga, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, when Ron Weasley gets to know Harry in the train heading to Hogwarts, he asks him if it is true that he has a scar on his forehead. Harry lifts his hair to let Ron see the scar and Ron, utterly astonished, exclaims “Wicked!” The expression is translated into Italian, in different ways in the dubbed and the subtitled versions. In the dub the secondary interjection “cavolo!” is used, whereas the adjective “mitico” is used in the subtitles. “Cavolo” is a euphemism hiding the more vulgar exclamation “cazzo” (“dick”), more often employed in negative contexts and obviously chosen because of the phonetic similarity in the initial part. Being a euphemistic form, it can also be used by children, but it is true that in Italian it is more widely employed next to negative expressions or with an overall negative meaning (e.g. “Non me ne importa un cavolo”, “I don’t give a damn”). The choice of “mitico” in the subtitles has a fuller correspondence with the original, in that one of its derived meanings is slangy and corresponds to “exceptional, extraordinary”. The only partial reservation is that it is slightly marked as belonging to previous decades, the 1980s and 1990s.

In what follows, I review the most important tenets of pragmatics, focusing in particular on what is especially relevant in a translational perspective. Therefore I concentrate on the performative dimension, i.e., the use of utterances to carry out different social actions, and, in particular, on speech act types and the roles of interactants, sometimes entailing politeness issues, and the speaker’s meaning and utterance meaning. Awareness of these aspects is necessary before translating texts, as texts are the output of real speakers operating in specific contexts of situation and culture. Examples are drawn from the translation of written texts, dubbing and subtitling, with only some cursory references to interpreting.

1 Philosophy of language: speech act theory

1.1 Philosophy of language and its neighbouring disciplines

Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), exploiting the fertile ground developed in the previous decades by other philosophers such as Frege, to whom Austin owes the contextual anchorage of meaning, and Wittgenstein, who conceived language as a series of activities strongly tied to social life, developed the idea that utterances are forms of “doing”.

Before exploring the description of speech act theory and its repercussions on translation studies, in what follows I will briefly review some other research orientations that are also driven by an interest in users and their interactions. The innovative sociologists who developed the “ethnomethodological” approach and also gave origin to conversation analysis have opposed the procedural tenets of philosophers of language, essentially because they advocated rigorous observational methods, in contrast to the “armchair” examples contrived by philosophers and theoretical linguists. If imaginary examples are used, there is no evidence that language works in the way philosophers claim, unless they demonstrate that people really speak likewise. The sociological perspective, developed first by Garfinkel (1967) and then by Sacks and Schegloff (cf. Sacks et al., 1974), to mention only a few among the most influential exponents, focuses on conversation as a social activity in which participant behaviour is carefully regulated: extensive analysis has shown that turns are allocated according to specific rules, normally without much overlapping or interrupting. Of course, breaches of the rules occur and necessitate repair mechanisms to restore balance and mutual understanding. Criticism has been made of conversation analysis, in that generalisations can always be denied on the basis of contrary evidence. In addition, this perspective has granted little consideration to how individual factors impact on conversation: the way conversation is managed has not been sufficiently investigated in relation to variables such as gender, age, social class, level of instruction and so on.

Other sociologists, sociolinguists and anthropologists have refined the methodology to make it suitable for investigating oral language and the nuanced and varied modes of conversation: some noteworthy proposals are those put forward by Goffman with his micro-sociological analyses (1967), Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology (1967), Gumperz’s contextualised approach to conversation (1965) and the extension of ethnomethodological analytical tools to anthropological research (Duranti, 2001). Through this complex research network, the attention of scholars interested in the pragmatic dimension of language has expanded in a few decades to cover an even broader range of discursive and textual genres, communicative modes, types of linguistic events, social and cultural contexts.

1.2 Austin’s speech act theory

As specified above, Austin started his reflection from the idea that some utterances are forms of “doing”. He proposed the differentiation between constative and performative utterances, by arguing that the use of “I promise” in a statement like “I promise to arrive on time” is not descriptive but counts as a promise. In How to Do Things with Words, the notes of a Harvard course published posthumously in 1962, he explored performatives, which are a good test bed of the fact that language can be considered as action. From the initial consideration that performatives are actions, he later enlarged his view to also include descriptive uses of the language.

Performative utterances contrast with other utterances which may be performing the same act but do not contain a performative verb that explicitly describes the intended speech act. Rather, the recipient is left to infer the speaker’s intention. Austin called these utterances constatives: for example if a speaker looking at scarves in a shop says “I like the red one”, he or she makes his/her personal preference explicit, whereas if he/she says, “I choose the red one”, he/she is performing the act of choosing the one he/she likes.

Every statement, being a linguistic act, can be evaluated on two levels: first of all as a successful utterance, that is appropriate given the type of utterance it is; second, an utterance can be checked against facts, that is it can be assessed whether, everything considered, it is the right sequence to achieve the communicative aim within the given situational frame. The traditional equation of meaning with truth was called into doubt, as the identification of meaning with truth values was no longer ascribable to all speech act types. The majority of speech acts cannot be defined as either true or false, but as appropriate or not, successful or not. If words are used, for example, to open a conference, what needs to be verified is not if the actual words are true, but if they are uttered by the “right” speaker in the “right” circumstances. In this case it should be someone entitled in their professional role to open the conference, uttering some welcoming and introducing words before letting the presentations commence, performing a series of ritual conventions, like standing at the podium, or talking into a microphone facing an audience. If these conditions are satisfied, the conference can be considered officially opened. If only one of the conditions is not met, the speech act is “infelicitous”.¹ Only expositive acts (see section 2.3) can be evaluated for the truth of what they state.

Illocutionary types are the types of actions that are performed by uttering words. In uttering illocutionary acts people do not merely pronounce words, but actually perform something, be it a promise, a threat, a compliment. Illocutionary acts are recognised because they rely on sets of tacitly accepted conventions that allow speakers and recipients to link linguistic expressions and functions. When pronouncing utterances, speakers perform illocutionary acts, which also have effects on their recipients. Each illocutionary act is characterised by several parameters: a conventional effect; some preparatory rules that have to be met for the conventional effect to hold; the intention of the speaker; the linguistic expression used; the accompanying features of pronouncing the words, i.e., paralinguistic features and kinesic elements. Initially Austin identified performative illocutionary acts on the basis of various grammatical criteria, that is all the verbs that could be used in the active form, in the first person of the simple present and could be accompanied by the adverb “hereby”. The criteria were however rather simplistic: there are in fact performative utterances that do not use the active form and yet they are performatives, like “Entrance is forbidden”, or utterances that correspond to the above criteria but are not performatives, like “I state that the sun is shining”. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that there are verbs whose illocutionary force (or type) is clear because the verb itself “names” the act, e.g. “I declare the session open”, “I bet ten dollars that Italy will lose the match”, but there are other cases in which other elements can express (and modulate) th...