3.1.1.

The pragmatic aspect of translation

Words in language are related to certain referents which they designate and to other words of
the same language with which they make up syntactic units. To the users of the language its words
are not just indifferent, unemotional labels of objects or ideas. People develop a certain attitude to the
words they use. Some of the words acquire definite implications, they evoke a positive or negative
response, and they are associated with certain theories, beliefs, likes or dislikes. Words can be nice,
ugly, attractive or repulsive. Such relationships between the word and its users are called pragmatics.
Pragmatics is a study that involves the interpretation of what people mean in a particular
context and how the context influences what is said. It requires a consideration of how the speakers
organize what they want to say in accordance with who they are talking to. Consequently,
pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning. This approach also explores how listeners can make
inferences about what is said in order to arrive at an interpretation of the speakers intended meaning.
Therefore, pragmatics is also the study of how more gets communicated than said. Closeness of the
speaker and listener, whether is physical, social, or conceptual, implies shared experience. On the
assumption of how close or distant the listener is, speakers determine how much needs to be said.
Pragmatics is the study of expression of relative distance.
According to Skinner translation can be defined as a verbal stimulus that has the same effect
as the original on a different verbal community. Along similar lines, Jakobson divides translation
into three parts: intralingual, intersemiotic and interlingual. Intralingual translation consists of the
interpretation of linguistic signs within the same language. Intersemiotic translation has to do with
the interpretation of linguistic signs by using non-linguistic signs. Interlingual translation consists of
interpretation of linguistic signs from one language to another. The primary purpose of translation is
the successful transmission of the original message using the medium of different linguistic signs. In
the process of reproducing a message and its resultant nuances from one linguistic form into another,
the translator is often confronted with problems of contextual meanings.
Scientists claim that speech acts form a fundamental part of pragmatic discourse. Likewise,
translation, being essentially a communicative event, can gain immensely from the three related
speech acts of locutionary act, illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect. Similarly, locutionary
act simply involves the production of a meaningful sentence. Furthermore, every locutionary act is
to fulfill a certain intended communicative function which is the illocutionary force. The
illocutionary force reveals the intention of the speaker. To conclude, the locutionary act and
illocutionary force should produce the perlocutionary effect which is the response intended by the
locator from the interlocutor when the locutionary act is produced.
 In order to better understanding, every translation goes through the first two phases in a very
clear way while translating meaningful sentences and their underlying intentions. Grice affirms that
meaning means intentions and this helps the translator to see that a texts intention can be best
appreciated only after a good appraisal of the reason and context of utterance. Thus, an angry
president may simply be waiting for the spirits to clam down when he says Nu va jucai cu focul or
Dont play with the fire.
As shown previously, speech acts have no universal cross-cultural application, and may pose
pragmatic problems of transmission. The particular social action leads us to conclude that the
interpretation given to any speech act is greatly influenced by speech events.
Therefore, the importance of pragmatics to translation can be viewed from the fact that no
locator says everything he has in mind. The locator is conditioned either by the context or his culture
to say the most relevant aspects of his speech that will ensure comprehension. In a similar way, this
is what Hall means when he says: Man himself is programmed by his culture in a very redundant
way. If it were not so, he would not be able to talk or act as these activities would be too demanding.
Each time a man talks, he only enunciates a part of the message. The remaining part is completed by
the hearer. A great part of what is not said is understood implicitly.
An attempt to translate the illocutionary act and the perlocutionary effect, draws the translator
near to the theory of interpretative translation. Interpretative translation lays premium on
interpretation of the message in the light of the context, and transmits the message in the target
language by deverbalising by forgetting the original words while retaining the meaning. On its part,
dynamic equivalence was formulated by Nida following Reiss where the receptors of the message in
the receptor language respond to it substantially the same manner as the receptors in the source
language. It needs to be highlighted that Neubert claims that, pragmatic adaptation is the process of
adaptation of a translated work to the needs of the target language audience. Along similar lines,
Lehto suggests that pragmatic adaptation is applied to modify those source text elements which,
translated would not work properly in the target language. He also claims that pragmatic adaptation
refers to the modification of the source text in order to produce the text which conforms to the needs
of new language environment.
Chesterman and Wagner consider pragmatic adaptation a strategy of translation and propose certain
strategies of pragmatic adaptation.
1. Explicitness change. This strategy helps to transform the information of a source text to
make it more explicit or implicit. When the implicit information given in a source text is not
sufficient for the target audience, a translator can make it explicit in a target text. A translator can,
vice versa, omit some unnecessary information provided in a source text, which would be an
implicitation, if the target audience is expected to deal with it.
2. Interpersonal change. This kind of strategy, applied, to give an example, when translating
business letters, helps to change the level of formality, the degree of involvement and emotively of a
source text author.
3. Illocutionary change. This strategy involves a change of moods, changes of the structure of
rhetorical questions and exclamations, variation between direct and indirect speech.
4. Coherence change. This may include various types of the source text structure alterations
5. Partial translation. Using this strategy, a translator can reduce a source text to a summary.
6. Visibility change. In this case, translators undertake changes in the level of the authors
presence in the text. Alternatively, translators make themselves visible by adding footnotes,
bracketed comments, etc.
7. Transediting. This change involves radical re-writing of a source text.
To summarize, pragmatic adaptation can be applied to some isolated parts of a source text
which block target readers proper understanding of this text. In this case, pragmatic adaptation acts
as one of enumerated translation techniques. If a source text, translated as is, represents a general
difficulty for understanding, pragmatic adaptation can be opted for by a translator as a strategy
applied to the source text as a whole.
Nida affirms refers to sociocultural adaptation in translation, postulating that for a truly
successful translation, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism, since words only have
meanings in terms of the cultures in which they function. His opinion is strongly supported by Nord,
who claims that translating means comparing cultures. People of various cultures naturally differ in
the way they create messages and construct utterances, and sociocultural situations they apply those
utterances to vary as well.
The pragmatic implications of a word are an important part of its meaning that produces a
certain effect upon the Receptor. Of even greater significance is the pragmatic aspect of speech units.
Every act of speech communication is meant for a certain Receptor, it is aimed at producing a certain
effect upon him. In this respect any communication is an exercise in pragmatics. The pragmatic
aspect of translation involves a number of difficult problems.

Eugene Nida has noted that language is a part of culture, and in fact, it is the most complex
set of habits that any culture exhibits. Language reflects the culture, provides access to the culture,
and in many respects constitutes a model of the culture. In order to render culture specific elements
and to reflect a certain model of culture, translators may use the following techniques:
 omission: the elimination or reduction of part of the text;
expansion: making explicit information that is implicit in the original, either in the main body or in
footnotes or a glossary;
exoticism: the substitution of stretches of slang, dialect, nonsense words in the original text by
rough equivalents in the target language;
updating: the replacement of outdated or obscure information by modern equivalents;
situational equivalence: the insertion of a more familiar context than the one used in the original;
creation: a more global replacement of the original text with a text that preserves only the essential
message, ideas, functions of the original.
To begin with, the pragmatics of the original text cannot be as a rule directly reproduced in
translation but often require important changes in the transmitted message. Correlated words in
different languages may produce dissimilar effect upon the users. An ambition in English is just the
name of a quality which may evoke any kind of response, positive, negative or neutral. Its Romanian
counterpart ambiia is definitely not a nice word. Thus, the phrase The voters put an end to the
generals political ambitions can be translated as Alegtorii au pus punct ambiiei politice a
generalului, retaining the negative implication of the original, but if the implication were positive
the translator would not make use of the derogatory term. The sentence The boys ambition was to
become a pilot will be translated as Visului baiatului era s devin pilot.
When we consider not just separate words but a phrase or number of phrases in a text, the
problem becomes more complicated. The communicative effect of a speech unit does not depend on
the meaning of its components alone, but involves considerations of the situational context and the
previous experience.
Only in good knowledge of the political aspirations of the hearers and knowing that the
speaker knows himself this spectrum of political aspirations, a human analyst would succeed in
interpreting the whole range of subtleties of a political speech. Consequently, pragmatics makes a
good deal of the political speeches interpretation process. Therefore, interpretation of the text in
terms of psychological distance between the partners or opponents; defining the transmitters
political attitude before and after the communication; determining the receptors political attitude;
pursuing echoes of the political communication in the audience (immediately), or in the society (after
a delay),; discovering the political speakers intentions by evidencing the semantic roles of different
sentence constituents.
Daniela Sorea, in her book Translation. Theory and practice, lists some of the main theories
of meaning, among which she mentions the so-called use theory of meaning, strongly connected with
the pragmatic view upon language. Pragmatics deals with meaning not as a mental representation,
nor as a relation between a symbol and an object or an entity designated by that symbol. In other
words, pragmatics situates language within wider social and cultural settings and behavioural
patterns and, while laying heavy stress on the context of the verbal exchanges, it deals with the way
people exploit words and combinations of words, with the actions actual users perform in the act of
communication. The meaning of a linguistic expression is given by its use, under certain
circumstances, where interlocutors nourish specific intentions and pursue specific goals. Interactions
like thanks, curses, greetings, praying, describing people and objects, narrating events and stories,
giving orders, expressing invitations, making assumptions, speculations, hypotheses, telling jokes,
idioms, figurative language are all aspects which might make translating from one language to
another troublesome.
According to Shuttelworth and Cowies Dictionary of translation studies pragmatic
translation is the kind of translation ,which pays attention not only to denotative meaning but also to
the way utterances are used in communicative situations and the way we interpret them in context.
Pragmatic translation will take into account connotative meaning, allusion, interpersonal
aspects of communication such as implicature, tone, register. Among pragmatic translations we can
cite: scientific treatises, government documents, instructions, descriptions, directions that appear on
packaged goods.
It should be mentioned that different languages employ different pragmatic principles and
maxims in the same communication behavior. Pragmatic problems will be evident in case of
applying pragmatic principles such as speech acts, presuppositions, implicatures, relevance, deictic
expressions and politeness formulas to translation.
Pragmatics as a linguistic term means the analysis of language in terms of the situational
context, within which utterances are made, including the knowledge and beliefs of the speaker and
the relation between speaker and listener. Pragmatic information is actualized in translating the
equivalentlacking lexical units, starting with personal names, geographical names, national realia by
way of transcription and transliteration. However, in some cases, while translating the names of
states, boroughs, countries and provinces explication of their implicit information is needed.
Pragmatic aspects define translation of realias, objects or events which have a direct
connection with the history, culture, national customs and traditions. In this case the translator has to
pay a special attention to the words with no direct equivalents in other languages. For example, it can
be lexical units that reflect specific realias of a definite country. Transliteration, transcription, loan
translation, explicatory translation, translation comments are used for the translation of realias.
Finally, analysing pragmatic aspects of social and political this issue is of a special interest for the
contemporary research. It is necessary to point out that the most important function of social and
political texts is appealing. According to this fact, the author of the source and target texts could use
special language units in order to influence addressees opinion and give rise to his/her
corresponding response.

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