The pragmatics of translation (Multilingual Matters, 1998)
Includes bibliographical references and index
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
Introduction - Leo Hickey -- - Speech acts and illocutionary function in translation methodology - Sandor G.J. Hervey -- - Cooperation and literary translation - Kirsten Malmkjaer -- - Pragmatic aspects of translation: some relevance-theory observations - Ernst-August Gutt -- - Politeness and translation - Juliane House -- - Text politeness: a semiotic regime for a more interactive pragmatics - Basil Hatim -- - 'New' versus 'old' - Frank Knowles -- - Presupposition and translation - Peter Fawcett -- - Deictic features and the translator - Bill Richardson -- - Verb substitution and predicate reference - Palma Zlateva -- - Discourse connectives, ellipsis and markedness - Ian Mason -- - Hedges in political texts: a translational perspective - Christina Schaffner -- - Translating the pragmatics of verse in andromaque - Ian Higgins -- - Perlocutionary equivalence: marking, exegesis and recontextualisation - Leo Hickey