Abstract
Relevance Theory (RT), developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986), has captured scholarly attention for almost four decades. In translation and interpreting (T&I) studies, this theory has the potential to assist translators and interpreters in achieving cross-cultural and interlingual pragmatic equivalence. However, little has been explored about the RT-informed T&I studies. From the perspective of a ‘practisearcher’ (Gile, 1994), the author of this exciting book provides us with a practical, accessible, and up-to-date overview of cognitive-pragmatic accounts that can be applied to both translation and interpreting activities. It is intended for interested readers in pragmatics, discourse studies, translation and interpreting studies, and beyond.
This book comprises three parts. Part I presents an overview of the conceptual framework. Chapter 1 introduces key concepts and terms in Gricean pragmatics (see Grice, 1989), shedding light on how to handle competing maxims in intercultural communication. For example, the maxim of politeness embedded in the discourse organisation might be interpreted differently by various linguistic and cultural communities, as norms of politeness and areas of taboo may require adequate culture-specific explanations to achieve effective and efficient operativeness in communication, which highlights the need for culturally relevant inferences in communication. Then the notion of relevance in communication is further examined from the cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Chapter 2 regards the concept of relevance as a psychological property through effort and effect guided by two principles: maximising and optimising relevance. As human beings are constantly making inferences in communication, attention is required to both conceptual and procedural meaning inferences. For example, discourse markers (e.g. but, so, well, you know, and now) and other procedural devices are generally considered as hard to paraphrase and translate. However, these markers may contribute to the inferential process (Blakemore, 2002: 185), as they signpost how the following utterance should be processed (Jucker, 1993: 438). It is thus argued that interpreters should retain these linguistic devices in their renditions to facilitate interlocutors’ meaning inferences in communication.
Building on the theoretical foundation, Part II shifts our attention to the applied aspect of RT in translation and intepreting practice. Chapter 3 is organised around the issue of faithfulness in translator’s decision-making processes. Drawing on Gutt’s (1991) RT-informed model of translation, this chapter examines the effort-effect relation and argues that a stylistically aware translator should understand the importance of context and stylistic features (e.g. iconicity and wordplay) in influencing meaning, choices, voices, and perspectives, and make necessary pragmatic enrichments (e.g. temporal, thematic, discourse relations, and implicatures) for effective communication. Chapter 4 turns to interpreting activities by investigating mode-specific difficulties induced by the interplay of cognitive, linguistic, and social constraints in simultaneous, consecutive, and dialogue interpreting. Drawing on Setton’s (1999) mental model of spoken language interpreting and Stone’s (2007) interlingual enrichment of sign language interpreting, RT-informed strategies to interpret attitude and intentionality markers (e.g. frankly, regrettably, however, anyway) and prosodic devices (e.g. contrastive stress) are proposed to facilitate note-taking and renditions of discourse markers in international war crime trials and interpreter-mediated domestic courtroom proceedings (see Mason, 2015; Wadensjö, 1998).
As the concluding part, Part III summarises the theoretical and methodological implications of relevance-theoretically informed approaches to T&I studies and illuminates further avenues for research, practice, and education.
To sum up, the interdisciplinary book reveals three clear merits. Firstly, it synthesises various theories, approaches, and methods into T&I studies supported by a wealth of real-world data. Secondly, it demonstrates linguistic diversity and cultural inclusiveness through in-text examples of different languages (e.g. Arabic, Bosnian, Croatian, English, German, Japanese, Serbian, and Spanish), text genres (e.g. literary work, tourist visits, and advertisements), and contexts (e.g. everyday conversation, courtroom, post-editing machine translation, and audiovisual translation). Thirdly, it engages readers with a ‘food for thought’ section that contains a list of reflective questions, targetted exercises, a focused further reading list, and a detailed glossary of technical terms, which can be tailored for instructional use in pedagogical settings. This book is instrumental for quality evaluation, meta- and cross-pragmatic skills acquisition and assessments in the T&I discipline.
Overall, this impressive book successfully equips readers with closely knitted discussions of RT-informed theoretical and practical issues in T&I studies. Therefore, the book is recommended as an invaluable asset for educators, trainers, and practitioners in pragmatics, discourse studies, translation and interpreting studies, and beyond.