Pragmatic Aspects of Translation

The term “pragmatics” was introduces in late 1930s by Charles Morris as the name of one of the subdivisions of semiotics. He divided semiotics into 3 parts:

- semantics – relations between linguistic sign and the object of reality

- syntactics – relations between linguistic signs themselves

- pragmatics – the relations between linguistic signs and speakers (participants of the communicative act)

Pragmatics actually deals not with language, but with things we achieve by speaking.

Pragmatics took shape of a separate linguistic discipline in the 1970s under the influence of Speech Act Theory: sentences do not only convey information, but also perform an act (J. L. Ausin, developed by John R. Searle).

A great number of utterances have the look of statements, but thet turn out not to be utterances that can be true of false (“I do” in church – we do sth, not report sth. I now pronounce you man and wife. You are fired).

Austin distinguishes 3 types of act:

- locutionary – the act of making a meaningful statement

- illocutionary – the act that intends to achieve sth

- perlocutionary – consists of the effect of the utterance on the speaker

“Can you stop singing, Bruce?” – it is a question whether or not a man called Bruse can stop producing sounds. It is a meaningful sentence => locutionary. One wants Bruce to shut up => illocutionary. As for perlocutionary – it depends on Bruce’s behavior. He might stop or start singing even louder.

In practice linguistic discussion has focused largely on the illocutionary act, because locutionary is semantics and perlocutionary falls outside the sphere of linguistics.

So when a translator should translate some ritualistic performances, a literal translation won’t do. An appropriate formula in the target language is needed to perform the same act. It is quite surprising not to find such formulas in bilingual dictionaries.

Other speech acts of non-ritualistic kind such as apologising, promising, thanking etc. also should be translated not literally, but by means of some ideomatic sentences in the target language with the same illocutionary force.

Different cultures use the same speech acts to different degree. Eg. requests. (British over-politeness), sppech acts of cursing (quite normal for educated Britains but must be rendered into Russian very carefully), public notices (different modality).

Mary Snell-Hornby: sentences and utterances are different by form and function: sentence – a unit of grammar; utterance – a functional unit which realises in statements, questions and orders.

It is commonly believed that declarative sentence is automatically a statement, interrogative – a question and imperative – an order. But in practice the relation between the grammatical form and the communicative function is far more complex.

Rhetorical question – interogative sentence with a force of an emphatic statement. The form and function exist in dynamic tension, and it varies from language to language. (frequent in French, so translators into French add them where there are none and are justified, because they so apply the pragmatic approach).

Directives (public notices) – illocutionary speech acts with perlocutionary function. In different languages they are requests, commands and prohibitions, but differ in whether the addresse is specified and grammatical and lexical units. (Do not feed, Mind your head, Children must not ride... Passangers... Hawks are not allowed... – imperatives and identifications. German: abstract nouns. No addressee. No modal verbs. Achtung! Wagen schert aus. Benutzung auf eignem Gefahr. Hausieren verboten. Nicht gestatten. Ungesagt. And ‘please’ is more common in English than in German. Russian is closer to German.) Prohibition is typically realised not in imperative, but in declarative form. Your feet are killing the spring-bulbs. Fish don’t smoke. No literal translation is possible in the area of public notices!

Cultural aspect. Passengers are kindly requested not to travel on the roof. – in India roof-top riding was quite common.

On the whole the pragmatic approach plays a very important role in modern translation theory. Adjusting the source text to the requirements and expectations of the target audience. Any utterance containing a message has at the same time a certain pragmatic potential, it can affect the receiver in a certain way. The translator should use the method of pragmatic adaptation to achieve the desired effect.

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