Specialized translation from Relevance Theory A case study of a legal text
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Abstract
Relevance Theory explains human communication from a cognitive perspective: the speaker conveys ostensive stimuli to make his or her communicative intention clear and the listener interprets these stimuli on the assumption that they are optimally relevant, i.e. that they convey the greatest possible amount of knowledge in exchange of the least possible processing effort. The stimuli linguistically encode only part of the information; another part of what is communicated is dependent on the inferential computations accessible to cognition. The principle of relevance is also relevant in activities of mediation, although in this case it operates consciously. In fact, there are occasions when the translator, conditioned by the target language, must decide which part of the information should be communicated explicitly and which meanings can be inferred. Through the translatological analysis of a legal-administrative text, it is shown that the translator applies this cognitive principle of communication and establishes in the target text a new balance between what is provided by the code and what is subject to inference. The proposed analysis has implications for the didactics of specialized translation.
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