Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

The pragmatic dimension

Handling text in context, according to Hatim & Mason (1990: 55), involves not only identifying the register membership of a text, but also inferring the underlying intentions or pragmatic values which are at once subsumed by each element of discourse, and which also result from the interaction of these pragmatic values. In fact, it is these interactions which enable language users to perceive or “locate a given message” in its natural habitat – human intentionality (Ibid: 58). In other words, these communicative intentions serve an overall rhetorical purpose or a global intention and lead to the notion of the illocutionary structure of a text (Ibid: 77).
Other developments in pragmatics, which are also important in handling text in context, include the notion of the ‘co-operative’ maxims which interlocutors have to abide by (Grice 1975), the notions of presuppositions, inference, text act, relevance, effectiveness and efficiency. Thus, dealing with text in context does not merely concern the referential meaning and “matching SL and TL registers” (Hatim & Mason 1990: 55); the translator also has to relay the illocutionary force. According to Hatim & Mason (1990: 76),

Equivalence is to be achieved not only of propositional content but also of illocutionary force. At discourse level, communicative failure (relatively speaking) of a translation may be attributed to failure to represent speech acts adequately.

House (1997) sees no point in including a pragmatic dimension when dealing with text in context. Hatim and Mason (1990), on the other hand, draw attention to the fact that this is most important, especially in cases where intended meaning varies between the SL and TL texts norms:
From the point of view of translators, this [i.e. the pragmatic dimension] is important not so much because they might be unable to perceive intended meaning (competence in this area being a sine qua non of professional translating) but rather because in certain cases expression of intended meaning is subject to subtle variation between SL and TL norms and equivalence may therefore be difficult to achieve (Ibid: 57).

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