What is pragmatics?

Yule (1996:4) defines pragmatics as “the study of the relationship between linguistic forms and the users of these forms”. Stalnaker’s definition is more explicit (see Hatim and Mason 1991:59):

Pragmatics is the study of the purposes for which sentences are used, of the real world conditions under which a sentence may be appropriately used as an utterance.

Through pragmatics, contextual meaning is exploited and analyzed to discover the “real” meaning. It is important in pragmatics to talk about implied and intended meaning, assumptions, purposes and goals of people in communication and various types of actions.

The inability of semantics to satisfactorily explicate the sociolinguistic and other non-linguistic components of verbal communication gave birth to pragmatics. Thus, pragmatics is a fairly new field of study which shares borders with sociolinguistics and semantics. Pragmatics is discourse in action, action determined by society or interlocutors. When the action is determined by society, it becomes more or less sociolinguistics, but when it is more of intended meaning, it tends or leans towards semantics.

What is translation?

B.F. Skinner (1974:95) says that “translation can best be defined as a verbal stimulus that has the same effect as the original (or as much of the same effect as possible) on a different verbal community”. The Russian formalist, Roman Jkobson, divides translation into three parts: intralingual, intersemiotic and interlingual. Intralingual translation is “rewording” which consists of the interpretation of linguistic signs within the same language. Intersemiotic translation has to do with the interpretation of linguistic signs by using non-linguistic signs. Interlingual translation is translation proper, and consists of interpretation of linguistic signs from one language to another. When viewed against the background of Roman Jakobson’s three-fold definition of translation, it can be asserted that translation is as old as man. The primary purpose of translation is the successful transmission of the original message using the medium of different linguistic signs. In the process of reproducing a message and its resultant nuances from one linguistic form into another, the translator is often confronted with problems of contextual meanings.

Both sociolinguistics and semantics have links with translation. Newmark (1981:5) sees translation theory as being mainly an aspect of semantics while sociolinguistics has a “continuous bearing on translation theory”.

Speech acts

Speech acts form a fundamental part of pragmatic discourse. Translation, being essentially a communicative event, can gain immensely from the three related speech acts of locutionary act, illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect. Locutionary act simply involves the production of a meaningful sentence. Every locutionary act is to fulfil a certain intended communicative function which is the illocutionary force. The illocutionary force reveals the intention of the speaker. A combination of the locutionary act and illocutionary force should produce the perlocutionary effect which is the response intended by the locator from the interlocutor when the locutionary act is produced.

To the extent that speakers make meaningful sentences and have intentions and desire responses, to that extent the speech acts are an integral part of translation. Every translation goes through the first two phases (i.e. locutionary act and illocutionary force) in a very clear way while translating meaningful sentences and their underlying intentions. Grice’s “meaning means intentions” (Newmark 1981:7) helps the translator to see that a text’s intention can be best appreciated only after a good appraisal of the reason and context of utterance. Thus, an angry mother may simply be wanting to discipline her recalcitrant child if she says “I’ll kill you today if you don’t obey me immediately”.

Speech acts have no universal cross-cultural application, and may pose pragmatic problems of transmission e.g. the translator may have the problem of translating from Yoruba to French the almost endless conventional ways of greeting in the former. Some languages tend to use expressions of courtesy more than others. This is due to the difference in conventions, but a good translator may not be more courteous than the language provides naturally except he intends to deliberately promote the culture of the source language text. Thus, the excessive use of “please” while translating a French or an English text into Izon (a Nigerian Language) may be “distasteful” as it may portray undue submissiveness. For instance, a sentence as simple as “come in, please” will not require the use of “sisei” which is the Izon equivalent of “please”.

Just as speech events differ cross-culturally, in the same way social distance and closeness cannot be determined in a universal way. It is culture-specific and the translator/interpreter has to determine the practicality of the situation to know whether or not to employ the strategy of “disturbing” the original message with a view to conveying the message appropriately in the translated version without causing any offence. The translator is thus often involved in making practicaluse of his knowledge of cross-cultural pragmatics. Influenced by Austin, the foremost proponent of speech acts and later Searle, Traugolt and Pratt (1980) (in Hatim and Mason, 1992) produced a taxonomy of illocutionary acts. These acts are representatives, expressives, verdictives, directives, commissives and declaratives. Grice (in Hatim and Mason, 1992) tries to expand the scope of pragmatics as he speaks of “Cooperative Principles” which are maxims that language users adhere to conventionally. Grice’s maxims are meant to ensure effective communication. Any deviation from these maxims may produce implicature, an intended meaning. Reasons for the use of implicature may be conventional or conversational, even though most speech act models tend to place emphasis on conventional rules. Implicature is recognized in translation also and will be discussed shortly.

As earlier pointed out, an illocutionary act has to do with the intention of the speaker. Bach and Harnish (in Lawal et al. 1996) propose “Mutual Contextual Beliefs” to capture the concept of the speaker’s intention and the listener’s inference. Works by Adegbija (1982) and Lawal et al (1996) also lay adequate emphasis on intention as well as “the pragmatics of the particular situation of social interaction” (Lawal et al 1996). In theory, translation based on the pragmatics of a particular social action is bound to be a subjective procedure which is intended to achieve a similar effect on the reader’s mind.

The particular social action leads us to conclude that the interpretation given to any speech act is greatly influenced by speech events. This implies that an utterance can produce different corresponding actions and translations depending on the context. We produce below an authentic discourse which produced a perlocutionary effect that was aided by the context. It was a chat that I had with a friend:

“I love your left hand” (The friend had a cup of tea in his hand)

The friend, in reaction to my utterance, transferred the cup to his right hand. That prompted me to say:

“I love your right hand”. My friend smiled, recognized my desire for tea and told his sister, “My friend wants tea”.

The implicature in my utterance is conversational not conventional. The communicative purpose of my utterance went beyond the sense conveyed by the sum total of the individual lexical items in my sentence. In other words, the semantic context was at variance with the pragmatic function. The propositional content and the illocutionary force potential differed. The locutionary act produced by me was a representative, i.e. I was stating a fact. But my “admiration” of the left and right hands fell under expressive, i.e. my words portrayed a mental and emotional attitude. However, the overall effect which was the perlocutionary effect could be classified as a directive, i.e. a request. My friend’s utterance addressed to his sister in reaction to mine was a representative, i.e. a simple statement: “my friend wants a tea”. The girl rightly interpreted the context of the representative to mean a directive. In other words, her brother (my friend) was ordering her to prepare some tea. The context makes it possible for us to understand the real intentions of the interlocutors, the implicature was obvious. But how does one relate these utterances and the analysis above to translation?

The answer is simple. It behoves the translator to ensure that his/her performance accomplishes the appropriate speech acts. Having first understood the locutionary act, the translator has to recognize the illocutionary force, and in this case produce the perlocutionary effect. In other words, the translation should be done in such a way as to produce the desired “tea”.

The importance of pragmatics to translation can be viewed from the fact that no locator says everything he has in mind. The locator is conditioned either by the context or his culture to say the most relevant aspects of his speech that will ensure comprehension. In a similar way, this is what Hall (In Cordonnier, 1995:13) means when he says:

Man himself is programmed by his culture in a very redundant way. If it were not so, he would not be able to talk or act as these activities would be too demanding. Each time a man talks, he only enunciates a part of the message. The remaining part is completed by the hearer. A great part of what is not said is understood implicitly… (translation mine).

Man is very often not conscious or just superficially conscious of this process.

An attempt to translate the illocutionary act and the perlocutionary effect draws the translator near to the theory of interpretative translation formulated by the Teachers at ESIT, Paris or the theory of dynamic equivalence based on the principle of equivalent effect or response. Interpretative translation lays premium on interpretation of the message in the light of the context, and transmits the message in the target language by deverbalising, i.e. by forgetting the original words while retaining the meaning. On its part, dynamic equivalence was formulated by Nida (1964) following Reiss where “the receptors of the message in the receptor language (should be able to) respond to it substantially the same manner as the receptors in the source language” (Nida & Taber, 1969:24). The desire to produce an equivalent effect made Nida to accept J.B. Phillips translation of Romans 16:16 from “greet one another with a holy kiss” (King James Bible) to “give one another a hearty handshake all around”. Nida’s dynamic equivalence and Seleskovitch’s traduction interpretative” recognize the fact that speech acts differ cross-culturally, but the translator has a business of ensuring a cross-cultural pragmatic success.

It is also worth noting that Jin and Nida too discuss translation from an essentially semiotic perspective as they focus on the effect of the translation on the receptor. In Chang (1996), translated version, but an attempt is made to establish the text and its receptor. The relationship becomes more interesting when viewed against the concept of communication load and channel capacity of receptors. In other words, Jin and Nida (in Chang, 1996:2) were conscious of the fact that “a message that has been properly formed by a source usually has a degree of difficulty which more or less matches the channel capacity of receptor”. (Channel capacity has to do with the capacity to assimilate). The translator may then have to make explicit what is linguistically implicit in the original text by lengthening the message through deletions, additions or substitutions. At times the adjustments could go as far as adaptation. The notion of communication load and channel capacity brings us to the idea of pragmatic or variant element of translation which is difficult and may have to be explained.

Conclusion

In our view, virtually every translation, or in particular interpretation, has with it a pragmatic element at one level or the other. Speech acts and events are common features to the two. A good knowledge of pragmatics can enrich the study and practice of translation. Drawing from his knowledge of pragmatics, the translator could, through properly contextualized situations, capture and translate appropriately the non-linguistic dimensions of verbal communication. The basic difference is that translation deals with different languages.

Notes

1. I am highly indebted to Professor Tunde Ajiboye of the University of Ilorin for inspiring me to write this article.

2. See Ozidi Bariki (in press): “Translation in relation to Linguistics: the debate so far” in Soyoye, Ayo (ed.): Readings in Modern Languages Studies in Nigeria.

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