6.3.2 Cohesion o

Blum-Kulka's well-known study 'Shifts of cohesion and coherence in trans- Q

lation' hypothesizes that increased explicitation of cohesive ties may be a general strategy adopted by all translators. She shows how changes in cohe­sion in translation may bring about functional shifts in texts, giving the example of a Hebrew translation of a scene from Pinter's Old Times (Blum-Kulka 1986/2000: 302-3). Inevitably, because of the inflection of the adjectives, the Hebrew TT has to make explicit the gender referent of the enigmatic opening ST statement, 'Fat or thin?' Hebrew and other languages would need to state whether the character referred to was a man or woman. Similarly, literary translations from verb-inflected languages into English need to make explicit what are sometimes deliberately ambiguous grammat­ical subjects. The first line of Julio Cortazar's classic novel Rayuela begins with the question 'dEncontraria a la Maga?' In English this could be 'Would I/he/she/you find the (female) Magus?'

As with the thematic structure, it is in many ways the density and progres­sion of cohesive ties throughout a text that are important. This web of relationships may have to differ between ST and TT, since the networks of lexical cohesion will not be identical across languages (Baker 1992: 206). As an illustration, Baker (pp. 185-6) puts forward the idea, backed by short extracts and their translations, that Portuguese prefers lexical repetition to pronoun use and (p. 207) that Arabic prefers lexical repetition to variation. The TT must also be coherent, in other words it must hang together logically in the mind of the TT receiver. This has to do with pragmatics, the subject of the last of Baker's chapters.

6.3.3 Pragmatics and translation

Baker considers various aspects of pragmatic equivalence in translation, applying relevant linguistic concepts to interlinguistic transfer. Baker's defin­ition of pragmatics is as follows:

Pragmatics is the study of language in use. It is the study of meaning, not as generated by the linguistics system but as conveyed and manipulated by partici­pants in a communicative situation.

(Baker 1992: 217)

In this section, we briefly consider three major pragmatic concepts: coher­ence, presupposition and implicature.

The coherence of a text, related to cohesion, 'depends on the hearer's or receiver's expectations and experience of the world' (Baker 1992: 219). Clearly this may not be the same for the ST and TT reader. Baker gives the

98 Discourse and register analysis approaches

SEMIOTIC LEVEL OF CONTEXT AND DISCOURSE

example (p. 220) of a passage about the London department store Harrods. In order to make sense of the passage, the reader needs to know that the flagship Harrods and the description the splendid Knightsbridge store are syn­onyms. TT readers in other cultures may not know this. The Arabic transla­tion therefore makes the link explicit with the addition to the name of a gloss incorporating the repetition of the word store (the main store Harrods).

The area of presupposition is closely related to coherence. It is defined by-Baker (p. 259) as 'pragmatic inference', although, perhaps surprisingly, she only discusses it briefly. Presupposition relates to the linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge the sender assumes the receiver to have or which are necessary in order to retrieve the sender's message. Thus, in the European Parliament in 1999, Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan's phrase let me now turn to bananas would presuppose that the receiver knows about the trade dispute between the European Union and the United States over banana imports, or at least can access this information from the linguistic and extralinguistic contexts. This is not unlikely for the immediate receivers, since they are Members of the European Parliament and are aware of the issue. Similarly, the phrase J discussed this issue in Washington presupposes knowledge that Washington in this context refers to the seat of government of the United States and the venue for Brittan's talks. The problem for the translator occurs, of course, when the TT receivers cannot be assumed to possess the same background knowledge as the ST receivers, either because of cultural differences and/or because the text is being translated after a time gap when the original information is no longer activated by the reference.³

More emphasis is placed on presupposition by Fawcett (1997: 123-34), whose chapter on the subject contains many perceptive and interesting examples; typical (p. 124) is the metaphorical use of the place name Mohdcs in a Hungarian text. The name would mean little to most receivers in other cultures, so a translator would need to replace it with an explicitation such as crushing defeat. \

Baker gives more attention to implicature, another form of pragmatic inference, which she defines (p. 223) as 'what the speaker means or implies rather than what s/he says'. The concept of implicature was developed by Paul Grice (1975), who described a set of 'rules' or 'maxims' that operate in normal co-operative conversation; these are:

1. Quantity: Give the amount of information that is necessary; do not give too much or too little.

2. Quality: Say only which you know to be true or what you can support.

3. Relevance: What you say should be relevant to the conversation.

4. Manner: Say what you need to say in a way that is appropriate to the message you wish to convey and which (normally) will be understood by the receiver.

In addition, some theorists add the maxim of politeness: Be polite in your comments (see Brown and Levinson 1987).

Participants in conversations assume the person to whom they are speaking is (subconsciously) following these maxims and they themselves co-operate by trying to make sense of what is being said. In turn, they also tend to be co-operative in what they say and the way they say it. Clearly, the linguistic and cultural contexts are also crucial in limiting the range of implicatures.

The maxims may also be deliberately flouted, sometimes for a humorous effect. Such a flouting of the relevance maxim might have occurred, for instance, had Sir Leon Brittan, above, begun to discuss the value of eating bananas for breakfast. Particular problems are posed for the translator when the TL works by different maxims. An example given by Baker (p. 235) is the translation from English to Arabic of a book on Arab political humour, where a vulgar joke about God is omitted in the Arabic TT so as not to upset local sensibilities. This shows a difference in the operation of the maxims of manner and politeness in the two cultures. This is also the case in an example (Gibney and Loveday, quoted in Baker 1992: 233-4) that occurred during negotiations between the USA and Japan in 1970. The Japanese Premier replies to American concerns on textile exports by saying zensho shimasu ('I'll handle it as well as I can'). This is understood by the US President as a literal promise to sort out a problem (i.e. it obeys the US-cultural quality and relevance maxims), whereas the Japanese phrase is really a polite formula for ending the conversation (i.e. it obeys the Japanese-cultural maxim of polite­ness). This clearly shows, as Baker notes (p. 236), that translators need to be fully aware of the different co-operative principles in operation in the respective languages and cultures.