Now let us see how the analysis of conversation presented above interacts with translation. It looks that speech act theory and conversational implicatures are presented keeping in view oral mode of discourse. And hence the applications are obvious to liason interpreting. An interpreter can perfectly translate the locutionary act of an utterance, i.e., an interpreter can find appropriate equivalents for ST words and produce them correctly and appropriately following TL Grammar. But he might fail to perceive or misinterpret the illocutionary force of an utterance in context. For instance, in translating the following utterance:
"In those days, only men could vote in elections".
Here, one has to translate the meaning that only men were permitted to vote in election. Instead if the word 'could' is translated as past ability, the utterance loses its seriousness.
Misrepresentation of illocutionary force of the utterance achieves an unintended perlocutionary act. In the case of a writer-translator, the result of misrepresentation of illocutionary force (i.e, perlocutionary act) is not immediate. Unlike in oral mode of discourse, the felicity conditions are difficult to perceive in written discourse as the interlocutors text producer and the reader, while the former dictates and shapes his discourse according to this whims and fancies. We do not know how much a reader interacts and contributes to the text. However, recent studies assume that the participants in conversation (producer and reader in the case of a written text) are in continuous interaction with each other. If it is so, any text becomes a process rather than a product and then the translator has to work on this dynamic element. That is, the interaction between producer and receiver is crucial to translation activity as a process. A translator should not only understand the locutionary act of each sentence in a text but also the illocutionary force which the sentence carries with it. In other words, the translator has to be competent enough to process the intention of SL text and also be in a position to make judgements about the likely effect of the translation on readers. After all, both ST and TT are produced for a reader whose needs, expectations etc. are always kept in the mind of a ST producer. In an advertisement, for example, the intention of the producer is to sell the product and so any translation has to achieve the same goal (i.e., persuade the consumer to buy the product). While a translation of a public notice maybe required purely for information. Thus the translator has to be a receiver of ST but not specifically an addressee i.e., not the intended receiver of ST. He is an observer of the text-world environment of ST. His role may be to construct a model of the intended meaning of ST and judge the probable impact of ST on intended receivers. And as a text producer, the translator should consider a different sociocultural environment and try to reproduce the interpretation of ST producer's intention in such a way as to achieve the intended effects on TT readers. He should also take into consideration TT readers needs and expectations. So the translator as any other text producer achieves his goals by transmitting relevant content following Grice's maxims. In doing so, he / she might delete, add or modify some of the information. |
