Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)

ALBERT PÉTER VERMES Culture in Translation: Strategies and Operations

86 Albert Péter Vermes One basic assumption is that translation is a form of ostensive-inferential communication, as explicated in Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Gutt (1991). A brief outline of relevance theory is presented in Section 2.1, followed by, in the next section, a discussion of translation as a form of interpretation and of the context of translation. Section 2.3 will clarify what I mean by the terms 'culture' and 'culture-specific expression'. Section 3, in turn, introduces, along with a short explanation of translation strategies, the translation operations, which will be discussed through examples in Section 4. 2. Background 2.1. Ostensive-Inferential Communication, Relevance and Meaning The terms ostensive and inferential describe two complementary aspects of communication. It is an ostensive process because it involves communicators in producing a stimulus that points toward their intentions, and inferential because the audience uses the stimulus in an inferential process of comprehension as evidence for what those intentions may be. Any individual will only pay attention to a stimulus when they can expect that it will prove relevant to them. Thus, when communicators produce a stimulus with the intention to convey a certain set of assumptions, they will have to, in a way, implicitly promise the audience that, on the one hand, the stimulus will lead to the desired effects and, on the other, it will not take more effort than is necessary for achieving these effects. This requirement is at the heart of ostensive-inferential communication and is called the principle of relevance: "Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance" (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 158), where optimal relevance means that the processing of a stimulus leads to contextual effects that are worth the audience's attention and, moreover, that it puts the audience to no unnecessary processing effort in achieving those effects. A contextual effect arises when, in the given context, the new information strengthens or replaces an existing assumption or when, combining with an assumption in the context, it results in a contextual implication. The effort required to process a stimulus in a context is the function of several factors. According to Wilson (1992: 174), the three most important of these are: the complexity of the stimulus, the accessibility of the context, and the inferential effort needed to compute the contextual effects of the stimulus in that context. In relevance theory, an assumption is defined as a structured set of concepts. In this framework the meaning of a concept is made up of a