Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Albert Vermes: Proper names in translation: a case study

This refinement of classification is made necessary, first of all, by an intuitive recognition of the fact that when there is a conventional correspondent available in the TL, this would seem to be the translator's first and natural choice: the one that comes to mind almost subconsciously. This does not mean that no other solution is ever possible, but any digression from the most obvious solution would need to be supported by serious reasons. In a relevance-theoretic framework we would say that a translation using a conventional correspondent is the one that requires the least processing effort and any digression, increasing the amount of processing effort, would need to be justified by a substantial gain in contextual effects. Now which of these four operations the translator employs in a particular situation depends primarily on what meanings the proper name has in the given context and which of these meanings she thinks important to retain in the TL. (From now on, for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the translator/communicator as she and to the audience as he.) One question we will have to examine, then, is what sort of meanings a proper name may have and how these meanings can be rendered in the translation. Before we can do this, however, we will have to clarify what a proper name is. So far we have been content with an implicit understanding of the concept but a detailed characterisation of the problem will require that the definition is made more or less explicit. One basic assumption that we shall draw on in this paper is that communication is an ostensive-inferential process, as explicated in Sperber and Wilson (1986). A brief outline of their relevance theory is presented in the next section and in the subsequent sections we shall carry out our analysis of the problem in this relevance-theoretic framework. 2 Relevance theory and translation 2.1 Relevance The principal assumption of this study is that translation is a special form of communication and, as such, is not essentially different from any other communicative process. The theory of communication, relevance theory (see Sperber and Wilson 1986), that we are going to build on views communication as an ostensive-inferential process. Ostensive because in every act of communication the communicator makes it manifest to the audience that she wants to communicate something; and inferential because comprehension involves the audience in constructing a hypothesis about the communicator's intentions via spontaneous non-demonstrative inference. 162