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

The result of this non-demonstrative inferential process, the hypothesis, cannot be logically proved but can be confirmed. When the communicator utters something, her utterance will be interpretable in a number of different ways; however, not all of these possible interpretations are equally accessible to the audience. In evaluating the various interpretations, the audience is aided by one general criterion which can eliminate all but a single possible interpretation: the criterion of optimal relevance. The audience can reasonably expect that the communicator's message will be relevant to him on the given occasion and, moreover, that it is formulated in such a way that will make it easy for him to come to the intended interpretation. Wilson (1992) gives the following definition of optimal relevance: "An utterance, on a given interpretation, is optimally relevant if and only if: (a) it achieves enough effects to be worth the hearer's attention; (b) it puts the hearer to no unjustifiable effort in achieving those effects" (175). This definition of relevance is built on the notions of contextual effect and processing effort. 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 needed to process the utterance is a function of the linguistic complexity of the utterance, the accessibility of the context and the inferential effort made in computing the contextual effects of the utterance in the given context (Wilson 1992: 174). In brief: the more contextual effects and the less processing effort, the more relevant the utterance is to the audience on the given occasion. It follows, then, that a reasonable communicator will formulate her message in such a manner as to enable the audience to come to the desired interpretation in the most cost-effective way: that is, she will make sure that the first acceptable interpretation that occurs to the audience will be the one that she intended to communicate. What this means at the audience's end is that as soon as he has found the first interpretation that satisfies his expectations of relevance, he has found the one that a rational communicator can be reasonably believed to have intended. Eventually, the principle of optimal relevance entails that "all the hearer is entitled to impute as part of the intended interpretation is the minimal context and set of contextual effects that would be enough to make the utterance worth his attention" (Wilson 1992: 176). According to Sperber and Wilson (1986), an utterance, or indeed any representation which has a propositional form, "can represent some state of affairs in virtue of its propositional form being true of that state of affairs," that is, descriptively, or "it can represent some other representation which 163