Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Albert Péter Vernes: Translation as Interpretation
TRANSLATION AS INTERPRETATION 135 "language of habitual use", as is sometimes allowed). The translator, on the one hand, has to be able to predict what assumptions might be present in the audience's cognitive environment and this is most likely when they share a common culture. And, on the other hand, she has to possess an ease of expression in the target language which is normally possible only in the mother tongue. That is, in most cases the translator will be familiar with the cultural context and also with the language to an extent sufficient to enable her to satisfy the above conditions only in her mother tongue and very rarely in a foreign language. The above definidon also accounts for another interesting problem, namely that although the degree of resemblance between translation and original can always be increased, for some reason it often seems undesirable. We can now explain why this is so: exactly because the increase in resemblance may be accompanied by an increase of processing effort which might outweigh the gains in contextual effects. The two factors, contextual effects and processing effort need to be carefully balanced by the translator, who has to accept the fact that losses in contextual effects are sometimes unavoidable in order to keep the processing effort at a reasonable level, thereby ensuring the overall success of the communication. Relevance, it needs to be kept in mind, is always a joint function of contextual effects and processing effort. Having accepted a definition of translation as an act of communication aimed at optimal resemblance with the original, it seems in order that I clarify certain points here. First of all, how should we understand the expression "the translation optimally resembles the original "? The terms "translation" and "original" are certainly not meant here as the translated and the original text (a text, in the narrow sense, is a collection of printed marks) but as the set of assumptions they give rise to in the secondary and the primary contexts, respectively. Second, what is the specificity of translation (as a form of interpretive language use) compared to monolingual communication? In monolingual communication the communicator communicates (that is, provides evidence, for the audience, for) her own thoughts, whereas a translator communicates (provides evidence for) the assumptions conveyed by the source text, which she has worked out in a different context and language, built on a conceptual system which is likely to be, at least partially, different from that of the secondary context (including the target language). Thus the uniqueness and the difficulty of translation lies
