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
136 ALBER T PÉTER VERMES partly in the fact that it involves second-order interpretation and pardy in that it may (and most often does) necessitate a shift between conceptual systems. Third, does this definition enable us to distinguish translation from other forms of interlingual communication, like adaptation, where a certain interpretive relationship between two texts also obtains? In Gutt's (1991) view, every interlingual interpretive act of communication is an act of translation, irrespective of how close is the interpretive relationship between the source and the target text. This relationship may range from com'plete to non-existent, and since in this continuum there are no natural break-points, the theory does not provide a grasp to distinguish between what counts as translation and what counts as nontranslation. Yet, at one point he does allow for the possibility of separating translation from, for instance, paraphrase in such a way that an interpretive act which does not fulfil the promise of optimal relevance may be regarded as paraphrase (Gutt 1991:121). In my opinion, however, this view takes us the wrong way for the following reasons. The relevance of a stimulus is always a function of the context and thus an utterance which is optimally relevant in one context, may not be so in a different context. From this it follows that an interpretive act which is optimally relevant in one context and is thus a translation, may not be optimally relevant in another context and would therefore be an instance of non-translation. I do not think that this would be a desirable turn. Whether a given target text qualifies as translation or not, obviously, cannot depend on if it is optimally relevant but on the intention with which it was produced. The pivotal question, in my view, is whether the secondary communicator intended the target text to be a translation or a paraphrase. This, of course, is a rather trivial statement. The question is how and, most importantiy, whether the theory is able to grasp this difference of intentions. I think it is, and the crucial element is contained in the definition. If translation is regarded as a communicative act which, in the secondary context, purports to convey an informative intention that interpretively resembles the original as closely as possible , this means that an interpretive act of communication will be a translation only ifit is produced with the intention to convey in the secondary context, in consistence with the principle of optimal relevance, those and only those explicatures and implicatures which the original conveyed in the primary context. If the secondary communicator does not have this basic
