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
138 ALBER T PÉTER VERMES (3) In the early Fifties, during his two-year stint in the US Army, he had a casual relationship with a schoolteacher in Carmel. When he attempted to end the affair, she turned violent. Did it frighten him? "Yeah, it gave me the spooks," he says. "It wasn't a homicide —someone trying to kill me. But it was someone stalking me and threatening to kill themself." What is interesting here is the use of the pronominal form 'themself', when the referent is clearly a female person. Naturally, anyone familiar with the present-day American cultural context will realise that this is probably the result of a somewhat exaggerated effort to comply with expectations of political correctness. Thus (3) conveys the following implicature: (4) Clint is trying to be PC. Now what could a Hungarian translator do with the last sentence in (3)? Let us first suppose she assumes that her average Hungarian reader knows nothing about what PC means in America and she does not consider it possible to introduce this notion within the limits of the given translation task. In this case, assumption (4) will, most probably, be completely lost, and the result will be an instance of indirect translation, since the interpretive resemblance between the original and the translation is less than complete. Let us now suppose that the translator assumes her reader to be familiar with the concept of PC, that is, she assumes that the translation operates in the same context as the original does. Then she could try to look for a solution that will convey assumption (4) in the Hungarian text, thereby achieving complete interpretive resemblance, in this respect at least, between (3) and the translation, which can thus be said to be an instance of direct translation. Parenthetically, my guess is that in this particular case the assumption is likely to be lost because the difference concerning pronominal gender contrast between the two languages would probably make the preservation of the assumption too effort-consuming and would thus threaten the optimal relevance of the translation. Therefore, it seems that here the translation is doomed to be somewhat indirect but, regarding that (4) is a relatively weak implicature,
