Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
ALBERT PÉTER VERMES Culture in Translation: Strategies and Operations
Culture iri Translation: Strategies and Operations 91 an expression substituted this way, by directly activating relevant contextual assumptions in the target context, 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. Substitution, in my understanding, also subsumes cases where the graphologica! units of the SL expression are replaced by TL graphological units, based on conventionally established correspondences (Hungarian Moszkva for Russian Mocnea or Hungarian Csingacsguk for English Chingachgook ), where the TL form makes explicit the phonological value of the original expression. The inclusion of graphological substitution, traditionally called transliteration (cf., e.g., Catford 1965: 66), within this operation is justified, I think, by the conventional nature of the correspondence between graphological units and by the fact that its application is motivated mainly by considerations of optimising processing effort. (4) Modification I understand as the process of choosing for the SL expression a TL substitute which is semantically, or conventionally, unrelated to the original. In relevance-theoretic terms this means replacing the original with a TL expression which involves a substantial alteration of the logical and encyclopaedic content of the SL expression (English the market for Hungarian közért , 'grocery shop', or English shoe repair shop for Hungarian harisnyaszemf elszedő) . This operation is clearly aimed at minimising processing effort, even if it means losing some relevant assumptions and, thus, contextual effects. We thus have a relatively simple set of four operations, which are defined generally enough, hopefully, to allow for any possible cases. Transference is an operation which preserves both the relevant logical and encyclopaedic content of the original expression, translation proper preserves the logical but not the encyclopaedic content, substitution preserves only the encyclopaedic content and, finally, modification preserves neither. In general, the use of modification and substitution seems to be motivated mainly by considerations of processing effort, while the other two, transfer and translation, through preserving relevant assumptions, seem to occur mainly for reasons of ensuring adequate contextual effects in the target text. This is remarkably in line with Sperber and Wilson's definition, whereby an assumption is said to be relevant in a context, on the one hand, to the extent that it has adequate contextual effects in this context and, on the other hand, to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is not unnecessarily great (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 125), insofar as both processing effort and contextual effects, the two factors to
