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

132 ALBER T PÉTER VERMES (because the new assumptions are found too weak and are consequently erased) or all it does is simply add some new assumptions to it, it will have failed to achieve any contextual effect (Sperber and Wilson 1986:117). Relevance, then, is clearly context-dependent: a given set of assumptions to be communicated that yields an appropriate number of contextual effects may fail to do so in a different context and thus the communication may break down. Alternatively, it can break down because the effort needed to work out these contextual effects in a secondary context may be gratuitously great, leading to a loss of interest in the communication on the part of the audience. As Bell (1991) writes, this is the point, the threshold of termination, "where the reader has got enough out of the text and/or feels that, in cost-benefit terms, there is little point in continuing" (p. 213). It is then a gross oversimplification of matters to say that a given message can always be communicated through translation: it is only possible if the secondary context makes it possible to communicate that message. And this is exactly what Steiner says when he writes "not everything can be translated now " (Steiner 1975/1992:262, italics as in original). Some things may defy translation at a given moment but through changes of context and language may become translatable in the future. Translators, too, have long been (even if only intuitively) aware of this fact. This is manifest in translations which are addressed to an audience essentially different from the original one, for instance when a great classic of American literature like The Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper was rendered into Hungarian by Ádám Réz in such a way that long politico-historical descriptive passages were eliminated for the obvious reason that the translation was done for children, who would not be interested in these or, rather, would not be prepared to interpret such descriptions, all of which might result in the child reader losing interest and putting the book down. Thus in such a case it may be a wise decision on the part of the translator to leave out these parts, in order to ensure that the communication as a whole would be successful. In sum, the primary question in translation is not in what way a given message can be communicated in the target language but whether it is communicable at all in the context of the receiving culture, in the given communicative situation, in consistency with the principle of