últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

HASSANE LOUNIS–RELEVANCE THEORY: HOW USEFUL IS IT TO TRANSLATING DISCOURSE CONNECTIVES?
contextual effects 2 and some cultural references the process will inevitably encounter some
difficulties. Relevance theorists believe that it is only through the combination of all these
factors together that an effective communication can take place. One might wonder here
about the link between mental powers and communication. Let us illustrate: if one for
instance attracts the attention of his wife in a party by pointing at his watch, he would most
probably be wanting to bring to her attention that it is time to leave. In this situation, there
is a belief in the husband’s mind that his wife is unaware of the time and yet it is getting late
to leave. What enables the wife to recover her husband’s message is the context. i.e. her
knowledge of the world. In this sense, Sperber and Wilson (1986:15) say that a context
is not limited to information about the immediate physical environment or the
immediately preceding utterances: expectations about the future, scientific hypotheses,
anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the mental state of the speaker,
may all play a role in interpretation” 3 (emphasis added)
The principle of relevance is the backbone of this approach. RT supporters claim it
follows the human nature. They also believe that it subsumes all of Grice’s (1975) maxims.
The idea is simple:
1. The speaker says only what he/she believes is necessary to his/her
audience.
2. What is uttered is adequately relevant to the audience, which with
minimal processing efforts recovers the message intended.
This process obviously requires an effort from the audience. The less the effort
produced the more relevant the information becomes. So, it’s based on two notions: effort
and benefit. Thus, one can deduce that what the hearer believes is the message intended by
the speaker first is the one that this speaker wanted to communicate. Obviously, things
cannot be that straightforward: sometimes the speaker might say things indirectly, use
idioms, metaphor, etc. RT supporters distinguish between descriptive use of language, as
in:
and, interpretive use, as in:
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon, in England
If we give this problem to Anne, she will have it for breakfast.
Sometimes, one party involved in the communication process intentionally breach
the communication elementary rules and here that party is simply being irrational and
consequently there will be a breach of the communication rules. i.e. say only what he/she
believes is relevant to his/her listener/reader.
Now, in case the hearer says only what he/she believes is necessary for the idea to
be understood and the hearer interpret that message with minimal efforts then the
communication has achieved optimal relevance. Wilson and Sperber emphasise that “[…] an
utterance or other act of communication is optimally relevant when it achieves an adequate
2 The notion “context” here is used in a framework other than RT. In RT, this notion has more implications. It
involves “a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world. In other words, “the set of
premises used in interpreting [a given utterance] (Sperber and wilson; 1986 cited in Gutt (1998:42).
3 In other words, the notion “context” as used in other writings is only a part of this same notion when used in a
RT framework.
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