On the Relevance of Translation Theory

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Pattemore, Stephen, On the Relevance of Translation Theory. Review and Expositor. 108(2011): 263-277 Stephen Pattemore The author is a Translation Consultant with the United Bible Societies, based in Auckland, New Zealand. On the Relevance of Translation Theory Abstract Contemporary Bible translation is guided by theories of communication, which emphasize pragmatic dimensions of language – the use of language in a particular context. For the Bible translator, at least two contexts are important – that of the original delivery of the text, and that of the contemporary reading audience. Relevance Theory (RT) holds that what we say is merely a clue to what we mean and has to be interpreted within the intended context of ideas. Thus RT provides a principled means for

evaluating the role of context in the creation and reception of meaning. This paper briefly explains the issues involved, outlines some of the key ideas of RT, and provides some examples of the way in which considerations of relevance can influence translation. Reading Between the Lines Try as I may, I find it almost impossible understand the currents of thought that swirled around the appearance of the Bible of 1611. The preface From the Translators to the Reader, from which I might expect some help, is at times clear and cogent, and at times seems itself to be lost in the mists of a past age.i It is not that I cannot read and understand the sentences. It is reading between the lines that is so difficult. And yet that is what I really want to do. Why does that particular sentiment appear on the surface of the text? What lurks beneath? Why do the translators use the first 1500 words of their preface to recite examples of great people of the past who did well and were

calumniated for it? Who are those nursing fathers and mothersthat withdraw from them who hang upon their breastslivelihood and support fit for their estates? If such is the difficulty of reading a document 400 years old and in my own language, how much more opaque the Scriptures themselves, coming from alien cultures, written in foreign languages, evoking a context 2000 years old! And yet, again, reading between the lines is precisely what I want to do, to unlock the secrets trapped in the interstices between words and sentences, because I am convinced that only then will I really be able to understand what was going on. I want to understand it because I approach the Bible as a Christian, a member of a confessing community which has for nearly 2000 years held these particular documents as central and normative. Why these documents and not others? What was it in that first interchange of meaning, which started them on their path to canonisation? There are at least two common responses to this dilemma, neither of them totally satisfactory. A historical critic will say that much of the information I lack is accessible if only I will search hard enough. Historians and classicists, archaeologists and biblical scholars have uncovered a vast trove of background information, or context. And this does indeed help to fill in some of the gaps. Were I to read all that is known about Henry VIII and William Tyndale, about the religious rivalries of the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, the political aims of James I, the Hampton Court conference and its outcome, I would certainly be better placed to understand the nuances and the silent assumptions of the Preface. And the same goes for the Bible. My problem, now, is that in each situation I have too much context. Just how much is necessary to read between the lines? On the other hand, a postmodern critic will say that all I have is the text and I just have to get used to that. The authors and their meanings are irretrievable lost and we confront a never-ending recession of signification. I must make of it what I will. And yet, though I have learnt much of value from postmodern approaches, I am never satisfied that this fundamental pessimism about the

construction of meaning is genuinely true to the human condition. We regularly, and for the most part successfully, communicate meaning to each other by word and gesture and text. And when I hear or read what appears to be a token of intentional communication, I relentlessly pursue the meaning which I assume to lie behind it. This no less true when the author of the communication is removed from me in time and space. There are large parts of the AV Preface, which I am convinced I do understand correctly. Certainly the greater the distance, the wider are the gaps between the words, and the possibility of missing the meaning greater. But even to admit the existence of misunderstanding is to acknowledge and privilege understanding. For undoubtedly the Translators Preface to the KJV was intended to be understood by its readers – not just in its surface form but in its hints and implications. The authors presumed on a great deal of interest among the readers – enough for them to persevere through pages of apparent ramblings before reading anything pertinent to the new translation of Scripture they held in their hands. The Preface is in all respects a typical record of an act of communication. One group of people seek to change the mental state of another group by means of a coherent text, assuming that the readers have knowledge not only of the grammar and semantics of a language, but of a whole socio-cultural context of ideas, events and places. And what is true of the Preface is no less true of the translation it introduces, and ultimately of the source texts themselves. The KJV represents an act of communication between the translators and the Christian public of 17th century England, but not an independent and original one. It claims to faithfully represent an earlier act of communication, or rather multiple earlier acts, in which biblical authors sought to change the mental state of their readers within their own socio-cultural contexts. It is this understanding of translation as an act of communication, between specific people embedded in a particular context, that underlies most modern theories of translation. This was not always the case.

Communication and Context

People often thought of language as a kind of code. To communicate a thought from my mind to yours I must encode it in words and sentences which you in turn must decode (using the same code book as I did) to generate the thought. The meaning is essentially contained within the text. This code model of communication was dominant through much of the second half of last century and formed one of several theoretical foundations on which Eugene Nida based his theory of translation.ii This was the most influential theoretical framework for translation prior to the rise of Translation Studies as a secular discipline. His way of understanding translation continues to influence Bible translation around the world to this day – in particular the idea that the form of a text and its meaning were separable, and that in Bible translation at least, the effective communication of the meaning must take precedence over preservation of the form. Growing awareness of more complex dimensions internal to the text itself (discourse structure) and of the function of text not so much as containers of meaning but as signs pointing to something else (semiotics) led to significant refinements of the earlier theory.iii But developments in linguistics and communication theory began to undermine its theoretical underpinnings. In particular, the code model was found inadequate to account for the subtlety and power of human communication. Increasingly, theories of communication have taken into account the importance of context, inference, and the cooperation between participants in the construction of meaning. These pragmatic accounts of communication have impacted our understanding of the nature of translation. Wilt, for example uses the metaphorical concept of communication frames – subsets of context marked by the restrictions of language, organisation, and socio-culturual situation – within which communicators and audience negotiate meaning by mutual interaction.iv Nord has built on the funtionalist ideas of Vermeer to develop skopos theory, in which the success of a translation is measured against the negotiated interests of sponsor, translator, receptor community and text.v

Relevance in Communication

Operating at a more fundamental level is Relevance Theory (RT) proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986 and applied to Bible translation by Ernst-August Gutt shortly thereafter.vi The fundamental insight of RT is that we rarely say exactly what we wish to communicate. We usually say less than we intend, and choose our words for their ability to point efficiently to our meaning. If I shout Fire! in a crowded room, it will be understood by everyone to mean The house is on fire. Leave the building immediately. I could say exactly what I mean, but it would not be so relevant, because it would take too long for the listeners to process and might not gain their attention in the first place. Similarly, few in the room would interpret my utterance to mean Squeeze the triggers of your guns, although in another context that might be the precisely relevant meaning. No code system conceivable distinguishes the two meanings of Fire! - it is context does that. This may seem an unusual and extreme example. But these same factors determine much of our communication habits, spoken or written. When we hear (or read) a token of communication that was clearly intentional (ostensive communication), we assume it is as relevant as possible, and search for contexts in our understanding which lead to results which are beneficial in some way. Finding the first such context and its implied meaning, we stop processing. The party-goers running for fire exits do not stop to probe deeper as to whether I actually intended them to shoot their guns. These ideas, expressed in language drawn from pragmatic linguistics and cognitive psychology, provide Relevance Theory with a framework for understanding how human communication works. Meaning is underdetermined by the message that carries it. Even when all the laws and resources of syntax and semantics have been applied the results must be interpreted through extensive use of inference, before the senders meaning can be reached. The text interacts with its intended context to prompt the audience towards the meaning, driven by our instinct to find the communication

relevant. Context in RT is a cognitive concept - a set of propositions that we hold to be true or probably true. The sum of all such ideas is our cognitive environment. By evoking a context the speaker both compels and constrains the listener towards a specific interpretation. The ideas derived inferentially from the text of a communication are called contextual effects, which may be explicatures or implicatures. Explicatures are assumptions derived from the text itself, including the results of assigning reference to pronouns, general terms and deictic particles, resolving ambiguous terms, and enriching concepts in the text from the listeners memory. Implicatures by contrast, can only be derived by processing the text in a particular context. They result from the interaction of text and context. Relevance itself is defined comparatively. An idea communicated is more relevant if it has many contextual effects for the listener. The communication is also more relevant if it requires less mental processing effort to understand. A communication is optimally relevant when it is worth the listeners effort to process it, and it is the most relevant text that could have been generated consistent with the speakers abilities and preferences.vii So human cognition takes place in a balancing act between processing effort and contextual effect. Communication works because the audience assumes that the communicator intends to communicate and intends to be relevant. Communicators work on the same assumptions and craft their messages to lead their audience to their intended meaning with appropriate degrees of effort. Context is not determined in advance, but various contexts are accessed progressively as a message is processed, as listeners accesses their short term memory of previous parts of the conversation, information stored in their longer term memory and other environmental factors to which the message points them.

Relevance Theory and the Bible RT was developed largely around considerations of face-to-face conversation. However Sperber and Wilson envisaged it as applying equally to written communication and to literary texts.viii The ability of RT to explain the use of non-literal language in literature arises from a distinction between descriptive use and interpretive use of language.ix In the former, an utterance (or text) is used to represent an actual state of affairs. In the latter, an utterance represents the speakers interpretation of another representation (e.g. an utterance or thought.) Reported speech, metaphor, simile, irony are all examples of interpretive use, and poetic language can be shown to operate by generating a large number of weak implicatures.x Since RT holds that no sharp cut-off can be defined between strong author-intended implicatures and a long tail of progressively weaker contextual effects for which the audience must take increasing responsibility, it explains the nuanced effects of literary texts on varying audiences, and the reality of multiple readings. Thus RTs treatment of literature is neither a deterministic author-centred approach nor a deconstructive audience-centred approach. Rather it functions to explaining how each such approach operates. The Bible is a special case of a literary text.xi Thus RT offers a framework for understanding firstly how each original communication act would have been understood by its first audience within the cognitive environment they shared with the author, and secondly how subsequent audiences, assuming different sets of priorities within their cognitive environments, arrive at differing readings.xii RT also provides a principled way of evaluating the role of intertextual quotation and allusion.xiii Biblical texts, then, are not simply packages of information waiting to be unwrapped, containing within themselves all that is necessary to understand them. Context is vital for understanding, but not context as a vague unbounded situation for the texts. Context which is relevant to understanding is specifically the assumptions about their world shared by the author and audience – and just sufficient of these to make sense.

Relevance and Bible Translation RT is equally interested in what goes on when a translator offers to a new audience a text purporting to represent a text originally given to another audience in another language. Ernst-August Gutt pioneered the application of RT to Bible translation.xiv Finding the usual notions of equivalence problematic, Gutt suggested that RTs concept of descriptive usage provided a basis for explaining translation. Translation is a second order act of communication – it claims to faithfully represent an earlier and primary communication. The translator may choose to present to the new audience a text which requires them to access elements of the original context in order to understand it correctly. This Gutt describes as direct translation, or more recently s-mode translation because it centres on representing the stimulus. Alternatively the translator may choose to present a text which the new audience can understand correctly using their own readily accessible contextual clues. This is indirect translation or i-mode translation, as it represents the interpretation. Of course no extended translation is ever exclusively s-mode or i-mode but usually some mixture of the two. But what Gutt has done is to force translators to consider what context they are expecting the readers of the translation to have access to, and therefore how they will measure their success. Considerations of the relevance of the communication event place a number of constraints on translators. How much information which is implicit in the source text should be made explicit in translation? Traditional translation practice has no principled way of dealing with this, and translational adjustments proposed or modelled sometimes set the translated text adrift from its context. RT redefines the boundaries by introducing the concepts of explicatures and implicatures. As a slight oversimplification we may say that in translation explicatures may be raised to the status of assertions in translation (e.g. the river Jordan; Jesus (he) said) without greatly distorting the communication content of the text. But much greater care needs to be taken with implicatures, which when they are asserted in translation often entail their own new and unintended set of implicatures.

Aanother issue has to do with contextual consistency (as opposed to lexical consistency) in translation. Translational adjustments can drastically change the nature of one of the most accessible dimensions of context – the text itself obscuring patterns in the tapestry, with a consequent loss or distortion of meaning. Given the richness and diversity of English, a single source language word may force the translator to choose between several synonyms. How should this be done? Should a single one-to-one equivalence be maintained consistently? The KJV translators made a point of the freedom which they assumed, not to be legalistically consistent in their translation of some terms, advancing reasons inducing us not to stand curiously upon an identity of phrasing.xv But source languages words with multiple meanings usually cannot be translated by a single word in the target language, because of the different semantic range of the SL and TL equivalent. Nida and Taber express this idea as the Priority of Contextual consistency over Verbal Consistency: it is inevitable that the choice of the right word in the receptor language to translate a word in the source-language text depends more on the context than upon a fixed system of verbal consistency. xvi

This appears consistent with RTs stress on the importance of context, but it contains a hidden danger if insufficient attention is given to the importance of the text itself (and other texts to which it alludes) as a component of the mutual cognitive environment of a particular item. Assuming that authors are self-conscious and deliberative in their composition of texts, we may suppose that they choose a particular word or phrase in full awareness (and an assumption of mutual awareness) of its previous use in accessible contexts. These other contexts (earlier parts of the same text, or other texts evoked) are therefore part of the context of interpretation of the new use of the word or phrase, even when a semanticist might decide that they are being used in a different sense! When a translator chooses to translate with a different word in the new context, this web of contextual

implication is broken and the interpretation of the translated text will be different from that of the original. Examples of Relevance in Translation Inspired by RT, translators will examine the text not as an artefact, but as token of communication. Firstly they will seek interpretations which will optimize relevance within the world of the original author and audience. This will involve analysis not only of the text but of the context which contributes optimally to the meaning communicated. Then, before beginning to craft a new translated text, translators must decide whether they will assume their audience has access to the original contextual assumptions or whether they will need help. And if so, how will it be provided – by making contextual assumptions explicit in the translated text? Or by providing insights into the context using contextual notes, maps, glossaries, introductions and other helps? We conclude with a few specific examples of the way RT might influence translation. 1 Corinthians10.7

 ,  ,         .

KJV: Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. NRSV: Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play. GNB: nor to worship idols, as some of them did. As the scripture says, The people sat down to a feast which turned into an orgy of drinking and sex.* Contemporary readers, left to themselves, would almost certainly understand rose up to play against a background of assumptions quite irrelevant to the context of the original communication

event. But how far should translators go to help the reader? The Translators Handbook judiciously observes TEV's translation of the quotation from Exo 32.6b is a vivid paraphrase, the meaning of which may be implied in the Greek but is not expressed.xvii Not only has GNB explicated the sexual component, but it has regrouped the drinking with the play/sex/dance rather than with the eating, where it belongs. This is a clever rendering of some implicatures of the original, but itself carries so many further implicatures (particularly to do with drunken sexual behaviour) that are at best only weakly derivable from the text. 1 Corinthians 10.18

KJV: Behold Israel after the flesh: are not they which eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar? NRSV: Consider the people of Israel; are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar? GNT: Consider the people of Israel; those who eat what is offered in sacrifice share in the altar's service to God. The NRSV translators rightly considered that contemporary audiences do not have appropriate context by which to understand kata sarka – or rather, that they would most likely bring quite wrong assumptions to bear. But even the NRSV leaves a lot of work to the reader. What does it mean to be partners in the altar? This rather unusual phrase is capable of a wide range of meanings, corresponding to different contexts. Assuming the Corinthians were familiar with the Jewish sacrificial system, the meaning was probably clear to them. The Translators Handbook comments that Paul is appealing to well-known facts and common beliefs, including an understanding that worshippers normally ate together from the sacrificial offering at the altar.xviii But contemporary audiences need some help. The GNB chooses to make some of the background explicit but in a way that is itself ambiguous and problematic, having its own quite different set of

possible implicatures. One minority language translation I checked offered as a backtranslation of their final version are the ones who make the sacrifice at the altar. Now this is a reasonable implicature of GNBs version, but not of the original, and ends up with the people and priests very much confused. Revelation 7. 2-3xix Does the sealing of the servants of God have anything to do with the the seals on the scroll? And how should translators handle this? Several other texts or current ideas have been suggested as providing the background necessary to understanding this passage. These include the seal as a mark of ownership (of slaves), Passover (Exodus 12), Ezekiel 9, and the rite of baptism. There appears little immediate motivation for access to the context of the Exodus or of baptism, and both these contexts raise so many questions of difference as to greatly increase their processing effort. Ezekiel 9 is closer, but still raises a number of difficulties. The cultural context of slave ownership and the seal or brand as its mark would have been easily accessed and provide significant good contextual effects for the hearers. But the immediate previous co-text in chapter 6, of the breaking of the seals, is more readily accessible still. The choice of identical terminology is not accidental but deliberately ironic. The opening of six seals has revealed the wrath of God against disobedient humanity. But here there is a simultaneous sealing to take place. And just as the inexorable revelation of the judgment of God has been marked by a repetitive formula (When he opened the seal), so now the sealing of Gods servants is emphasized by repetition (7.2,3,4,5,8). Against the background of the unsealing of the scroll, with its attendant disasters, the people of God are secured by a process of sealing. Most major English versions retain this possibility with a reference to sealing, although GNT does dilute the effect a little by saying marked with Gods seal. However CEV refers throughout this scene to marking rather than sealing. This could be seen as a good example of contextual consistency, but in fact it loses the connection completely, and in the process sets up a closer

connection than is warranted to another mark not yet mentioned at this point the mark of the beast. Revelation 21.1 . . Many Christians have taken these verses to imply the destruction of the current earth before the appearance of the new heavens and earth, and the absence of sea on the new earth. RT helps rectify this by demanding we look for elements of close context which might constrain interpretation and translation. Careful analysis of the structure of Revelation suggests that this shorter New Jerusalem vision (21.1-8) is very closely linked to the previous vision of the last judgment (20.11-15), which therefore forms a very readily accessible context. So when we read that the first heaven and first earth have passed away (21.1) this is a consequence of 20.11, where they fled from before the face of the Judge, like actors fleeing off stage. In this close context there is no reason to push the word (aplthan) beyond its normal meaning: went away, left.xx The old heaven and earth have, simply left the scene, not been destroyed. The cross-references provided in GNT and CEV point to the new heaven and new earth in 2 Pet 3.13. But readers who follow this cross-reference, may receive the added implication from 2 Pet 3.12 that the passing away in Rev 21.1 is the same as the destruction of the heavens by fire. It would be better for cross-references to point them backwards to Rev 20.11 as a relevant context of interpretation. The translation disappeared is then perhaps acceptable, but translations should not move in the direction of cease to exist. It is also in this context that we read that the sea is no more, not as predicting an earth without its marine environment, but describing the end of chaos and the power of death, because in 20.13 along with Death and Hades it holds the dead. A cross-reference to Rev 20.13 would help, but for the average modern reader, whose normal understanding of the word sea does not include the concept of chaos, it may also be necessary to explain the background in a footnote.

RTs concern for optimal relevance – good cognitive effects without undue processing effort – suggests that the destruction of the earth and heavens is not explicitly asserted here, and the reader can readily understand the new heavens and new earth as the result of Gods programme of renewal as expressed in 21.5, See, I am making all things new. Heaven and earth which, old and tired, fled the stage in the previous scene, now return renewed and revitalized. Relevance and Translation Considering the Scriptures as records of ancient acts of communication allows us to bring contemporary theories of communication to bear, both to understand what it is that is going on in the original context, and to create new texts in new languages to allow new audiences to have access to the original event. But how does it help me resolve the dilemma I posed at the beginning of this article? RT offers an olive branch to both historical and post-modern critics. To the historicist, it affirms that the historical context is vitally important for understanding. With the post-modernists it agrees that every different audience will read the text differently, depending on the contextual assumptions they bring to it. But it also challenges each group to greater rigour. On the historical-critical side, RT provides a limit to the context which is relevant for interpretation and challenges the interpreter to evaluate that context more critically. And on the post-modern side, RT challenges incipient intellectual laziness. Texts do not simply mean what I want them to mean. There is an ethical obligation to the author and his context, to those who received and treasured the text, and to the Holy Spirit as the yet-present author, to optimize the relevance of the communication represented by the text. And to the translator, RT does not so much offer a methodology of translation, as a perspective from which to apply the techniques and strategies for communicating meaning to a new audience in a different socio-cultural context. Methods of exegesis, techniques for finding equivalences,

strategies for presenting necessary contextual assumptions, in fact the whole aim and expectation of the translation project are seen no longer as a task on paper. Rather we are participators in a new communication event, reflecting the original one, constrained not simply by linguistic criteria, but by loyalties to communities of people and ultimately to God as the great Communicator. As the KJV translators insisted, a translation does not simply represent the word of God, it is the word of God.xxi

i

The full preface is rarely printed. It can be conveniently accessed as Appendix A in David G. Burke, ed.,

Translation That Openeth the Window: Reflections of the History and Legacy of the King James Bible (Atlanta: SBL, 2009), pp. 219-242. ii

The others include a deep structure view of grammar based on the work of Noam Chomsky, and a theory of

lexical semantics. See Stephen Pattemore, Framing Nida: The Relevance of Translation Theory in the United Bible Societies, in A History of Bible Translation, ed. P. Noss (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007), 217-263. iii

E.g. Jan de Waard and Eugene A. Nida, From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible

Translation (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1986). iv

Timothy Wilt, Translation and Communication, in Bible Translation: Frames of Reference, ed. Timothy Wilt

(Manchester: St. Jerome, 2003), 27-80. v

Christiane Nord, Translation as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained (Manchester: St.

Jerome, 1997). vi

Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell,

1995).; Ernst-August Gutt, Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context , 2nd ed. (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2000). Both of these seminal works are now in their second editions. vii

Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p. 125. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p. 75. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, pp. 224-243.

viii

ix

x

A number of authors, such as Ian McKenzie, Paradigms of Reading: Relevance Theory and Deconstruction

(Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2002) and Adrian Pilkington, Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), have taken the application of RT to literature much further. xi

It is distinct in its multiplicity of authors and contexts of communication (many details of which are not

known), the time depth through which contemporary audiences must examine it, and not least the overlay of the assumption by some (readers and authors) that it represents a message from God. See Stephen Pattemore, Souls under the Altar: Relevance Theory and the Discourse Structure of Revelation , UBS Monograph Series, 9 (New York: UBS, 2003), pp. 38-45. xii

Stephen Pattemore, The People of God in the Apocalypse: Discourse, Structure, and Exegesis , ed. J. Court,

vol. 128, SNTSMS (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). Pp. 28-31. xiii

Stephen Pattemore, Relevance Theory, Intertextuality, and the Book of Revelation, in Current Trends in

Scripture Translation, ed. P. Noss, UBS Bulletin 194/195 (Reading: UBS, 2002), pp.43-60. xiv

Gutt, Translation and Relevance; Ernst-August Gutt, Relevance Theory: A Guide to Successful Communication

in Translation (Dallas: SIL, 1992). xv

Burke, Translation That Openeth the Window, pp 237-8. Eugene A.Nida and Charles R. Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation. (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1969), pp. 15-

xvi

22. The quotation is from p.17. xvii

Paul Ellingworth and Howard Hatton, A Translator's Handbook on Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians .

(London, New York: UBS, 1985), p.193. xviii

Ellingworth and Hatton, 1 Corinthians, p. 200.

xix

For a detailed treatment of this chapter see Pattemore, People of God, pp. 117-164 Indeed there is no unambiguous instance where aperchomai means cease to exist. Burke, Translation That Openeth a Window, p. 231.

xx

xxi