the use of calque, etc., which are fairly common in translated texts.

Coming from an oil-rich Gulf state, the student translators could not socio- cognitively see how or why ‘working for the government’ should be abysmal, as intended by the ST. They therefore aimed for positive connotation which, to highlight, entailed restructuring the utterance to read as follows: Example A7.3b . . . and although 45 of those who do find jobs actually end up working for the government, this is still an abysmal record. Yet it is clear that the concept of ‘working for the government = abysmal’ was crucial to the development of the argument and to the critical stance adopted by the editorial. The way the text was translated conveyed a totally different picture and certainly a much milder tone. Task A7.6 ➤ List some problems you have encountered in your language that are essentially cultural-conceptual i.e. socio-cognitive. ➤ Reflect, for example, on the values assigned in English to such concepts as ‘single-parent’, ‘farmer’, ‘bungalow’, ‘countryside’, ‘old and Victorian’? ➤ Identify the values assigned to the cultural concepts which you have listed above. Commission In addition to aesthetics, cognition and the criterion of knowledge base, the task specification agreed with clients could drastically influence decision-making. This raises issues of translation skopos or purpose, loyalty and conflict of interests, etc. We can now refer to this sense of purpose specifically as ‘the purpose of the translation’, and distinguish it from the purpose of translation in the collective, which has to do with the skill involved in translating within a particular professional setting e.g. subtitling. The nature of the commission is a crucial factor in defining the purpose of the translation. For example, in translating a press release for the radical Palestinian group Hamas reporting one of their ‘suicide’ bombings and talking eulogistically about the carnage they caused, the translation brief had to be re-negotiated with Hamas who commissioned the translation. The translator suggested a more con- ciliatory tone, eradicating all references to bloody scenes for which credit was being claimed in the Arabic version. The suggestion was flatly refused by Hamas. 54 I n t r o d u c t i o n A SECTION ★ Task A7.7 ➤ Do you think it is the translator’s job to alert the client to problems of the kind outlined in the above vignette, or to negotiate a more favourable strategy for dealing with a situation that is likely to be controversial? Should the translator of the Hamas text have just gone ahead and translated what she was given? Or should the translator have simply doctored the document and deleted elements likely to cause offence? TEXTUAL PRAGMATICS By far the most concrete set of criteria for effective decision-making seems to be grounded in text type. Linguist and translation theorist Robert de Beaugrande sees equivalence relations in terms of the translation generally being ‘a valid repre- sentative of the original in the communicative act in question’ 1978:88. The decision-making involved would thus be partly subject to system criteria such as grammar and diction, and partly to contextual factors surrounding the use of language in a given text see langue vs parole on p. 49. Task A7.8 ➤ Show how the parole-dimension affects your reading and translation of this short text from an interview: Example A7.4 NEWSWEEK : It is a bid [sic] odd, isn’t it, that a journalist who was held captive by the Taliban would, several months later, be converting to Islam? RIDLEY : I know, you couldn’t make it up. It is strange. Newsweek 26 August 2002 [italics added] In this example, there is a typo ‘bid’ for ‘bit’, a minor performance error which can be rectified easily. But what about isn’t it? Pragmatically, this feature suggests ‘surely’, another problem concept for many users of English as a foreign language. To render isn’t it? into Arabic, for example, we need to gloss it by something like ‘I am sure you will agree’. Similarly, we need to complement you couldn’t make it up by something like ‘even if you wanted to’. These pragmatic glosses are indispensable in any meaningful rendering of the above utterances, certainly into Arabic. These considerations can only highlight the proposition, which we saw in Unit 3, that it is not the word which is the unit of translation but rather ‘text in com- munication’ Beaugrande 1978:91. This is a contentious issue, and one that has T e x t u a l p r a g m a t i c s a n d e q u i v a l e n c e 55 A SECTION ★ ★ often been misunderstood. Fawcett sheds some useful light on the psychological reality of ‘text’ as a unit of translation: What professional and even novice translators actually do is relate the translation of the microlevel of words and phrases to higher textual levels of sentence and paragraph, and beyond that to such parameters as register, genre , text conventions, subject matter, and so on. Fawcett 1997:64 Useful as the textual approach may generally be in clarifying the kinds of resem- blance that are deemed appropriate, it is not yet clear what kind of constraints there are for determining what types of resemblance between original text and translation are most crucial, in what kinds of text, for what kind of reader and so on. Formal resemblance whether in Nida’s ‘contextually motivated’ sense or in Koller’s identical form-to-form relation is a valid option; so is pragmatic resemblance Nida’s dynamic equivalence or Koller’s higher levels of equivalence. But can there be any reliable means for ascertaining the precise form–content relationship in any coherent and useful way? The question that is uppermost in the mind of the ST author or the translator must be:is it worth the target reader’s effort to invest in the retrieval of something which would normally be opaque and therefore not straightforward to retrieve a meaning, a nuance, an implication, a subtle hint, etc.? This effort and reward is regulated by what Levy´ 1967 called the Minimax Principle:during the decision-making process, the translator opts for that solution which yields maximum effect for mini- mum effort. This principle has been recently resurrected by models of translation relevance to be dealt with in Unit 8. 56 I n t r o d u c t i o n A SECTION Summary