http://hdl.handle.net/11089/22284 2026-04-05T22:55:11Z 2026-04-05T22:55:11Z Vasileanu, Monica http://hdl.handle.net/11089/22290 2019-03-19T13:30:43Z 2017-05-17T00:00:00Z

What Was a Relevant Translation in the 18th Century? Vasileanu, Monica The paper applies RT to analyse an 18th century translation of a Latin text by the preeminent Romanian scholar Demetrius Cantemir. The translation diverges significantly from the original and was met with harsh criticism. Using the conceptual toolkit of RT, I argue that the differences between the original and its English translation were motivated by the translator’s desire to yield the same cognitive effect without putting the audience to unnecessary processing effort. Both effects and effort need to be evaluated by taking into account the respective cognitive environments of the source-text and the target-text audiences. The intertextual dimension of the text under scrutiny adds to the difficulty of communicating the same message in different languages and cultures.

2017-05-17T00:00:00Z Cruz, Manuel Padilla http://hdl.handle.net/11089/22289 2019-03-19T13:24:15Z 2017-05-17T00:00:00Z

Interlocutors-Related and Hearer-Specific Causes of Misunderstanding: Processing Strategy, Confirmation Bias and Weak Vigilance Cruz, Manuel Padilla Noises, similarities between words, slips of the tongue, ambiguities, wrong or false beliefs, lexical deficits, inappropriate inferences, cognitive overload, non-shared knowledge, topic organisation or focusing problems, among others, may cause misunderstanding. While some of these are structural factors, others pertain to the speaker or to both the speaker and the hearer. In addition to stable factors connected with the interlocutors′ communicative abilities, cultural knowledge or patterns of thinking, other less stable factors, such as their personal relationships, psychological states or actions motivated by physiological functions, may also result in communicative problems. This paper considers a series of further factors that may eventually lead to misunderstanding, and which solely pertain to the hearer: processing strategy, confirmation bias and weak vigilance.

2017-05-17T00:00:00Z Piskorska, Agnieszka http://hdl.handle.net/11089/22288 2019-03-19T13:22:43Z 2017-05-17T00:00:00Z

Editorial: Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication Problems Piskorska, Agnieszka This editorial to the special issue of RiL dedicated to relevance theory and problems of intercultural communication addresses the general requirements that a theory of communication must meet to be applicable to the analysis of intercultural communication. Then it discusses criticism levelled against Grice’s theory of conversational implicature and Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness on the grounds that these theories were not universal enough to be applied to all data. Finally, it offers some remarks on the applicability of relevance theory to intercultural pragmatics.

2017-05-17T00:00:00Z Szymańska, Izabela http://hdl.handle.net/11089/22287 2019-03-19T13:29:15Z 2017-05-17T00:00:00Z

The Treatment of Geographical Dialect in Literary Translation from the Perspective of Relevance Theory Szymańska, Izabela This paper discusses problems involved in the translation of literary works that apply linguistic varieties, especially geographical dialects. It surveys selected approaches to the functions of dialects in literature and to the strategies of dealing with linguistic variation in translation, arguing that the understanding of the issue may be deepened and systematized by applying notions drawn from relevance theory. The use of dialect in literary texts is interpreted as a communicative clue and the translators′ approach to its rendering is described with reference to the cognitive environment of the recipients and the balance of processing effort and communicative gain. Examples are drawn from the Polish translations of The Secret Garden by F.H. Burnett, the oldest coming from 1917 and the newest from 2012, which highlight the translators′ changing assumptions on the recipients′ cognitive environment reflected in the choice of the strategy of dialect rendition.

2017-05-17T00:00:00Z