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Relevance Theory and Testing Translations

In Katy Barnwell's 'Ten Ways to Test a Translation' we are advised not to ask any questions that ask for the opinions of the hearer, only factual questions should be asked. Certainly we don't want to ask, 'Is this a good translation?' Nor do we want to ask, 'What do you think of the translation?' We might, however, want to ask, 'Why, in your view, did Jonah run away from the Lord?' when testing Jonah 1. This is because it finds out if the hearer has understood the main point of the plot in chapter 1, despite the fact that this is only implied, not openly stated. Jonah is running away from the Lord because Nineveh is a major Babylonian (Iraqi) city full of non-Jews who might want to kill him. Not only that, we later find out that Jonah doesn't even want the Ninevites to repent. His view is that they deserve punishment simply for being non-Jews, and therefore non-believers. He is falling into the religious trap of being judgmental, like the older brother in the prodigal son story.

The reason we want to ask people's opinions is that, as Relevance Theory has taught us, most communication includes implicatures (implied information) as well as explicatures (stated information). If we ignore the former and concentrate only on the latter we do a disservice to the aims of the original speaker (author) of the utterance or text we're studying and wanting to translate.

Many stories, jokes, poems and proverbs rely on implicatures. Here's a joke for you:

    Mother: Anton, do you think I’m a bad mother?

    Son: My name is Paul.

What's the implicature? She's such a bad mother that she doesn't know her sons name. If you explain that, as I have just done, you destroy the joke. Why? Because the hearer has to do some work if you leave the implicature as an implicature, rather than stating it explicitly. This gives the joke greater impact.

That's why, in Bible Translation, we test for people's opinions - we want to know if they have understood the implicatures, and we also want to know if the story will have the same impact as the original story had (and the author intended).


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