A relevance-theoretic analysis of concept narrowing and broadening in English and Norwegian original texts and translations

Abstract

This paper studies the lexical-pragmatic processes of narrowing and broadening of conceptual content in the relation between original texts and their corresponding translations in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) from a relevance-theoretic point of view. It is suggested that, in at least some cases, translations can be seen as a kind of mirror reflecting the pragmatic processes at work in lexical interpretation. A translator may choose to render an underspecified concept encoded in a source text by a word that more closely encodes the interpretation given to the concept in question, in which case the semantics/pragmatics distinction (as it applies to the source text) will be made explicit in the relation between source and target text. In other cases, the comparison of source and target text shows that similar lexical encodings in the two languages do not necessarily provide the same possibilities for lexical broadening.