Searching for some relevance answers to the problems raised by the translation of irony

María Ángeles Ruiz Moneva

doi:10.14198/raei.2001.14.14

Abstract

Even though the approaches and definitions of irony have not been historically homogeneous, it has generally been argued that it implies a certain discrepancy in meaning, be it between what is said and what is meant, or between attitudes such as blame and praise, to refer only to some of the most recurrent tendencies. Moreover, recent literary and pragmatic views on the interpretation of irony seem to have agreed upon the role played by inference, thus stressing the fact that traditional models of communication fall short to account for the dexterity of possible meanings that may be conveyed by such a proteic resource. It may be said that the inferentially based relevance approach to communication has been offering fruitful insights into the understanding of irony. Thus, the relevance studies on irony go back in time more than twenty years so far, and new proposals keep on being put forward (1978-). However, perhaps not so many suggestions have been made on the problems and possible recurrent traits in the translation of irony. The present paper sets out to explore some of the problems that have been traced in the translation of irony. The relevance analyses of irony and of translation will then be sketched, with a view to testing whether the relevance proposals on communication and translation can shed some light upon these issues.

Highlights

As this paper attempts to analyse the proposals on the translation of irony that may be contributed by relevance theory, the discussion will be stractured as follows
As shown above, the translated text should be geared to maintain a degree of explicitness similar to that of the source text, so that the balance between processing efforts and contextual and cognitive effects to be achieved by the audience should not be substantially altered, it follows that it is precisely one of the translator's tasks both to perceive the ironic meaning intended in the original, and convey it in the target text in such a way that its addressees may infer similar implicatures to those intended in the original text
The present paper has set out to trace some of the recurrent challenges that the translator may face as an interlingual communicator in the translation of irony, on the basis of existing contemporary analyses of the problem, and to attempt to suggest certain proposals based on the relevance model of communication as an ostensive-inferential process, whereby the translator is assumed to trace the communicative intentions made manifest in the source text and to convey them in the target language so that they can be processed by the audience, who seeks to obtain communicative effects similar to those of the source readers, without being demanded any extra processing effort

Summary

Introduction

As this paper attempts to analyse the proposals on the translation of irony that may be contributed by relevance theory, the discussion will be stractured as follows. A synthesis of the relevance approaches to irony and to translation will follow, with a view to revising those aspects of the theory which could shed light on this issue. The main focus of the paper will be the development of certain proposals on the basis of the relevance approach to communication as an ostensive-inferential process which could improve the present state-of the-art of the issue. These will be applied to the analysis of existing translations of representative contemporary works of English literature

Problems in the translation of irony

Towards the definition of the relevance approach to irony and translation

The translation of irony as a balance between efforts and effects

The role of context

Communicative clues and contextual sources

Conclusions