GASTOS DE FUNCIONAMIENTO

The general approach adopted in this chapter is the relevance theory of translation, which is based on a communicative framework formulated in 1986 by Sperber and Wilson. The theory was applied to the field of translation studies by E.A. Gutt in 1991.9 In brief, relevance theorists assume that in order to guarantee the success of an act of communication, the utterance or stimulus should be optimally relevant or meaningful to the receiver.10 In order to process a message correctly the receiver or addressee needs to consult his/her cognitive environment, a web of knowledge comprising all the information the individual has collected through observation, education, upbringing, social interaction, etc. In his article on ‘Audiences, relevance and cognitive environments’ C. Tindale has summarized the notion of cognitive environment as follows:

8

Rouse and Rouse (forthcoming). 9

For an introduction to translation and the principle of relevance, see Hatim and Munday 2004, 57-66. 10 _{The following relies heavily on Gutt 2004.}

(…) a cognitive environment is a set of facts and assumptions which an individual, or, in the case of shared cognitive environments, a number of individuals, is capable of mentally representing and accepting as true (although they may be mistaken in doing so). (…) And these environments tell us nothing about what a person knows or assumes, but about what they could be expected to know or assume.

(Tindale 1992, 182)

To succesfully interpret the message, the addressee needs to select from this knowledge the information that is relevant to the interpretation of the stimulus (communicative context) and consequently use this information to infer correctly the speaker’s intention.11 This cognitive process of inference is universal and can only function optimally when the communicator through careful choice of the stimulus allows the receiver to select relevant information from his cognitive environment ‘without requiring unnecessary processing effort’.12 In brief, for communication to be successful, an utterance is preferably relevant and not unnecessarily complicated.

This process implies that the communicator can make accurate assumptions (a) about the cognitive environment of the receptor audience (as Tindale points out: we have no direct knowledge of the cognitive environments of other individuals) and (b) the way in which the receiver will select the appropriate context. In situations where the cognitive environments of communicator and audience can be expected to be similar, this process is fairly straightforward. Thus, the communicator can, to a large extent, rely on his beliefs regarding the audience’s interpretation. As far as translations are concerned, however, this is not always the case. In situations where cognitive environments of the original communicator (the author) and the translator diverge from one another, the latter needs to reconstruct the communicative process between the author of the original text and his intended audience together with their respective cognitive environments. This capacity is called ‘metarepresentation’.

Translation typically, though not necessarily, brings into contact people with different cognitive environments and therefore metarepresentation is one of the crucial challenges facing translators. Thus, very often the translator cannot simply use his own cognitive environment when trying to understand the original; rather he has to metarepresent to

11 _{The cognitive environment ‘includes any information accessible to that individual from memory,} perception or inferential thought processes’. Context should be understood as ‘the subset of information necessary to interpret a particular text correctly’. Gutt 2004, 78.

himself the mutual cognitive environment shared between the original communicator and original audience.

(Gutt 2004, 82)

In the case of Gerard Potter’s translation of the Chroniques, the situation can be

represented as follows. In order to understand Froissart’s text correctly, the translator needs to reconstruct for each stimulus or utterance:

1. Froissart’s communicative intentions;

2. (Froissart’s beliefs regarding the) information accessible to the author and his intended audience through their (shared or similar) cognitive environments.

Due to their presence in similar socio-cultural circles (aristocratic courts), in this case, the common ground between the cognitive environments of the original author and the translator must have provided Gerard Potter with a sufficient basis to adequately understand and translate Froissart’s text.13 On the other hand, differences between their respective backgrounds (time, place) equally confronted the translator with difficulties. Born in Holland and raised in the vicinity of the court, Gerard Potter certainly had some affinity with Froissart’s native soil of Hainault and its neighbouring principalities.14 His (relative) proximity to the rulers of the county – and possibly his own involvement in local government requiring him to travel throughout the Low Countries, Germany and France – familiarised him with foreign policy (e.g. the war between the rivalling kingdoms of England and France). It is doubtful, however, that the level of Froissart’s background- information was always equivalent to his Dutch translator’s. Indeed, some of the events recounted in Froissart’s narrative took place over half a century before Gerard Potter even was born and, what is more, in regions which in some cases were probably unknown to him.15 In this respect, it is highly probable that the translator was not always familiar with the places or people referred to in the text. These, next to more general, linguistic problems of comprehension, may have left their mark on Gerard Potter’s translation.

13

For Potter’s socio-cultural environment: see Chapter One. 14 _{Cf. Chapter One.}

15 _{Gerard Potter’s translation of ‘Asquesufort’ (Ainsworth and Croenen 2007, 109), i.e. Oxford, as} ‘Zuytvolk’ (H21,fol. 3 r.; also fol. 134 v.), which refers to Suffolk, shows that French toponyms occasionally were a problem (or that the translator did not fully understand the relations between the English aristocracy or was unfamiliar with the geography of England).

However, it is not sufficient that the translator adequately understands the original text. It is imperative that the translation he produces is also relevant or at least intelligible to his audience. This entails that it should be possible for the readers to contextualise the text within the boundaries of their own cognitive environment.

On the production side, the translator can largely rely on his intuitions about relevance – except that differences between the original and the receptor environment may again need to be taken into account, either by helping the receptors adjust their own cognitive environment or by adapting the resemblance relations accordingly. However, to take either of these steps the translator would need to first identify the differences between the background knowledge of the original and the receptor audiences (…)

(Gutt 2004, 86)

Gutt suggests that when a translator anticipates a problem in his audience’s understanding of the text, he can act appropriately in two ways: he can try to expand the cognitive environment of his/her readership by somehow adding the required information to the translation or he can adapt the ‘resemblance relations’ between the original text and the translation, e.g. by using a paraphrase that fits the audience’s cognitive context or by deleting (cultural) information which is unnecessarily confusing.16 In 1967, Levý had proposed that – when confronted with a problem – a translator chooses the solution ‘which promises [the audience] maximum effect for minimal effort’.17

The degree in which the translator interferes in the source-text situates his translation on the scale of direct translations (i.e. close to the original text, what has been called ‘faithful’) and indirect translations which ‘are intended to survive on their own, and involve whatever changes the translator deems necessary to maximize relevance for a new audience’.18 The notions of translation, adaptation and rewrite, commonly used in the debate on medieval translation, should be regarded as representing different positions on this gliding-scale.19

16 _{Gutt elaborates both mechanisms in his 2007 article on bible translation (Gutt 2007, 97-99).} 17

Hatim and Munday 2004, 60. 18

Hatim and Munday 2004, 62.

19 _{For translation, adaptation and rewrite: Reynders 2000, 219-220. In recent articles on translation and} relevance, the difference between direct and indirect translation has been exchanged for the idea that language can be used in stimulus-oriented mode (s-mode), which focuses on the formal resemblance of the utterances in the source and target-language and interpretation-oriented mode (i-mode), which focuses on how the stimulus should be interpreted rather than on the stimulus itself. Cf. Gutt 2004a.

In the following, I will analyse the alterations that Gerard Potter made in order to re-produce the Chroniques in a new linguistic and social context. Given that the

translator’s interferences in the text may (a) provide information about possible differences between the cognitive environment of the original author (shared by his intended audience) and the cognitive environment of the translator and (b) point towards expectations that the translator had regarding his intended receptor audience, this approach appears to be promising for the contextualisation of Gerard Potter’s text.