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Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 69:2 (2023) ► pp.188–215

Translating explicatures between Arabic and English

Completing logical forms and calculating pragmatic competence and metalinguistic knowledge

| University of Jordan
| Yarmouk University

This article explores which areas of explicature identification (i.e., disambiguation, reference resolution, saturation, free enrichment, and ad hoc concept constructions) were more attended to in Arabic-English translation. Twenty translators were asked to render from one language into another 50 sentences whose logical form could be enriched by explicatures. Translators were found to attend more to the effects of disambiguation and reference resolution. A demarcation line was drawn between explicatures that called for completing overt logical forms (disambiguation and reference resolution) and those that prompted calculating pragmatic competence and meta-linguistic knowledge (saturation, free enrichment, and ad hoc concept constructions). Using relevance theory as a framework of analysis, we propose that completing overt logical forms is more rewarding and less costly for translators than computing pragmatic competence and meta-linguistic knowledge. The figures corroborated this assumption, which showed that explicature observance was positively correlated with educational attainment and years of experience.

Keywords: explicature, logical form, translation, relevance theory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Explicatures and their identification
    • 2.1Disambiguation
    • 2.2Reference resolution
    • 2.3Saturation
    • 2.4Free enrichment
    • 2.5Ad hoc concept construction
    • 2.6Questions of the study
  • 3.Methods
  • 4.Findings and discussion
    • 4.1Explicature identification areas and their observance in translation
    • 4.2Experience and educational attainment
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00319.alj
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