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Target
Vol. 3:1 (1991) ► pp.1–16

World Knowledge in the Process of Translation

| Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Leipzig

The paper illustrates the role of world knowledge in comprehending and translating texts. A short news item, which displays world knowledge fairly implicitly in condensed lexical forms, was translated by students from English into German. It is shown that their translation strategies changed from a first draft which was rather close to the surface structure of the source text to a final version which took situational aspects, texttypological conventions and the different background knowledge of the respective addressees into account. Decisions on how much world knowledge has to be made explicit in the target text, however, must be based on the relevance principle. Consequences for teaching and for the notions of semantic knowledge and world knowledge are discussed.

Published online: 1 January 1991
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.3.1.02sch
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Cited by 3 other publications

Cao, Deborah
1996. Towards a Model of Translation Proficiency. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 8:2 ► pp. 325 ff. DOI logo
Pagnoulle, Christine
1993. Creativity in non‐literary translation. Perspectives 1:1 ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo
Valdeón, Roberto A.
2015. Fifteen years of journalistic translation research and more. Perspectives 23:4 ► pp. 634 ff. DOI logo

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