What, where, when, what for and how? (Reflections on Pragmatic Adaptation)

Abstract

The article discusses the problem of choosing ways and means of pragmatic adaptation in translating a text. The relevance of the topic is due to the necessity to facilitate cross-cultural communication in view of the increased intensity and diversity of forms of international contacts. The definition of pragmatic adaptation as the actions of a translator aimed at adapting the source language text to its perception by a recipient belonging to a different culture, does not answer the questions of when and how a translator can and should change the text in order to preserve the pragmatic potential of the original. The aim of the article is to analyze the problems arising in translating texts requiring pragmatic adaptation and evaluate the impact of different types of pragmatic adaptation on reproducing the pragmatic potential of the original and achieving the possible purposes of translation. In order to do it an experiment was carried out: a text was translated in four different ways with different means used for its pragmatic adaptation, and the translations were compared. The results of the experiment show that the choice of pragmatic adaptation methods and techniques is determined not by the type of text or the type of adaptation, as is usually believed, but by the specific purpose for which the text is translated. Thus, when translating a literary text, which always contains factual, conceptual, emotional, aesthetic, and cultural information, the choice between the naturalness of the text, the preservation of the author’s style, the completeness of the content and the communication of culturally relevant information means, in fact, setting different accents. The means of pragmatic adaptation used by the translator depend entirely on the prioritization of these types of information, in other words, on the purpose of translation.