Chapter Five
120
a) The source language author’s intention will be reproduced as
faithfully as possible in the translation. The translator will then have to
ensure that the original author’s communicative intention is interpreted
correctly in its specific context. Consequently, the target reader’s right
inferences will be activated.
b) The translation will reflect the intentional clues provided by the
original text, i.e. the target readers will access the same, or equivalent,
cognitive effects the source text produced in L1 readers; therefore, the
inferential response will be similar in both groups of readers.
c) In consequence, the final translation will contain the same, or
equivalent, specialist and pragmatic meanings offered by the source text
and obtained after the adequate intentional/inferential interpretation
process in terms of (a) and (b) mentioned above.
d) Finally, the translation will include a lexical and grammatical
content equivalent to that in the source text, with the exception of the
inevitable structural and idiosyncratic differences in each language.
To conclude this chapter, I shall illustrate these ideas with two further
examples, where I describe the sets of inferences triggered by two English
financial metaphors included and contextualized in such examples, which
may yield different translations, depending on the inferential approach
used:
[1] My advice is crisis means opportunity. I’m a bottom-fisher. I like to go in
when the market is bad.This example contains the focus term bottom-fisher inserted in a
straightforward financial frame. Addressees have to interpret the likely
associations between fishing and finance, two seemingly unrelated
domains. However, they will quickly infer that bottom-fisher has a
metaphorical sense in this context, and will try to interpret it in its
specialist context as a financial metaphor. Other terms, such as crisis or
market, will offer clues about the meaning and will help to access the
metaphorical content without any special difficulty. It would be enough to
look this term up in an appropriate dictionary to find the answer: bottom-
fisher = background fisherman, i.e. ‘a bargain hunter’. The English
dictionary entry includes a financial sense. The (almost literal) Spanish
translation does not pose any major problems: although the fishing
metaphor does not exist in Spanish, the equivalent cazador/buscador
(hunter/seeker) metaphor does: