Dear Stefan,
I've been thinking about the applicability of RT to artistic communication, too, so I'm quite sympathetic to your qualms...
I assume RT can cope very well with literary communication if you add a layer of emphatic self-reflection to it: Whenever RT refers to "speakers' actual intentions" as opposed to intentions ascribed to speakers by hearers, it highlights a difference not so much between psychological reality and mere ascription, but rather between angles of ascription: in the first case, it's the relevance-theorist who puts forward his or her interpretation of the speakers' behaviour (though, which is decisive, with the help of great theoretical refinement and insight into the very processes by which the theorists themselves are inevitably guided), while in the second, it's someone else with whose ascription the theorist may or may not agree. Since from that interpretation of RT communication is always and only based on "merely" ascribed intentions (not those invisible real ones), there wouldn't be a problem in saying that some readers think the author intended them to follow a particular implication (counts as communication) while you aren't sure or don't think she did.
I know nothing about literary translation, but I suppose it's one characteristic of literary artworks that you can't (or shouldn't) decide once and for all which of the possible shades of meaning the author intended (poetic effects), while suspecting she can't have intended all of them. So I would expect translators in cases of doubt to try and come up with solutions similar in their range of weak implicatures to the original expressions (or similar in whichever respects the translator thinks most readers of the original perceive as relevant), instead of calling up the author to narrow the "actually intended" meanings down, because most readers don't have that option and possibly don't want to have it...
All the best
Jan
----- Original Message -----
From: Stefan Malmberg
To: relevance list
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 1:02 AM
Subject: RT list:RT and authorial intent
Hi all,
In the course of my reseerach on RT and literary translation I have begun to reflect
on the applicability of RT to literary communication. Of course R T transcends the
tradtional semiotic code model accounting for different shades of strong and weak
communication with manifestness and according modification of our cognitive
environments, which include enclyclopaedic knowledge. So far so good. Yet how
does one square RT's insistence on communication being subsumed under the
principle of relevance which assumes communicative intent on the part of the
author with literary communication especially which according to many researchers is polysemic and multilayered, consisting of several different stratifications of meaning, many of which are unintentionally generated by the author? Is it possible to gauge the success of literary translation with the minimum amount of information processing the maximum number of contextual effects when relevant communication and authorial intent cannot be guaranteed? Looking forward to hearing from some of you!
Best wishes
Stefan Malmberg
Måsvägen 3A1
22100 Mariehamn
Åland
Finland
Tel:018-41349
stefan.malmberg@aland.net
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