Translating explicatures between Arabic and English

Abstract

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.