Pragmatic Aspects of Translation

Translation is a communication act of meaning from one language (the source) to another language (the target). By taking into account cultural differences between the source and target languages and speech communities, a translator will seek to transmit the original content and intent of a speaker's or writer's message to their target recipients. Translation is thus closely connected with pragmatics, as it encompasses not only structural and linguistic knowledge of a writer or speaker, but also the context of the utterance and background knowledge about those involved in order to convey the exact meanings of the writer or speaker. Postulating and demonstrating a strong association between pragmatics and translational process research, the present chapter provides a comparative description of language-pairs that have significantly different syntactic structures. As one of the research foci of this study, relative clauses in three different languages, i.e. German, Korean, and English, are descried. Ten Korean- and ten English-speaking subjects translated the same three texts from German into Korean or from German into English respectively, and their decision-making and translation processes while writing were captured by two eye-tracking devices, enabling observation of the subjects' eye movements and creation of heat map visualizations.