The last type of equivalence we are going to deal with is pragmatic equivalence.

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in a communicative situation.

In order to contrast languages on the pragmatic level, one has to decide what the equivalence of contrasted
structures on the pragmatic level means.

One definition could be that there is pragmatic equivalence between two expressions in the SL and the TL if they
can be used to perform the same speech act (directive, commissive, perlocutionary etc.) All we have to do then is to
look at the strategies used in the two languages to perform these acts.

For this purpose we will consider above all two aspects: coherence and implicature

Coherence

While cohesion concerns the surface relations that organize and create a text, coherence is the network of conceptual
relations which underlie the surface text as perceived by the language users.

The mere presence of cohesive markers, such as linkers or lexical chains, is not sufficient to create a coherent text.

Imagine we said:

(a) I’ terribly tired because (b) bananas are yellow.

Or:

(c) I’m very tired at the end of the week. (d) On Wednesday I usually see my sister.

Although a conjunction such as because suggests a cause/effect relationship between the two clauses or parts of the
sentence, in fact it would be very difficult to find a logical reason why (b) should cause (a).
And although week and Wednesday belong to the same lexical chain, it is hard to find a connection between (c) and (d).

Thus, what really gives texture to a stretch of language is the possibility to recognize in it underlying semantic relations
that establish continuity of sense.

Coherence is mostly receiver-centred. It depends on the ability of the hearer/reader to interpret a stretch of language on
the basis of his/her expectations and experience of the world. Which, in their turn, are influenced by the society he/she
lives in.

For example, in order to attribute sense to a stretch like:

He looked like Frodo coming down the mountain. The hobbit was walking slowly and singing to himself.

One has to know that “Frodo” and “the hobbit” are the same person, which means that he/she must have read the novel
Lord of the Rings, seen the movie drawn from it, or at least heard about one of the two.
If a translation of the sentence were addressed to a public who is not likely to have done any of the above mentioned
things, the translator would probably have to intervene and modify it, for instance in the following way:

He looked like Frodo the hobbit coming down the mountain. He was walking slowly and singing to himself.

Thus coherence is not really a property of text but of the event/situation and of the people and things involved in it.

A dialogue can be coherent to one observer or participant and not coherent to another.

For example, from the patient's point of view, a medical interview can appear incoherent. The physician may be
considering two or three diseases as potentially being the patient's condition. and the patient may not know what
diseases are being considered and why certain questions are asked. While another physician, listening to the dialogue,
may understand the doctor's intentions and regard the interview as coherent.

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From the point of view of translation, this means that the difficulties encountered will not so much depend on the
grammatical and semantic aspects of the source text in itself but on the audience the translation is addressed to.

Like a writer, a translator has to consider the range of knowledge available to his/her target readers, their expectations,
their views on how the world is organized and on the structure of social relations, and the conventions of particular text
types in the target language.

These are all elements that affect the coherence of a text, because we can only make sense of new information in terms
of our own knowledge, beliefs and previous linguistic and non linguistic experience.

Implicature

Grice proposed a well-known distinction between what is said and what is implicated,
distinguishing truth-conditional aspects of meaning as what is said, and conventional
and conversational implicatures as what is implicated.
In this distinction, semantics and pragmatics overlap: there is no clear-cut
boundary. Conventional implicatures, such as the meaning of contrast in 'but', the
conclusion to premises in 'therefore', or the idea of overcoming difficulty in 'manage', are part of word meaning but do
not contribute to the truth-conditional content of sentences.

Generalized conversational implicatures, such as enrichment from 'three' to

'exactly three', do not require context for their occurrence and are regarded by some as semantic, by others as either
semantic or pragmatic, unlike particularized conversational implicatures which are context-dependent and certainly
arrived at through pragmatic processes of inference.
Bearing this in mind, we might test the following hypotheses:
(A1) Semantic equivalence is the equivalence of what is said.
(A2) Pragmatic equivalence is the equivalence of what is implicitly communicated.

Implicature must not be confused with idiomatic meaning. Idiomatic meaning is conventional and its interpretation
depends on a good mastery of the linguistic system rather than on interpretation. For instance in the following
exchange:

A. Shall we go for a walk?

B. Could I take a rain check on that?

The interpretation depends on knowing the meaning of the expression “take a rain check” in American English, and will
be “If you don’t mind, we’ll do it another time”.

While in the case of:

A. Shall we go for a walk?

B. It’s raining.

The answer could be interpreted as: “No, thanks, I don’t want to get wet”, or “Okay, but let’s take an umbrella”, etc.
8) According to Grice, who is mainly concerned with spoken language, a speaker can signal an implied meaning
conventionally or non-conventionally.
In the first case he/she will use textual resources such as conjunctions or grammatical structures.

Implied meaning which is not signalled conventionally derives from the Cooperative Principle and its maxims of
Quantity, Quality, Relevance and Manner:

Quantity

- Make your contribution as informative as is required.

- Do not make it more informative than is required.

Quality

- Do not say what you believe is false.

- Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

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Relevance
-Make your contribution relevant to the current exchange.

Manner

- Avoid obscurity
- Avoid ambiguity
- Avoid prolixity
- Be orderly

The maxims of the Cooperative Principle can be flouted for various reasons but, generally speaking, we assume that an
utterance that follows a question provides an answer to that question. Therefore we will try to find an interpretation that
suits the question.
Again, the inferences we draw will depend on our knowledge of the world, of the participants in the discourse and of
the situation.

Implicatures, then, are pragmatic inferences which allow us to understand a stretch of language beyond its literal
meaning by taking into account the Cooperative Principle.

This complicates the task of a translator who might knowingly or unknowingly eliminate certain possible interpretations
of the original text.

Grice suggests a number of factors which can contribute to our success or failure to interpret implicatures, and they are:

a) The conventional meanings of the words and structures used (mastery of the language) and the recognition of any
references involved.

b) The Cooperative Principle and its maxims.

c) The context of the utterance.

d) Other elements of background knowledge.

e) The fact that the above mentioned elements are available to both participants.

The meanings of words and structures

This point is quite obvious. If we do not know the meaning of the words and structures used in the text, we cannot
understand its implied meanings.

A mistranslation can provoke the total loss of an implicature.

On the other hand, for example, in English the use of rhetorical questions often conveys irony, but it may not have the
same function in other languages.

The ability to identify references too is essential for drawing inferences and maintaining the coherence of a text. The
mention of a type of food or of a fictional character, for instance, that is unknown to the reader can disrupt the
continuity of a text.
One of the strategies a translator can use to overcome this problem is cultural substitution. He/she may substitute for a
reference to Camilleri’s “Commissario Montalbano” a reference to a similar fictional character who is more familiar to
his/her target public.

The Cooperative Principle and its maxims

According to Grice, the maxims of the Cooperative Principle are not arbitrary but a feature of rational behaviour,
although not all linguists agree with him and consider the possibility that the Principle and its maxims are not universal.
There are contexts in which the use of a particular implicature will differ from one language community to another. And
even in the same cultural and linguistic community, there are special contexts in which one or more of the maxims do
not apply (ex. quality and quantity in court questioning).

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There is also the question whether Grice’s list is exhaustive and whether the maxims have the same virtue in different
cultures. Grice himself admitted that a politeness maxim could be added to them, and in some cultures the Politeness
Principle could overwhelm all the other maxims.
Politeness is a relativistic notion and different cultures have different norms of polite behaviour and different taboos.
In some translation contexts, being polite can be more important than being accurate. A translator might decide to omit
or replace whole stretches of language which violate the reader’s expectations of how taboo subjects should be dealt
with.

Another important factor that seems to override Grice’s maxims, above all those concerning relevance and brevity, and
support the idea that they are both language and culture-specific, relates to norms of discourse organization and
rhetorical functions in different languages and different text types (ex. use of digressions and repetition).

A further question that has been raised is how Grice’s notion of relevance relates to a participant’s level of interest in a
topic.
This problem is particularly important in any translation activity which involves some form of rewriting, such as editing
or summarizing. It raises the question of how well the maxims transfer from speech to writing, that is from a context
which involves a single receptor and one that involves a range of receptors.

In fact, Grice’s maxims seem to reflect notions which are valued in the English-speaking world, such as sincerity,
brevity and relevance, but which do not necessarily have the same value in other cultures.

A more plausible theory would be that all discourse, in any language, is basically cooperative and the phenomenon of
implicature is universal. In other words, the interpretation of a maxim may differ from one cultural-linguistic
community to another, but the process of conveying meaning by exploiting whatever maxims are operating in that
community will be the same.

The context of the utterance

The context (participants and situation), co-text and linguistic conventions of a community in which an utterance occurs
determine the range of implicatures that may be derived from it.
The meaning of a word or an utterance or a gesture does not hinge so much
upon a universal, abstract and fixed semantic system but it is strictly connected with the context.

Due to this context dependence, the meaning of a word, an utterance or a

gesture varies each time, being subject to the conditions of a certain situation. For
this reason, in different contexts the same message may receive a different interpretation.

Besides, there may be a basic ambiguity between a given communicative intention by the
speaker and the ascription of another intention to him/her by the recipient.

In particular, the meaning of any utterance, word or gesture cannot be expressed and
grasped in a totally explicit way but it always entails some implicit aspects. Practically, it is impossible to enunciate all
the features of any meaning because we take for granted many things in speaking and in interpreting the utterances of
others. Such things are given as “presupposed” and often they are entailed by the appropriateness condition of the
sentence itself. For instance, if I say that Peter has stopped drinking, I presuppose that Peter used to drink, since the
verb to stop implies a specific behaviour in a previous time.
On this subject Searle introduced the notion of background assumptions as the
totality of things taken for granted by the interlocutors in a given communicative exchange.

For example:
Suppose I go into a restaurant and order a meal. Suppose I sayy: Bring me a steak with fried potatoes. I take it for
granted that they will not deliver the meal to my house, or to my place of work. I take it for granted that the steak will
not be stuffed into my pockets or spread over my head. But none of these assumptions was made explicit in the literal
utterance.

Though not explicitly said, those assumptions contribute in a basic way to determining the meaning of the utterance.

Besides background assumptions, circumstantial assumptions concern the specific conditions of a given context, the
communicative intention of the speaker, as well as the intention ascribed by the recipient. People’s interpretations of
their own and other people's expressions are not necessarily stable or constant over a period of time, but they may
change as the context changes.

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Searle identifies two types of meaning in speech<<<. sentence meaning or word meaning and speaker meaning.

Sentence meaning is the conventional meaning of the words as they are usually employed in a lexical sense. Thus in the
sentence below there is a clear meaning. A woman observes a couple leaving a party and comments to her partner:

Jim and his wife are leaving the party

The conventional or sentence meaning here is as follows: two people, a man (Jim) and his wife are leaving a social
function (as opposed to a political party).

Speaker meaning, as Searle puts it, differs from the sentence meaning or conventional meaning in terms of the speaker’s
intentions:

To return to the sentence above, the table below illustrates the sentence meaning (SEM1), the speaker meaning (SPM1)
and the listener meaning (LIM1). A woman, on seeing a couple leave the party, comments to her partner:

Jim and his wife are leaving the party.

Sentence meaning (SEM1)

Two people are leaving the party (social function).

Speaker meaning (SPM1)

Two people are leaving the party (social function).

Listener meaning (LIM1)

Two people are leaving the party (social function).

But it is possible that these same words could have a different meaning imposed upon them. For example, the same
speaker and her partner may have become concerned that they are staying too long at social functions. They decide that
in the future they will leave well before the end. The table below shows the same conventional sentence in a similar
context but with a different speaker meaning and listener meaning. On this occasion, the lexical approach would not
reveal the speaker’s meaning.

Jim and his wife are leaving the party. (SEM2)

Two people are leaving the party (SPM2)

We should be leaving now. (LM2)

She utters the sentence, ‘Jim and his wife are leaving the party’ with this meaning (‘We should be leaving now.’) on the
basis that in a previous conversation about their social habits the speaker and her partner have decided not to be in the
last group to leave social functions. The immediate physical context is the same but the socio-linguistic context has
been considerably altered by a previous conversation.

In addition to the realities of a situation, the context includes certain strategies that people generally use to impose some
kind of structure on the world around them. When someone describes something, recounts an event or makes a list,
he/she normally follows a certain sequence. For example, when recounting a series of events, one would generally
follow a temporal order. This order can be modified or even reversed, but still represents a preferred ordering strategy
according to Grice’s sub-maxim of Manner: “Be orderly”.

However, as we said before about brevity, sincerity and relevance, Grice’s maxims seem to reflect notions which are
valued in the English-speaking world, but which do not necessarily have the same value in other cultures.

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It is impossible to determine what the “natural order” is in different cultures and languages, also because the ordering of
events may be adapted to maintain point of view or thematic progression.. In a translation, order can be modified to
fulfil the expectations of the readers of a different culture. For example, it is normal to expect entities that are closer to
one’s own environment to be mentioned first in a list.

Another point which can be included in the category of “context” is the language user’s sense of what is socially
(politeness) or textually (genre) appropriate.

This first aspect does not only cover the use of personal pronouns (tu /lei /voi/ loro), it also includes the use of
appropriate personal and occupational titles, first names and surnames, nicknames and terms of affection. In translation
these peculiarities have to be brought back to the conventions of the TL.

Example:

Yesterday Mr Blair left for the United States

Ieri (il primo ministro) Blair è partito per gli Stati Uniti

Other items of background knowledge

A text may confirm, contradict or extend what we know about the world, as long as it relates to it in some way.

Whether a translator decides to explain a reference or not, or to recur to cultural substitution, depends on how much
he/she assumes the reader is familiar with it and on his/her freedom of intervention.

Of course, a translator may not grasp an implicature himself or herself, and in many cases it is a good rule to do some
research work in order to access to the relevant background knowledge. And sometimes include it, either in the text
itself or in a footnote.

The availability of all relevant items

In order to convey an intended meaning, the speaker / writer must assume that the hearer / reader has access to all the
necessary background and can work out any intended implicatures.

Apart from filling gaps in the reader’s knowledge, a translator can sometimes adjust the text to the reader’s
expectations in order to avoid conveying the wrong implicatures. But does not necessarily have to do it. We are
normally prepared to accept deviations from usual linguistic behaviour provided they are justified, for instance on the
basis of poetic creativity or humour, and interpretable.