Translating irony in media texts: A relevance theory perspective

Angela Kamyanets

doi:10.1556/084.2017.18.2.5

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Across Languages and Cultures

Volume/Issue:: Volume 18: Issue 2

Translating irony in media texts: A relevance theory perspective

Author:

Angela Kamyanets

Angela Kamyanets Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine

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Pages:: 261–278

Online Publication Date:: Dec 2017

Publication Date:: 01 Dec 2017

Article Category:: Journal Article

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1556/084.2017.18.2.5

Keywords:: irony; relevance theory; evaluation; translation; media text

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The focus of the paper is on ironic statements in Ukrainian media texts and their English translations. The theoretical framework underpinning the text analysis is Sperber and Wilson’s account of verbal irony as echoic allusion to an attributed proposition from which the speaker dissociates himself/herself, implicitly expressing a critical attitude (Wilson and Sperber 1992). The corpus of the present study consists of a series of ironic statements selected from three opinion articles published between 2010 and 2014 in a quality Ukrainian magazine having both Ukrainian and English versions. The paper explores how the ironic interpretation in each particular instance is consistent with the principle of relevance, and discusses implicatures communicated by the ironic statements. Then the focus shifts to the choices made by the translators in reproducing the irony in the target text. The study undertakes to assess how much the irony along with the implicatures is accessible to the target readers of the English translations, considering their cognitive environment. The results suggest that implicatures of ironic statements in the source and target texts do not coincide completely, with irony often being more pronounced in the English translation than in the Ukrainian original. At the same time, the value judgments communicated by the source ironic statements remain basically unchanged in the target text.

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Across Languages and Cultures

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Andrew CHESTERMAN (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Kirsten MALMKJÆR (University of Leicester, UK)
Christiane NORD (University of Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa)
Anthony PYM (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain, University of Melbourne, Australia)
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Mona BAKER (Shanghai International Studies University, China, University of Oslo, Norway)
Łucja BIEL (University of Warsaw, Poland)
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Rodica DIMITRIU (Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” Iasi, Romania)
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Sylvia KALINA (Cologne Technical University, Germany)
Haidee KOTZE (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
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Brian MOSSOP (York University, Toronto, Canada)
Orero PILAR (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Gábor PRÓSZÉKY (Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungary)
Alessandra RICCARDI (University of Trieste, Italy)
Edina ROBIN (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)
Myriam SALAMA-CARR (University of Manchester, UK)
Mohammad Saleh SANATIFAR (independent researcher, Iran)
Sanjun SUN (Beijing Foreign Studies University, China)
Anikó SOHÁR (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary)
Sonia VANDEPITTE (University of Gent, Belgium)
Albert VERMES (Eszterházy Károly University, Hungary)
Yifan ZHU (Shanghai Jiao Tong Univeristy, China)

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