What is it about?
Opinion articles often include ironic statements, which implicitly evaluate certain ideas or behaviours, usually negatively. These statements may prove challenging for translation as irony is often rooted in a particular cultural context, and translations are usually targeted at readers with a different cultural background. This study discusses hidden meanings of ironic statements considering the cultural background of the respective target readers, and shows that those meanings may differ between the original and the translation.
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Why is it important?
I show how the relevance theory - which explains how people understand indirect communication - can be used in a translation studies analysis to uncover hidden meanings of ironic statements. The key finding is that those meanings in the source and target texts usually do not coincide. Often irony is even more pronounced in the English translation than in the Ukrainian original. Meanwhile, the values communicated by the source ironic statements in this case remain basically unchanged in the target text.
Perspectives
I hope this paper will show that opinion articles - which have not been studied extensively within Translation Studies so far - can also be an interesting material for a Translation Studies analysis. This study might encourage other authors to analyze similar texts representing other language pairs and cultures and shed some more light on how values communicated by ironic statements cross cultural borders.
Angela Kamyanets
Ivan Franko National University of Lviv
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Translating irony in media texts: A relevance theory perspective, Across Languages and Cultures, December 2017, Akademiai Kiado,
DOI: 10.1556/084.2017.18.2.5.
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