Relationship between Pragmatic Comprehension and Translation of Culture-Bound Texts

Abstract

In processing the source text and reverbalization of the target text, a great awareness of the pragmatically relevant differences between the source text and the target text is needed so as to achieve an adequate translation that can fulfill its communicative role in the target culture (Bernardo, 2010). To assess the relationship between pragmatic comprehension ability and quality of translation of culture-bound texts, the current study was conducted on 60 Iranian undergraduate students of English translation at a university in Iran. The instruments used for data collection consisted of a pragmatic comprehension test to assess participants’ level of pragmatic comprehension ability and a culture-bound text to assess participants’ level of translation quality. The analysis of Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r) revealed that level of pragmatic comprehension is a strong predictor of the quality of translation of culture-bound texts. The pedagogical implications of the findings suggested incorporating pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic perspectives of the source language and their distinctions with the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic perspectives of the target language into class instruction.