Pragmatics and semiotics: the relevance of addressee expectations in the translation of newspaper texts

Abstract

Newspaper and advertising texts have traditionally been 'difficult children' for translation studies to deal with, mainly for one thing: they seem to be systematically norm-flouting. In fact, in traditional approaches, they were customarily quoted as typical examples of 'free translation', 'unfaithfulness' or, in some cases, out right creation of a new text. Although it is true that these texts present certain translation peculiarities, this is by no means a random process of transfer where translators set their 'wild imagination' to work. Quite on the contrary, it is argued here that it is precisely these texts that demonstrate how systematically translators are capable of forecasting the average target recipient and of adapting the texts to reader expectations by fulfilling pragmatic and semiotic considerations in the process of transfer; these seem to be the two guiding parameters for the occurrence of 'translation incidences' in newspaper binomials. To prove this claim, we present the results obtained from a descriptive study carried out with a selection of semiotic and pragmatic factors on a corpus of newspaper texts published by The Guardian and their subsequent translations into Spanish, published by El Mundo.