ABSTRACT
The study of pragmatics is the study of all the “correlations between linguistic units and their users in a given communicative situation”. The interface between pragmatics and translation is particularly useful to explore through the performative dimension of language use: that is, the use of utterances to perform different social actions. Drawing on Grice’s cooperative principle, one strand of studies has explored another type of pragmatic inference, namely implicature, which focuses more on speaker rather than utterance meaning. The cognitive-pragmatic model developed by Sperber and Wilson claims that the relation between a translation and its source text is grounded in interpretive resemblance rather than in equivalence. Although theoretical insights from pragmatics have increasingly informed research on all modalities of translation, there is a need for more descriptive studies that engage with a wider range of theoretical frameworks, address a broader range of topics, different types of data and settings, and a greater variety of languages.
