ABSTRACT
Contrastive pragmatics is the study of pragmatic variability between languages. Contrastive pragmatic research provides insight into the comparability – or equivalence – of pragmatic meaning across languages. Accordingly, contrastive pragmatic research has an important role to play in translation practice, research, theory, training, and education. In particular, in the context of language-pair-specific approaches to translation, contrastive pragmatic research methods can offer systematic insight into which linguistic constructions, out of all the options available, will result in pragmatically equivalent meaning in a translation, and how translators deal with pragmatic differences between languages in the process of translation. This chapter summarises the main research methods used in contrastive pragmatics translation research. It also discusses some of the critical issues and topics in contrastive pragmatic research bearing on translation, namely the notions of tertium comparationis, equivalence, and pragmatic universals. The chapter concludes with recommendations for contrastive pragmatic research in translation studies that will be relevant to theory building as well as translation practice and translator training.
