1. © Intercultural Studies Group Universitat Rovira i Virgili Plaça Imperial Tàrraco 1 43005 Tarragona Fax: (++ 34) 977 55 95 97 Risk management in cross- cultural communication Anthony Pym

2. © Intercultural Studies Group When languages meet… Lingua franca Pidgins, creoles Language learning Code-switching Translation

3. © Intercultural Studies Group But translation is expensive…

4. © Intercultural Studies Group The state of translation theory Equivalence died. Description, Skopos, deconstruction and localization lived. No debate. Just data.

5. © Intercultural Studies Group For a new theory… Equivalence as a useful fiction. Explain what happens. Explain what should happen.

6. © Intercultural Studies Group Example 1 In a birth certificate, where can you make a mistake? Name of person born? Date of birth? Name of midwife?

7. © Intercultural Studies Group This means Only work hard where there is high risk. Don’t work hard where there is low risk. (Don’t work too hard!) (These guidelines do not require equivalence.)

8. © Intercultural Studies Group What is risk? The probability of not meeting success conditions. Success means mutual benefits. (ethically) Minimally: The benefits must be greater than the efforts (transaction costs).

9. © Intercultural Studies Group Example 2 Foreign students will need to convalidar or homologar their first degree. Convalidación = accreditation Homologación = accreditation

10. © Intercultural Studies Group This means: “seek accreditation” = low risk? Use Spanish terms = low risk? Omit phrase = high risk!... More information is needed.

11. © Intercultural Studies Group Linguistics is not enough: Success conditions are not in the text. High-risk texts are not “rich points” (Agar).

12. © Intercultural Studies Group Risk aversion? Risk-averse strategies: generalization explicitation literalism (interference) Non-translation.

13. © Intercultural Studies Group Why risk aversion? Translators do not see success conditions. Translators are not responsible for risk management (Patton’s interpreter). Translators reduce transaction costs in order to increase the probability of (minimal) benefits.

14. © Intercultural Studies Group Risk-taking? Translation of humour. Translation in subtitles. Highly localized texts. Advertising. Texts of salvation (Nida, Gutt).

15. © Intercultural Studies Group Why more risk aversion? Cross-cultural communication: relatively high transaction costs relatively low trust between participants relatively tight success conditions. Translation is an expensive strategy, only justifiable in high-risk situations.

16. © Intercultural Studies Group Objection 1: trust Trust reduces communicative complexity. But translators are by definition open to mistrust. Mistrust feeds on minor mistakes. So,without trust, effort cannot be distributed away from low-risk messages.

17. © Intercultural Studies Group Objection 2 (Hatim) The calculation of success conditions itself increases transaction costs. So the default norm for translation is to reproduce what is in the text. (back to square one?)