ABSTRACT
All kinds of meanings in the original should be communicated in the translation. Some meanings are conveyed overtly and other meanings are communicated implicitly. The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the importance of implicit meaning to the literary translation. Implicit meaning is pragmatically inferred. The serious literary translator has to analyse the text ‘pragmatically’. The word ‘pragmatically’ includes all information that is understood and unexpressed. Major issues in pragmatics are speech acts, presupposition, implicatures, politeness and deictic expression. It also includes all ways in which context contributes to meaning. Context is a broad term that includes linguistic, situational, cultural and historic dimensions. The good literary translator has to investigate the work ‘linguistically’ and ‘pragmatically’. Though it is a subfield of linguistics, pragmatics incorporates linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge. It does not only include a speaker’s knowledge of a language, but also his/her knowledge of the world. He or she also has to identify the intention of the writer. The meaning intended in a literary text could be manifested through the many levels of language. The phonological level, the syntactic level and the lexical level reflect the intention of the writer. A sound could reflect the meaning intended. The very syntax of a literary text goes hand in hand with the meaning, and the choice of words is also a very important element. The translator of a literary text has to infer what is said and what is not said. Meaning loss can be avoided if s/he contributes to the interpretative act. Newmark argues that:
The resulting loss of meaning is inevitable and is unrelated, say, to the obscurity or the deficiencies of the text and the incompetence of the translator, which are additional possible sources of this loss of meaning, sometimes referred to as “entropy”.
(Newmark 1988, 8)