Cultural, communicative and relevance factors as the bases for decision making in translation

Abstract

The aim of the article is to show the role of translator’s cultural awareness, ability to be guided by communicative factors and to assess relevance of information in decision-making. The author’s analysis of possible choices and decisions is based on understanding translation as a creative process of interlanguage and intercultural mediation presupposing the translator’s ability to asses and take into account a wide range of parameters that cannot be formalized, such as background information, the speaker’s intention and relevance of information. The research has shown that the main difference between a human translator and a translating machine, as well as the main advantage of the former over the latter is the ability of a person to make nonprogrammable decisions. Unlike a machine, a person can assess relevance of information; relate words to their context and not only to the subject domain; reveal implications and allusions; identify culturally sensitive elements of the text. The success of contextually and culturally correct decisions depends on the translator’s professional mentality, the development of which must become the number one priority in training translation students.