Translation of strategic ambiguity: A relevance-theoretic analysis

2.1 Some basics of relevance theory

According to Wilson and Sperber (2004: 607), RT “may be seen as an attempt to work out in detail one of Grice’s central claims: that an essential feature of most human communication is the expression and recognition of intentions”. It capitalizes on the claim that human cognition, and ultimately human communication, is “relevance-oriented”, i.e. picking out assumptions that are relevant and processing them productively (Sperber and Wilson 1986a; 1986b; 2002; Wilson and Wharton 2006). What this means is that people pay the utmost of their attention to that which seems most relevant to them, the piece(s) of information that would create a change in their mind due to the interaction between the world of the text and the audience’s world. Accordingly, Sperber and Wilson (1986a[1995]: 122) provide the following definition, where relevance is viewed as a “relation between an assumption and a context”:

An assumption is relevant in a context if and only if it has some contextual effect in the context.

However, Sperber and Wilson (1986a [1995]) put forward another condition for the maximization of relevance, namely effort. By adopting an “extent-conditions format”, Sperber and Wilson (1986a [1995]: 125) redefine relevance along the following lines:

Extent condition 1: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large.

Extent condition 2: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is small.

Accordingly, the ‘interplay between effect and effort is what determines the relative relevance of an assumption. In gross terms, when processed in context, an utterance provides some “analytic implications”, which, no doubt, are not processed all at once; for people cannot attend to the whole text at a time. The overall relevance of the utterance increases by the implication that reduces the cognitive effort needed to process it, and by that which increases its contextual effects. This evokes in the mind that the notion of relevance, though relative, is a matter of the number of gains divided by the effort invested to generate them. In Sperber and Wilson’s (1986a [1995]: 152) terms, “it is the phenomena which are least likely to be relevant which get filtered out, and those most likely to be relevant which pre-empt attention”. The task is then to single out the assumption(s) which will have greater contextual effects and, in the meantime, require less processing cognitive effort (Wilson and Sperber 1981, 1986; Wilson 2000; Sperber and Wilson 1986a [1995], 1990a). At the level of detail we are considering here, this requires exploring “the linkage between linguistic structure and pragmatic interpretation” (Sperber and Wilson 1986a [1995]: 217). Accordingly, a verbal message embodies at least two layers of information:

1. The informative intention which basically means “to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions” (Sperber and Wilson 1986 [1995]: 58). This encompasses all potential interpretations which can be contextually justifiable.

2. The communicative intention which basically means “to make it mutually manifest to audience and communicator that the communicator has this informative intention” (Sperber and Wilson 1986 [1995]: 61). This includes the conveyance of the intended meaning that the source language producer really intends to express.

Therefore, it is not just the informative function of communication (i.e. the linguistic meaning) that matters, but the communicative function (speaker’s meaning) is ultimately crucial to turn the attention of the interactants to what seems most relevant to them. A major departure that this current approach makes from the traditional Griceian framework is that the explicit and implicit sides of communication are both inferential and worthy of the interlocutors’ attention, (for details see Wilson and Sperber 1981, 2012; for a counter argument see Belleri 2013). Despite this, the ‘communicative intent’ of the speaker is, according to this RT framework, not always equally manifest to all interactants who, ideally, need to compute all possible interpretations that could be combinations of explicit content, context and implied meaning. To figure out which meaning is really intended, is justifiable, and/or makes the most sense, the sole task of the interactants in an exchange is to fill in for what is left unsaid/unstated based on evidence provided for this purpose – a task that requires going beyond surface meanings. According to Smith (2008), there is a gap between the words people speak/write and the message they put across the table. The shared context between the speaker and audience fills the gap, and, by doing so, the message becomes complete and clear. This is an echo to the Reader-Response Theory expounded by Iser (1980) who argues that “as the reader reads, s/he makes his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled”. Filling the gaps implies that the world of the reader and the world of the text interact to produce a complete scenario. This is probably so because, according to Grice (see Grice 1957, 1968), communication is an intentional process. In Sperber and Wilson’s (1995: 49) terms, communication is an “ostensive” behaviour – “behaviour which makes manifest an intention to make something manifest”.

As a major driving force in verbal encounters, intentionality, the predecessor of ostension, sorts itself out from the relationship between the text and its producer. Neubert and Shreve (1992: 72), for example, argue that “intentionality” encompasses (1) “effects of an author’s or translator’s decisions on the text” and (2) “their subsequent impact on the receptive intentions of the readers”. With the advent of RT, the term ostension has been used to refer to what text producers intend to “make manifest or more manifest to their audience” (Sperber and Wilson 1986a: 63). To the advocates of this line of reasoning, ostension plays a key role in communication because the text producer’s main goal is to “affect the audience’s thoughts by exploiting their natural cognitive tendency to maximize relevance” (Mackenzie 2002: 20–21). This is often referred to as the ostensive-inferential communication, defined by Sperber and Wilson (1986 [1995]: 63) as:

The communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions.

As for the mechanism, ostension involves the use of an ostensive stimulus, designed to attract an audience’s attention and focus it on the communicator’s meaning (see Horn 2004). Contexts of crisis, we argue, are created in secondary communication situations (Gutt 2000), that is, when the interactants do not share the same mutual cognitive environment, defined by Sperber and Wilson (1986 [1995]: 39) along the following lines:

An individual’s total cognitive environment is a function of his physical environment and his cognitive abilities. It consists of not only all the facts that he is aware of, but also, all the facts that he is capable of becoming aware of, in his physical environment

According to Sperber and Wilson (1986 [1995]: 15–16), this includes “expectation about the future, scientific hypotheses or religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the mental state of the speaker”. What is of utmost concern to Kolaiti (2008: 346) is “how receivers move from an area X of their cognitive environment … to some other area Y of their cognitive environment in search of the presupposed conceptual information.” According to Sperber and Wilson (1986 [1995]: 39), it is the following of a path of least effort until an interpretation which satisfies the expectation of relevance is found. An interpretation is possible only if the mutual cognitive environment of the interlocutors has provided “sufficient evidence for its adoption”.^[2]

As a remedy strategy, when communicator and audience do not share a mutual cognitive environment, they have to be able to meta-represent, i.e., to think “how other people represent those states of affairs in their minds – even if their own thoughts are different” (Gutt 2004b: 4). Metarepresentation is defined in relevance theory as follows:

A metarepresentation is a representation of a representation: a higher order representation with a lower-order representation embedded within it.

(Wilson 2000: 411)

When tied to a particular context, the speaker’s knowledge and the hearer’s knowledge may not match one-to-one. For Cartson (2002: 96) “the relation between the concept constructed by the hearer and that in the speaker’s own thought is one of sufficiently close resemblance rather than identity”, a good reason that made Wilson and Carston (2007: 16) refute “the idea that only encoded concepts can contribute to the truth-conditional content of utterances”. To them, “it is the pragmatically adjusted meaning of a word or phrase, rather than the linguistically encoded meaning, that falls within the scope of sentence operators” (Carston 2007: 17–18). When interpretating the text to make a complete explicature, “the hearer accesses a variety of particular assumptions from the, possibly vast, range activated by the utterance and treats them as potential implicatures of the utterance” (Cartson 2002: 96). Gutt (2004) therefore distinguishes between two modes of communication: the interpretation-oriented mode (i-mode) and the stimulus-oriented mode (s-mode), where the i-mode (or intended meaning) is computed on the basis of the s-mode (stimulus meaning/s).

The processes of meaning construction are, the argument goes, constrained by three parameters that work in tandem. These are encoded concepts, contextual information and pragmatic expectations. In order to get the contextual implications relevant to them, hearers try to make use of all these pieces of information by making some lexical adjustment, and thus creating an ad hoc concept (i.e. occasion-specific sense) from an encoded concept (for details, see Cartson 2002; and Wilson and Cartson 2007). To use some technical notations, WATER, the encoded concept, becomes WATER^∗, an ad hoc concept (see Cartson 2002). In the main body of the paper below, we will try to show how the construction of an ad hoc concept by the original audience (who do not share the same cognitive environment with the speaker) may not be identical with the ad hoc concept constructed by the translator (who is well-informed about the cognitive environment of the interlocutors) for the same encoded concept.

2.2 Ambiguity at the discourse level

Scollon and Scollon (1995: 50–52) address the notion of ambiguity as a fundamental dimension of everyday discourse, and view it in terms of “external ambiguity” and “internal ambiguity”. External ambiguity requires the audience to construct a context to generate effective and fixed inferences. Internal ambiguity, on the other hand, is concerned with knowing which pieces go together to form a coherent text. It is substantially assumed that external ambiguity poses a challenge to the audience in that it demands knowledge of the world to compute the dimensions of the ambiguity. The challenge presumably lies in the observation that each utterance is not only a property of a language community (i.e. the social facet), but it is also part of the speaker’s thinking process (i.e. the psychological aspect). Research has shown that human cognitive activities cannot be devoid of the social context where they take place. To the sociocultural theorists (Vygotsky 1978, 1986), the social context in which cognitive activity takes place is an integral part of that activity, not just the surrounding context for it.

Although it is often believed that clarity is a dominant feature in day to day communication, bringing to the fore transparency as a strategy that yields and enhances a positive and desirable effect(s), transparency, a fallacy in everyday life, may however create confusion and negative behavior, in particular, in contexts of crisis (see Pfeffer 1981). It may cost the speaker, the policy maker, a serious damage to the strategic policy designed and adopted by the sociopolitical and economic institution. Contrary to this, ambiguity is an appropriate avenue/act of communication in both written and verbal dialogue; for, first, it gives the speaker a room to maneuver in critical situations; second, it allows the audience to construct multiple interpretations, with one interpretation being more specific and the other(s) perhaps more general (see Kempson 1988).^[3] Infinite interpretations, it is argued, create a state of uncertainty, or a compromise or a diplomatic tactic (Ge’mar, quoted in Harvey 2002: 181). It simply evokes in the mind Wittgenstein’s famous term “duck-rabbit effect” whereby the reader may gain one reading or the other, but she/he cannot maintain a hybrid of both (Kardaleska and Tasevska 2011).

In addition to multiple interpretations, strategic ambiguity enjoys greater tendency to expound cultural differences within the same geographical boundaries and across the geo-political borders. An intercultural act of communication in this context poses a challenge to translation as an act of communication between different languages and cultures. In this vein, Pascale and Athos (1981: 102) illustrate, “explicit communication is a cultural assumption; it is not a linguistic imperative. Skilled executives develop ability to vary their language along the spectrum from explicitness to implicitness depending upon their reading of the other person and the situation”.

However, overemphasis on clarity and openness is not always the optimal choice “to gauge communicative competence or effectiveness” (Eisenberg 1984: 5). Based on her/his judgment, the speaker therefore weighs the scenario and then determines which communication strategy to be persuasively invested in a particular situation to serve the interest of the socio-political institution. Being an act of choice, ambiguity as a strategy helps the policy maker maintain and secure a margin to maneuver and to act tactfully to manipulate the undesirable state of tension. As put by Eisenberg (1984: 230), strategic ambiguity is used in situations where the speaker uses ambiguity to purposefully accomplish her/his goals. It is designed to further individual and organization goals, for transparency, if used in a context of a crisis, may generate a negative response, posing a threat to the sociopolitical and economic institutions. Diplomatically speaking, the speaker orchestrates the situation to persuade her/his audience via wording that combines precision with ambiguity (Bernstein 1976).

To accomplish the utmost desirable goals in any act of communication, transparency may, in critical situations, posit tension and negative repercussion. Put simply, speakers cover up their language with ambiguity in response to an inquiry that may generate negative repercussions if answered with clear and direct communication. Strategic use of symbols, or what Kline et al. (2009: 40) call “strategic language”, is then designed to accomplish goals that do in fact serve contingent and strategic orientation. In this sense, Eisenberg (1984) demonstrates that ambiguous acts of communication do, by the same token, yield positive responses in cases of crisis. This implicates that open communication, in one way or another, is not the appropriate behavior to proceed once a crisis appears on the horizon. That is to say, “pragmatic ambiguity” or “open ambiguity” to use Cruse’s (2011) term, is a plausible strategic strategy to achieve the desirable goal(s). It permits the speaker to highlight certain dimensions and suppress other dimensions of the scenario.^[4]

2.3 Translating strategic ambiguity

Due to the intricate interplay between the cognitive and the social (Van Dijk 1995, 1997a, 1997b), research has not yet established one-to-one causal relationships between translation and the various contextual factors affecting it in different contexts. Indeed, this varies from speaker to speaker and reader to reader with reference to age, education, gender, ethnicity, culture and ideology. However, translating a text out of its context means making it say what you want it to say.

At the discoursal level, strategic ambiguity arises in at least two ways. At one end of the scale, some information may be left unsaid/unstated. At the other end, extra information (lexical or prosodic) is voluntarily provided so that more than one positive meaning can be created. In all cases, ambiguity is very likely to arise, and is measured, we believe, by the level of correspondence between the speaker’s intent and the receptor’s interpretation. At the level of detail we are considering here, we distinguish between at least two broad categories of ambiguity, each of which requires a different translation tactic:

1. Unintended ambiguity: ambiguous structures that result from the coding of the message, but the author does not want them to be so. In daily encounters, this is always fixed with apologetic expressions (such as I didn’t mean that, sorry that you got me wrong, etc.) from the interactants. In such cases, we find no harm that the translator chooses one interpretation over another, based on enough evidence (salient or inferable) available in the larger context that helps unravel the real communicative intent of the addressor. In such cases, Indirect Translation (henceforth IT) could be favored as a strategy to cope up with the scenario, for there would be no problem if the translator, the decision maker, manipulates the scenario by selecting partial translation, leaving instant impact on the audience.

2. Intended ambiguity: ambiguous structures that result from the coding of the message, and the author wants them to be so. Here, the translator should be wary enough not to let herself in for one interpretation over the other. Otherwise, she exposes the manipulation of ambiguity to unwanted scenario, namely, she inflicts upon the source text serious injury, letting the door wide open for the strategic intention to be figured out differently and inviting the interactants to compute different scenarios. Hence, ambiguity is part of the intentions of the addressor as a policy maker. In such a context of ambiguity, the translator strives towards reinstating on complete surface resemblance of the original text. In such cases, Direct Translation (henceforth DT) should, the argument goes, be favored as a strategy to cope up with the scenario, for there would be a serious problem if the translator, the decision maker, manipulates the scenario by selecting partial translation, leaving only instant impact on the audience.

Our current research limits itself down to actual translation practices of the second category of strategic ambiguous structures, thus limiting the discussion to verbal encounters where translators need to cope with those instances that do not promote one-to-one correspondence between the speaker’s intent and the receptor’s interpretation. It promotes scenarios of more than one persuasive and precise probability.

Based on the major tenets of the pioneering work of Gutt (2000/1991), Smith (2008) postulates a promising mechanism as to how the strategy DT is operating. First, Smith assumes that the translation should enjoy a balance between literalness and naturalness.^[5] Stylistically, the translation should sound natural in the target language as the original in the source language. The continuum, in other words, invites the translator to translate literally to the extent it is clear/reader-friendly in the receptor idiom. By literal, what is meant is a question of translating what is “meant” rather than what is “said”, a major departure from probably all previous translation frameworks. This means the translator has to be always cautious of adaptation which could be misleading in the sense that it may construct on the surface a negative/alien scenario. Second, to create an effective translation, the translator is required to generate a correct interpretation, an interpretation that, as is put by Winckler and Merwe (1993: 54–55), “goes beyond the lexical choices and grammatical level”. This means any act of interpreting the text should flesh out its discoursal features, rhetorical devices and the social conventions. Correctly interpreting the text, the translator will ensure the construction in the TL a “positive communicative act”. It is therefore the translator’s responsibility to adequately figure the dimensions of the contextual knowledge. Compounded together, these parameters are crucial for the construction of a message, ensuring adequate explicature/implicature information that permits the audience to draw complete and appropriate assumptions on their own.

2.4 Translating strategic ambiguity: A relevance-theoretic framework

Although RT is not originally advanced to be a theoretical and research platform for translation,^[6] we hope to show that its application may bring about new insights into hotly debated translation challenges such as the one we are undertaking in this research endeavor, namely the translatability of purposefully-made ambiguous structures (strategic ambiguity – to use Eisenberg’s 1984 words, or deliberate or purposive ambiguity in Kittay’s 1987 terms). Given Wilson and Sperber’s (1987: 14) claim that “every utterance has at most one interpretation which is consistent with the principle of relevance”, the research inquiry about strategic ambiguous structures is then like this: Should translation retain or remove ambiguity that is eventually designed to achieve and sustain the speaker’s ideological goal(s)?

Couched within a psycholinguistic model of analysis such as RT as explicated by Sperber and Wilson (1986a [1995], 2012), our current claim is like this: the translator should not try to explicate the implicatures of the original text, in particular, if the scenario deploys strategic ambiguity. Instead, she should be able to provide the receptors with all communicative clues which empower them to make their own inferences (see Smith 2000: 92). The translator leaves the contextual clues implicit to permit the audience retrieve the relevant implicatures that are already envisaged by the original audience. Nevertheless, the translator, an interpreter of the original, is responsible for figuring out the dimensions of the linguistically implicit information. This is probably needed because spelling out the relevant linguistic clues helps the audience retrieve the implicit implicatures which the source text (henceforth ST) provides evidence for (see Smith 2008). Accordingly, the translator, as a communicator, must ensure more or less the construction of what is termed by Gutt (1998) “positive communicative effects” across the geographical boundaries, ensuring that any act of adaptation may lead to creating a negative response in the mind of the target text (henceforth TT) audience.

We therefore make the claim that translation, as an act of communication, is optimally successful when the translator provides enough stimuli (verbal and nonverbal) of the source language speaker’s informative intention. This can be made possible by providing the stimuli which communicate enough clues that would enable the audience to infer the source language speaker’s informative intention on their own. Being advocates of DT as the most viable alternative possibly available to date, we refute altogether the common practice where the translator chooses to disambiguate the message for no reason(s) other than enhancing clarity and mutual intelligibility.^[7] From a diplomatic point of view, to disambiguate implies that the translator devalues the strategic objective that is purposefully and ideologically designed to accomplish the text producer’s goal, and thus paves the way to a state of tension and confrontation. It levels the multiple interpretations to the zero, denying the reader access to appreciate the aesthetic dimension of the text, let alone the information embedded in it.

All in all, when some utterance is strategically made ambiguous, at least two interpretations are possible (call them interpretations A and B); one is specific, and the other(s) is(are) generic. When translated, four scenarios are possible renderings of the source text. These are:

1. Remove ambiguity by providing interpretation A.

2. Remove ambiguity by providing interpretation B.

3. Remove ambiguity by providing both interpretations A and B.

4. Retain ambiguity by providing a translation that would allow for both interpretations in the receptor language.

The research inquiry arises as to whether the translator needs to remove or retain ambiguity. It is the translator’s responsibility to deploy across the border either a partial resemblance or complete resemblance. The central claim we put forward here is that 1, 2 and 3, which are obtained via indirect translation, deny the reader access to the contextual effects displayed on the surface by the source text. Following Wilson (2000: 411), we believe that these three alternatives are meta-representations (a representation of a representation) of the source text. They fail to retain the utterance semantic representation (explicature) and its pragmatic ambiguity (implicatures), thus denying the audience access to draw the plausible inferences for themselves. Alternatively, we would argue that the last alternative (the one that still leaves room for both interpretations) is the only option that underlies the real communicative intention(s) of the original speaker; hence the original linguistic encoding is purposefully made ambiguous. It is the only rendering that is consistent with the principle of relevance as it provides “the optimal ratio of contextual effect and processing effort” – to use Dor’s (2003: 704) words. Therefore, direct translation, along the lines laid by Gutt (1991, 2000), is, we believe, the only theoretical construct that would enable the translator to bring “the translation” of a strategically ambiguous text to its maximum effectiveness.

3.1 Translation of intended ambiguity: Exemplification

In order to verify the soundness of our claim, two strategically ambiguous texts comprised the data of this study. The two texts were religiously-oriented as they were taken from the story of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. The first text was reported when Muhammad’s enemies were preparing to wage a war against him. The social context of the story was something like this: the prophet and one of his companions (called Abu-Bakr) were asked by the chief of a tribe (usually called sheikh) about their origin. In order to conceal their identity, the prophet himself replied like this: We are from Maa’. Knowing that there is a tribe called Maa’, the tribesman thought that his addressee was referring to it as their origin, when the prophet was, in fact, referring to the Qur’anic verse which states that human beings creation was started from Maa’ (literally water):

Literal: ‘Now let man but think from what he is created! He is created from a drop of water (Maa’)’.

The social context of the second text was something like this: Muhammad secretly slipped out of Mecca with his companion Abu-Bakr on what has become known as ‘al-hijrah, or Migration. The utmost concern of both the prophet and his companion was again to conceal their identity from the people who met them on their way from Mecca to Medina, so that they did not cause trouble to themselves, as the people of Mecca had launched a manhunt for them. The prophet’s companion Abu-Bakr was stopped by someone who knew him. This man inquired from Abu-Bakr about the person who was riding ahead of him (Muhammad). Abu-Bakr replied like this:

Literal: ‘He is the one who shows me the way’.

The strategic ambiguity loaded into the text is something like this: Whereas Abu-Bakr meant that he (his companion who the inquirer is asking about) was his spiritual preceptor, the inquirer understood that he was some person whom Abu-Bakr had taken with him as his road guide).^[8]

In the discussion below, we will try to show that the encoded concepts MAA’ and SABEEL, each of which communicates two independent meanings, do not correspond one-to-one in the minds of the interlocutors as ad hoc concepts SABEEL^∗ and MAA’^∗. However, for the translator, who is able to metarepresent, there is no such lack of correspondence. The well-informed translator knows the eloquence and wit embedded in the two texts as well as the speakers’ real purposes in communicating their intensions in this way.

In order to make the discussion more sustained and in order to make the task of the readers who are not familiar with Arabic a bit easier, we tried to make the discussion more focused on just one text. The other text is only used for verification purposes in the discussion section when needed.

For this, ten translators, who understand the linguistic coding of the message and who know the events and the larger situational context of the story (the cognitive environment of the interlocutors), were cordially asked to translate the following Arabic text into English.

Asked to pay special attention to the underlined statement, which is purposefully made ambiguous by the speaker, our informants, came up with the renderings displayed in Table 1.

Table 1

Renderings of the Arabic text into English by 10 translators.

Arabic text:

Translator	English translation of the underlined utterance which is strategically ambiguous
Translator 1	He is a man showing me the way
Translator 2	He is a man guiding to the right path of Islam
Translator 3	He is a man guiding to the right path of Islam
Translator 4	He is a man who guides me to the right way to Madina
Translator 5	He is a man guiding me to the right way (to Madina)
Translator 6	He is a man who shows me the way
Translator 7	He is a man showing me the right way to Madina
Translator 8	He is a man guiding to the right path of Islam
Translator 9	He is a man who guides me to the right way to Mecca and he guides me to the right path of Islam
Translator 10	He is a man guiding to the right path of Islam

As far as the translation of the strategic ambiguity in this text is concerned, these renderings can be worked out into four possible scenarios. These are:

1. He is a man guiding me to the right way to Madina

2. He is a man guiding to the right path of Islam

3. He is a man guiding me to the right way to Mecca and He guides me to the right path of Islam

4. He is a man showing me the way

Given a text overloaded with eloquence and wit like this one, combining precision and ambiguity, the translator has to make a strategic decision as to how the underlined ambiguous statement (

) incorporated in the language of the speaker (Abu-Bakr) can be rendered into the target language. Endowing the text with such unique density requires the translator to invest more conceptual effort to process the implicit information. That is to say, the translator has to figure out and compute the speaker’s intention (i-mode), which is deliberately designed in this case to construct a descent security measure to the Prophet, to indirectly communicate the speaker’s fundamental objective to a new audience. The social entity ‘the man the guide’, sounds to be, strategically speaking, a prominent figure to the text producer, perceiving the man in terms of, ‘my leader’, ‘my Prophet’, let alone ‘my companion’. To materialize the objective(s), it is understood that Abu-Bakr produced such an utterance to promote the notion of security to his companion (the prophet), the man whose tribal men have launched a manhunt for him, as someone with an ideology and divine message. What this basically means is that the migration (the encircling context) was not an act of choice for them, but one that the Prophet of Islam was forced to undertake.

Understanding the linguistic coding of the message and knowing the events and the larger situational context of the story of the Prophet and Abu-Bakr on their journey from Mecca to Medina, the translator can quite easily figure out that Abu-Baker (the companion of the Prophet) purposefully communicated the message to the inquirer in a way that misguided him (s-mode). To use more technical jargon, Abu-Bakr puposefuly wanted the i-mode and the s-mode not to be the same in the mind of the inquirer. The linguistic encoding of the message by the original speaker (Abu-Bakr) triggers in the reader’s mind the JOURNEY metaphor,^[9] and allows for at least two possible interpretations. At one (probably surface) level, it can be understood as if Abu-Bakr does not know the area, and so refers to the man with him (the Prophet) as a travel guide (Arabic:

). Given this, what is underlined can be translated as

He is a man guiding me to the right way (to Madina).

But at another (probably deeper) level, metaphorical one, Abu-Baker had the intention to refer to the man with him (the Prophet) as the one who guides him into the path of Islam, a spiritual guide, triggering in the reader’s mind the metaphor of SPIRITUALITY IS A JOURNEY. Therefore, the following interpretation is highly competitive:

He guides me to the right path (of Islam).

When asked why Abu-Bakr chose to be purposefully ambiguous, almost all Islamic interpreters would agree that Abu-Baker did not intend to lie, yet he had had a strong motive to conceal the identity of his companion, exactly in the same way Muhammad himself did when asked about their origin on the other occasion. Put differently, Abu-Bakr used ambiguity strategically to accomplish some goals that, by all means, cannot be achieved if transparency is used. Figuring out the context, the translator, as a policy maker in cases of crisis like this, has to avoid banking on “transparency” as a strategy in rendering a text loaded with grains of ideology peppering the political discourse, simply because transparency in such a context creates a state of tension rather than a sort of peace making. What this basically means is that Abu-Bakr’s original wording of the message stimulates at least two CONTEXTUAL IMPLICATIONS, i.e. interpretations “deducible from the input and the context together, but from neither input nor context alone” (Sperber and Wilson 2002: 251):

1. He is a man guiding me to the right way (to Mecca).

2. He guides me to the right path (of Islam).

Because a relevance-theoretic approach sanctions only one contextual implication (i-mode) to be consistent with the principle of relevance at a time, the research inquiry that arises here is like this: Which contextual implication should the translator attend to? Would she opt to alternative 1 or 2 but (not) a hybrid of both, for example?

The central claim we put forward here is: None. We argue that these two acts of indirect interpretation deployed in the context may fit well the so called lazy reader, the non-expert, who enjoys as it were the pleasure of readymade scenarios. Possibly all other meaning-based theories of translation would require the translator, as an interpreter, to figure out which of these two interpretations should be rendered to the receptor language audience (i-mode). We strongly believe that attempts 1 and 2, obtained via indirect translation, partially represent the Arabic text, denying the reader access to the contextual effects displayed on the surface of the source text, and thus leaving only instant impact on the audience.

A relevance-theoretically informed translator, we argue, would choose neither the first nor the second interpretation or even a hybrid of both, a partial representation of the original, because each, in Wilson’s (2000: 411) terms, is a “metarepresentation” (a representation of a representation). This probably so because both attempts will depend on the linguistically encoded meaning, not the pragmatically adjusted meaning of the text, and therefore gushing no life into the translated version of the text. Alternatively, she should go for the contextual implication (i-mode) that still underlies the real communicative intention(s) of the original speaker; the one that still leaves room for both interpretations; hence the original linguistic encoding is purposefully made ambiguous. Therefore, this alternative reading He is the one who shows me the way is possibly the only interpretation, we argue, that is consistent with the principle of relevance, i.e. the one which brings about maximum effect for the lowest cost. This is probably so because it is basically a direct translation of this strategic ambiguous utterance with the ST in mind.

Let us try to show how DT, along the lines laid by Gutt (1991, 2000), is the most viable alternative. According to Gutt (2000: 170), “for an utterance in the receptor language to qualify as a direct translation of some original utterance in the source language, it needs to share all the ‘communicative clues’ of that original”. And that interpretation is the only ‘metarepresentation’ that is consistent with the principle of relevance (bring effectiveness to the maximum with the least efforts possible). However, because translation depends on what the translator believes to be the intended interpretation of the original text, we need to ponder on the translation that qualifies to share all the communicative clues, especially when the text is purposefully-made ambiguous. Gutt’s (2000: 110) suggested answer is like this:

… it is not simply the first interpretation that comes to mind that the audience is entitled to take as the intended interpretation, but rather the first interpretation that comes to mind and that is consistent with the principle of relevance (italics as in original).

As for the machinery, Wilson and Sperber (1995) suggested a path of practical reasoning formulated in Wilson and Carston (2006) along the following lines:

Relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic

1. Follow a path of least effort in constructing an interpretation of the utterance (and in particular in resolving ambiguities and referential indeterminacies, enriching or adjusting the encoded meaning, supplying contextual assumptions, deriving implicatures, etc.).

2. Stop when your expectation of relevance is satisfied (or abandoned).

Using this machinery, let us turn now to demonstrate how effect and effort, as counter forces, interact to yield the most optimal translation (i.e. the one consistent with the principle of relevance) for the strategic ambiguous ST under scrutiny.