Cognitive effort and contextual effect in translation: Relevance in the performance of novice and expert translators

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between cognitive effort and contextual effect postulated by Relevance Theory when applied to the study of the translation process. To do so, it analyses the performance of novice and expert translators in the language pairs English-Portuguese and English-Spanish. The data analysis attests the appropriateness of Gutt’s proposal to redefine the notion of effort in the presuppositions of relevance and provides evidence that the relationship between effort and effect in translation is mediated by the meta-representation that the translator has of both source and target texts.