Recognizing social aspects in translation

This chapter aims to show how cognitive approaches in translation studies recognize social or cultural aspects in the translation event and integrate them into their models to reflect the translation process. Among the pioneering scholars who include explicit references to social aspects in their models of dynamic meaning construction are Larson, who takes a tripartite view of meaning with referential, structural and situational elements, and Kußmaul, who adopts scenes-and-frames semantics. Other cognition-based translation studies approaches are taken by Gutt and Alves and Gonçalves, who introduce Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory to translation studies to explain translation solutions and problem-solving processes respectively, and Halverson, who refers to Langacker’s cognitive grammar for her explanation of translation trends in formulating a gravitational pull hypothesis. Künzli & Ehrensberger-Dow and Eardly-Weaver, finally, focus on the receiving actors of the translation event and their cognitive processing of the translated text