Böcker av Sergio Viaggio

Over the last fifty years tremendous changes have taken place on the planet that have affected translation practice and theory. The scientific and technical revolution -and, more recently, the revolution in informatics- has produced, together with the globalization of the world economy, both a textification of economic activity and a re-oralisation of culture, so that translation has begun to be seen as directly and crucially linked to economic production. On the political side, the birth of the new post-war world order and its corollary, the dismantling of the former colonial empires, gave rise to numerous specialized international organizations with several official languages, whereby translation came to be seen also as directly and crucially linked to global politics. Many multinational states, on their part, have become officially multilingual, and this has in turn multiplied the demand for translation. These new needs derived from economic development and its commercial, political, legal, religious, mediatic and institutional offshoots have produced an overwhelming demand for the translation of new kinds of pragmatic texts (written, oral or mixed).

Forty years of practice have made the author realize that interpretation, in all its modalities and social settings, is a sub-type of mediated inter-lingual communication whose success lies in establishing relevant sameness of meaning across the language barrier between real people. Successful communication, in the end, is having an interlocutor relevantly understand a speaker as a function of his, the interlocutor¿s, own interests, ability, knowledge, sensitivity and acceptability criteria. Whatever a speaker and an interpreter have said in his or her turn, communication will not have succeeded if the new interlocutor has not understood relevantly, i.e., what is necessary or advisable that he understand the way it is necessary or advisable that he understand as a function of the meta-communicative purposes of communication in the specific situation. Asymmetries in power, sophistication, interests and sensitivity as well as conflicting claims on our loyalty - let alone cognitive constraints, speed, accent, etc.- complicate our task. The above mentioned the author tried to explore in these pieces, a few of which were absorbed in his General Theory of Inter-lingual Mediation.