The CTTS is pleased to announce that Prof. Fabio Alves (UFMG, Brazil) will give the CTTS Annual Lecture on Wednesday 10th April from 2-3.30 p.m. in room CG86 (Henry Grattan Building, Dublin City University).

Prof. Alves’ lecture will be on ‘Competence Oriented Research in Translation’ – see abstract below.

In his application of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 2986/1995) to Translation Studies, Gutt (1991/2000) argues that one of the most significant contributions of Relevance Theory is to provide a cause-effect framework that is applicable to human communication in general and, particularly, to research in translation. Gutt advocates in favour of what he calls CORT, namely, Competence-Oriented Research of Translation, aiming at understanding and explicating the mental faculties that enable human beings to translate. Gutt suggests that a CORT approach would be instrumental to make testable predictions about the success and failure of translation in terms of a cause-effect framework. This lecture examines Gutt’s suggestions from a process-oriented perspective and draws on translation process data to look into how translators process higher-order representations, generate metarepresentations of source and target texts and, ultimately, try to maximize cognitive effects while minimizing processing effort in the course of their work. In short, the lecture hopes to show how a relevance-theoretic account of translation can be empirically grounded and experimentally tested.