Translation and World Englishes

The entry discusses the place of intervarietal translation in the semiotic classification of translation types provided by Roman Jakobson. This kind of translation is a liminal one, combining characteristics of intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic types of translation. Challenges related to formal intelligibility, semantic comprehensibility, and pragmatic intelligibility as defined by Smith are associated with intermediary translation via world Englishes and they are dwelt on in the entry. Further on, the discussion continues into the forms of world Englishes translation, which might be “outward” and “internal,” that is, with a translator having a source text and producing a target text, and without a mediator, with a bilingual producing directly a target text and having no source text. Both forms of translation require knowledge of the specificity of world Englishes participating in intercultural communication.