pragmatic-equivalence-coherence-and-implicature

name	pragmatic-equivalence-coherence-and-implicature
description	Diagnoses and reviews meaning in use — the reader's coherence judgement, implicature, speech-act force, background knowledge, and politeness — checking a rendering does not create wrong implicatures; owns inferred and interactional meaning, not the surface ties that cohesion-and-texture owns. Use when a caller asks whether readers will misread the implication, or whether the rendering lands the intended meaning or politeness.
kind	skill
status	ready
provenance	{"principles":["P007","P019","P020","P032","P033","P050","P070","P071","P072","P073","P092","P093","P113"],"claims":["C00274","C00275","C00276","C00277","C00278","C00279","C00280","C00281","C00282","C00283","C00284","C00285","C00286","C00287","C00288","C00289","C00290","C00291","C00292","C00293","C00294","C00295","C00296","C00297","C00298","C00299","C00300","C00301","C00302","C00303","C00304","C00305","C00306","C00307","C00308","C00309","C00310","C00311","C00312","C00313","C00314","C00315","C00316","C00317","C00318","C00319","C00320","C00323","C00324","C00325"],"evidence":[],"source_anchors":[],"authored_from_digest":"78b338dbfa05efc882940f0316f4c76b063d50dabeee77435a4596de4ed102ee"}

Pragmatic Equivalence, Coherence, and Implicature

Purpose

This skill reviews meaning in use — what a text implies, presupposes, and does, and whether the target reader can build the intended coherence. Its rule is that coherence is the reader's judgement, not a property of the text, so the translator must manage background knowledge, implicature, and expectation to avoid wrong inferences.

When to use

• Whether a translation will make sense to its readers is in question.
• An utterance carries implied meaning, presupposition, or a speech-act force.
• Background knowledge, politeness, or taboo must be weighed for the target reader.
• A rendering could create a wrong implicature or violate reader expectations.

Procedure

1. Treat coherence as the reader's judgement — the conceptual relations they build under the surface text — and aim for explanatory coherence that justifies the continuity of sense, not merely supplemental coherence (P007, P070).
2. Adjust the translation to the target context's realities and ordering conventions, which supply the premises for inference, and assess and supply the target reader's background knowledge deliberately (P019, P020).
3. Use the Co-operative Principle and its maxims (Quantity, Quality, Relevance, Manner) as orientation points rather than rules, treating them as culture-relative since politeness can override them; read any cited discourse or rhetoric norm as a loose tendency to verify against the actual target readership, not a fixed national pattern (P032, P033).
4. Examine anything that would violate the target reader's expectations and adjust it to avoid wrong implicatures (P050).
5. Handle implicature carefully, since implicatures are often indeterminate and a rendering can eliminate or invent one (P071).
6. Identify each reference well enough to interpret the associations it triggers, not just its referent, and read utterances by their implicit function using speech-act theory alongside implicature (P072, P113).
7. Weigh politeness and taboo against accuracy — in some contexts being polite outranks being accurate — respecting the target reader's sense of what is appropriate, and minimise discrepancies between the source's model of the world and the target reader's, calibrating how much to intervene (P073, P092, P093).

Inputs

• The source and draft target, and the implied, presupposed, or performed meaning.
• The target reader's background knowledge and cultural expectations.
• Where politeness, taboo, or a speech-act force bears on the rendering.

Output

Per finding: state the implied or interactional meaning at stake, the wrong implicature or coherence gap the draft risks, and the correction that lets the target reader build the intended sense; in compare mode weigh two ways to handle a deviation or implicature by which best lets the reader build that sense (P050). Follow the shared advise/review/compare response protocol in ../../references/translation-equivalence-key-concepts.md.

Anti-patterns to flag

• Treating coherence as a property of the text rather than the reader's judgement (P007).
• Leaving a rendering that creates a wrong implicature or violates target expectations (P050, P071).
• Applying Gricean maxims as universal rules across cultures (P033).

Worked example

Source assumes background the target reader lacks, so a literal rendering implies something unintended — a wrong implicature. Diagnosis — coherence treated as a property of the text rather than the reader's judgement (P007, P070): assess and supply the background the target reader needs to build the intended sense (P019, P020), and check the rendering creates no implicature the source did not (P050, P071). Weigh politeness and taboo against accuracy where they bear (P073, P092). Residual loss — supplying background adds text or shifts subtlety; name the trade-off, and hand the wording back.

References

See ../../references/translation-equivalence-principles-index.md for the full principle catalogue grouped by skill, and ../../references/translation-equivalence-key-concepts.md for the equivalence vocabulary this skill uses.

Provenance

Derived from principles P007, P019, P020, P032, P033, P050, P070, P071, P072, P073, P092, P093, P113, grounded in the distillation-only sources (Baker, In Other Words; Nida, dynamic and formal equivalence). The frontmatter provenance block lists the exact principle and claim ids, which resolve into principles/principles.yaml and analysis/claims.jsonl.