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CLAIM-202: What the line adds to functional and relevance-theoretic accounts of translation is measured structure beyond a static pragmatic profile: the context-indexed profile, its response to later framings and its decision relevance predict receivers' recovery beyond the similarity of static stance and footing ratings

4 min read

Properties13
StatusProposed
Version2
Rolethesis
Warrantinterpretive
Tagsphilosophy-of-language, translation, philosophy-of-science
Linepragmatic-transport
Bears onQUESTION-002 — What survives when an utterance is translated, retold or rendered in another medium?
Rests onCLAIM-023 — The contribution is not that translation is pragmatic or that speech acts change contexts, but a specified, testable account of which communicative distinctions a translation preserves
ComplementsCLAIM-005 — Pragmatic fidelity is the match between distributions of context-indexed communicative judgements across a correspondence of source and target contexts, not the similarity of one canonical meaning vector; the match constrains a translation only once one outcome correspondence is fixed across many items, and summed over source contexts alone it charges for loss and not for addition, CLAIM-078 — The theory succeeds if its observational and decision measures predict changes of communicative identity that text similarity misses and follow its compositional predictions across reconstructions; it needs neither quantum contextuality nor exact Noether laws, CLAIM-220 — For a named population of receivers and a stated family of tasks, what survives a translation, retelling or rendering is the set of task-relevant communicative distinctions those receivers can still recover from it, and measured preservation of the pragmatic observables predicts that recovery better than preservation of the wording or of the proposition, with or without its force
Illustrated byCASE-055 — The discriminating fidelity study: renderings built to dissociate wording, proposition, static stance and transport structure, judged by named populations in two languages on stated tasks
Cited as “concludes” byARG-031 — In the discriminating study, transport measures that beat the static pragmatic profile would show what the line adds to functional and relevance-theoretic accounts
Cited as “illustrates” byCASE-185 — A proposed study: direct and relay translations of one set of source utterances through three languages, to find whether agreement between the routes, the task-relative loss on each route, and the preservation of response to later framing come apart, and whether correspondences fitted between the communities' response structures on some items predict receivers' judgements on held-out items, translators and situations
Rendered intodocs/arguments-by-conclusion.md

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The claim

This is the record’s reply of 2026-10-10 to CLAIM-233. It is a proposal, Proposed until the study it names is run.

CLAIM-233 is right that a pass on the central defeat conditions is what a functional-equivalence account, Gutt’s relevance theory (LIT-784, unread) and plain speech-act pragmatics all predict. So the line’s distinctive claim needs its own thesis and its own test. CLAIM-023 says what the claim is: the contribution is “not that translation is pragmatic or that speech acts change contexts, but a specified, testable account of which communicative distinctions a translation preserves”. This entry states that account as something a study could find false.

Three predictors are compared, each for the same renderings and the same named receivers.

  1. Semantic similarity: human-rated propositional sameness, and machine embedding similarity.
  2. The static pragmatic profile: human ratings of the rendering’s stance and footing, each taken in one context, compared with the same ratings of the source.
  3. The transport structure: how the rendering’s judged profile varies across contexts, how it responds to later framings, and what difference it makes to the receivers’ decisions. These are the measures of CLAIM-228, CLAIM-231 and CLAIM-259.

The thesis is that the third adds to the second, by more than a margin fixed in advance, in predicting what the receivers recover on held-out renderings.

Why the second is the rival. A functional-equivalence account asks for the same receptor response in one context; a relevance-theoretic one asks for interpretive resemblance, the same contextual effects in the context of reading. Each fixes a profile of the rendering as read once, and the static stance and footing ratings are that profile made measurable. If the transport structure adds nothing to them, the line has said in more machinery what those accounts already say.

The design that tests this is old in the record. CASE-005’s Experiment 2 chose translations “by maximum semantic similarity, by maximum static pragmatic similarity and by maximum trajectory similarity”, and CASE-005 records that “the three-way selection design is gone by A52”. CLAIM-083 (Superseded) noticed the consequence: the manuscript’s criterion “is weighed against embedding similarity, not against static pragmatic similarity”. The discriminating study (CASE-055) restores the three-way comparison, with human receivers in place of a model judge, and its arm (c) supplies the renderings this condition needs: matched to the source on static stance and footing, different in response to later framings.

What it answers

CLAIM-233’s main point: the stated tests cannot tell the line from the accounts CLAIM-023 says it must be told apart from. This entry gives the line a test that can. CLAIM-220 keeps the central thesis’s own test, which a functionalist would also pass.

What it does not say

  • It does not say Nida, House, Reiss and Vermeer, Nord or Gutt are wrong. None of them is read here: the first four are absent from the record, and Gutt is held unread (CLAIM-023). It says only what result would show the line adds nothing to them, on the reading of them given above, which is the record’s and not theirs.
  • It does not say the static profile is useless. If the thesis fails, the static profile is what predicts recovery, and that is a finding for the functional accounts.
  • It does not fix the margin. That is the owner’s, in the preregistration.

Note of 2026-10-12: the interlocutor’s reading, as advice

The interlocutor’s reading of 2026-10-12 favours “making this the principal empirical thesis, with one qualification”: the rival set should include a strong contextual baseline. Filed as the counter CLAIM-205, with the test it calls distinctive, prediction under an unobserved composition, as QUESTION-074. Whether this entry becomes the principal thesis is still among the owner’s decisions on PR #121.

Note of 2026-10-30: the rival’s premise held false

“Why the second is the rival” says that each rival account “fixes a profile of the rendering as read once”. The record now holds the contrary. CLAIM-205, Active since 2026-10-30, holds that functional and relevance-theoretic accounts, as Nida, Nord and Gutt state them, need not fix one context or a static stance profile, and ARG-031, the inference from a win over the static profile to what the line adds, is Rejected. A win over the static profile would therefore not tell the line from those accounts. The proposed stronger rival is CLAIM-504, Proposed. The text above is unchanged.

Note of 2026-10-30: what holds it back

The discriminating study (CASE-055) has not been run and its margin is not fixed. The rival-set objection is unanswered: CLAIM-205 undercuts ARG-031, and no strong contextual baseline has been specified against which the thesis is restated.

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