The objection
The reading endorses CLAIM-202 “with one qualification”: “The current comparison risks underestimating the competing theories by operationalizing them through relatively impoverished static ratings. A relevance-theoretic or functional account need not be committed to only one context or a static stance profile.”
CLAIM-202 compares three predictors: semantic similarity, the static pragmatic profile, and the transport structure. It justifies the second as the rival by saying that each rival account “fixes a profile of the rendering as read once”. The reading denies that premise for relevance theory and proposes a fourth row between the static profile and the transport model: a “strong contextual baseline” of “rich context-response profiles, supervised predictive methods”.
“What matters is whether transport structure adds predictive or explanatory power over the strong contextual baseline, not merely over static pragmatic judgments. Otherwise, an empirical victory may establish that context matters without establishing that the transport formalism makes a distinctive contribution.”
What would answer it
The incremental thesis restated against a strong contextual baseline, specified in advance, with the margin fixed as CLAIM-202 already requires. Or an argument that the static profile is the strongest rival the functional and relevance-theoretic accounts license. QUESTION-074 names the test the reading takes to be distinctive of the formalism.
What it does not say
It does not say the transport structure will fail the stronger test, or that CLAIM-202 should not be the principal empirical thesis. The reading favours making it so.
It does not say every such account varies context. Gutt’s direct translation fixes one, the cognitive environment envisaged for the original (p. 254).
Note of 2026-10-28: split under ADR-061
The old title said both what a win would show and what the rival accounts are committed to. The first is a verdict on support, and is now ARG-031, from CASE-055 to CLAIM-202, form evidence, Proposed, with “An empirical victory may establish that context matters” as its answer to “does it tell the hypothesis apart from its rivals?”. This claim keeps the second, and undercuts that argument. The text above is unchanged.
Note of 2026-10-30: the accounts read, and narrowed
Nord (LIT-1863) translates for “a particular target audience from among various possible audiences” (p. 17), and the brief decides between instrumental and documentary translation (pp. 26–27). Nida (LIT-1864) makes the translation depend on the message, the purposes and an audience that varies in decoding ability and interest (pp. 127–128), and calls the rules “probabilistic” (p. 134). Gutt’s thesis (LIT-1845) makes faithfulness “determined for each occasion by the principle of relevance and the cognitive environment mutually shared” (p. 63). None fixes a profile of the rendering as read once. None proposes an operationalization, so the old title’s second clause moves to CLAIM-504.