Everyone has had the experience of coming across a piece of writing that doesn’t make sense to them, even though there’s nothing wrong with the words on the page. The selection might deal with a foreign environment or with a field unfamiliar to the reader. The writer fails to provide background; he assumes that we know enough about the topic. As a result, we can’t connect the text to anything, and it fails to expand our knowledge.
Editors and translators often have to help the reader in an unfamiliar information environment by smuggling more information into the text or by making the environment more familiar to us in some other way. The meaning of the text takes shape – or fails to – depending on whether the reader can relate its contents to things already known.
A theoretician of translation studies, Ernst-August Gutt, uses the concept of contextual gap. He’s referring to differences in the information environment of readers with different languages. Often, a translator has to reorganize the relationship of implicit and explicit information in the text.
It’s necessary to build a bridge over a contextual gap, especially when adapting jargon into plain language. As with actual bridges, it’s good to start with a solid foundation. When it comes to writing, that means starting with points that the readers and the writers share.