Everyone has\u00a0had 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.\u00a0<\/strong>The\u00a0selection might\u00a0<\/strong>deal with a foreign environment or\u00a0with\u00a0a\u00a0field unfamiliar to the reader.\u00a0The writer\u00a0fails to provide background; he assumes that we know enough about the topic.\u00a0As a result, we can’t connect the text to anything, and it fails to expand our knowledge.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0in some other way.\u00a0The meaning of the text takes shape \u2013 or\u00a0fails to\u00a0\u2013\u00a0depending on whether the reader can relate its contents to things already known.<\/p>\n A theoretician of translation studies,\u00a0Ernst-August Gutt,<\/em>\u00a0uses the concept of\u00a0contextual gap.\u00a0<\/em>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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s necessary to build a bridge over a contextual gap, especially when adapting jargon into plain language.\u00a0As 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everyone has\u00a0had 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.\u00a0The\u00a0selection might\u00a0deal with a foreign environment or\u00a0with\u00a0a\u00a0field unfamiliar to the reader.\u00a0The writer\u00a0fails to provide background; he assumes that we know enough about the topic.\u00a0As a result, we can’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2657","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-english-en","7":"category-wordoftheweek-en","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2658,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657\/revisions\/2658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yksityinenkielitoimisto.fi\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}