Translating Presuppositions

Informative presuppositions (information linguistically encoded as part of the common ground, but not actually known to the addressee) can cause confusion in translated material. A common solution in meaning-based translations is to restate the presupposed information as a separate assertion, but this approach distorts the information structure of the text, foregrounding material that was backgrounded in the source. I propose an alternative solution using conventional implicatures.
Exodus 18 “Now Jethro… had taken Zippo’rah, Moses’ wife, after he had sent her away” triggers a presupposition that Moses had sent her away; but this information was not previously known to the reader. Several meaning-based translations re-state this information as a main clause: “Earlier, Moses had sent his wife… and his two sons back to Jethro”. This preserves the information content of the original, but changes the information packaging.

The Indonesian TB (1974) adopts a different solution using a non-restrictive relative clause: “Jethro… brought Zipporah… who had earlier been sent back by Moses.” Such clauses, like other appositional phrases, are analyzed by Potts as conveying conventional implicatures. The information expressed in these constructions is backgrounded, but not assumed to be shared by the addressee. This rendering allows us to express the presupposed material in a way that will be less confusing to the reader, without making it more prominent than intended by the author.