Contrasting relevance in poetry translation

Abstract Although relevance theory has mainly been applied to spoken discourse, in the last years it has also been used in many other instances of human communication. We believe this cognitive approach offers excellent working tools to explain the processes performed in the translation of literature. This paper focuses, from a relevance-theoretic perspective, in two different translations of William Shakespeare's sonnet 130 into Spanish rendered one by two professional translators and the other by a literary person. Although both offer good translations, they have also produced texts that differ both linguistically and cognitively from their sources. As a result, such translations demand different comprehension efforts from their readers which, in different ways, may modify substantially the original intention–ostention/inference process of interaction.