On cooperation

Abstract

The deontological aim of translators may be to promote longterm cooperation between cultures. However, translational and linguistic approaches to cooperation (Holz-Mänttäri, Grice, Sperber and Wilson) remain conceptually weak in that they fail to elaborate clear models of noncooperation and thus cannot say what kind of relations translators should try to hinder. The game-theoretic model of the prisoner's dilemma, on the other hand, incorporates an active mode of non-cooperation that might be of more interest to a translatorial ethics. That model may be used critically to claim that (1) cooperation concerns what happens in intercultural space (overlaps of cultures) rather than the comparison ..