Author: Halima Umar Sani
Date: 20/02/2026
Pragmatics is the study of how people use language in real communication. Very often we communicate more than the literal meaning of the words we used. In trying to determine what someone actually meant to say, people regularly go beyond the conventional meaning of the word by taking into account conversational behaviour, an intended audience, an actual reader and functions of the text. Translation however, is regarded as a process where by some parts of language are not only given a new shape in the target language, but they are also taken out of their original context and placed in a new one, with different values assigned to communicative conventions, readers‟ expectation and norms. Basically, the translator‟s intentions must agree with the receiver‟s expectations. The paper aims to examine English to Hausa translation from the pragmatic dimension. In the quest to achieving this goal, news and report texts were randomly selected from BBC Hausa Service and pragmatic model of Gutt (1991/2000) was applied to analyse them.
Keywords: Context, relevance, source language, target language.
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