CONTENT #5

THE ISSUE OF
CULTURE
IN TRANSLATION
CULTURE IN TRANSLATION
Cultural elements
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Cultural categories
1. ECOLOGY
flora, fauna, seasons, winds, plains, hills …
• The species of flora & fauna are local, & are not translated unless they
appear in both SL &TL environment.
• For technical texts, the Latin botanical & zoological classifications can be
used as an international language.

2. MATERIAL CULTURE (artefacts)

food, clothes, transportation, houses & towns …
• Food terms are subject to the widest variety of translation procedure in
various settings (e.g. menus, cookbooks, tourist brochures)
• Clothes as cultural terms may be sufficiently explained for TL general readers
if the generic noun or classifier is added.
• The function of generic clothes terms is approximately constant, indicating
the part of the body that is covered.
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Cultural categories
3. ORGANIZATIONS – CUSTOMS – ACTIVITIES – CONCEPTS
political & administrative, religious, artistic …
• The political & social life of a country is reflected in its institutional terms.
• The title of a head of state or the name of a parliament is usually
transparent, i.e. made up of easily translated morphemes.
• Where the name of a parliament is not readily translatable, it has a
recognized official translation for administrative documents but is often
transferred for an educated readership.
• A government is usually designated as a “council of ministers” & may
informally be referred to by the name of the capital city.
• Some ministries & political parties may also be referred to by their familiar
alternative terms (e.g. the name of the building where they are housed).
• Names of ministries are usually translated literally, provided they are
adequately descriptive.
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Cultural categories
If a public body has an opaque name
(e.g. British Council, Maison de la Culture…):
• The translator has to establish whether there is a recognized translation &
whether it can be understood by the target readership.
• In formal informative text, the name should be transferred (e.g. maison de la
culture ≈ arts center).
• In some (doubtful) cases, a functional equivalent is preferable (e.g. British
Council ≈ a national organization responsible for promoting English language &
British culture abroad)
• For impact & neatness (not for accuracy), a TL cultural equivalent of
a SL cultural term is more effective than a culture-free functional equivalent.
• When an important word is used in a special / delicate sense, a serious
translator tends to add the SL word in brackets (after attempting a translation),
signaling that he finds his translation inadequate.
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Cultural categories
Historical terms
o In case of historical institutional terms, the first principle is not to translate
them unless they have generally accepted translations.
o In academic texts, they are usually transferred with, where appropriate, a
functional or descriptive term.
International terms
o International institutional terms often have recognized translations
(usually through-translations) & are widely known by their acronyms
(e.g. ASEAN, FAO, IMF, UNESCO, WHO…).
Artistic terms
o The translation of artistic terms related to movements, processes &
organizations generally depends on the putative knowledge of readership.
o For educated readers, opaque names are transferred & transparent names
are translated.
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Cultural categories

4. SOCIAL CULTURE
work & leisure …

5. GESTURES & HABITS

What are some possible procedure

for translating culture-specific terms?
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Some translation procedures proposed by Newmark (1988)
 Transference: transferring an SL word to a TL text VD: Quyet đinh -> Decision

 Naturalization: adapting an SL word first to normal pronunciation,

then to normal morphology of the TL
 Cultural equivalent: replacing a cultural word in SL with a TL one
 Neutralization
 Functional equivalent: requiring the use of a culture-neutral word
 Descriptive equivalent: explaining the meaning of culture-bound
terms in several words
 Paraphrase: explaining the meaning of culture-bound terms, with this
explanation being more detailed than that of descriptive equivalent
 Synonymy (≈ a near TL equivalent)
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Some translation procedures proposed by Newmark (1988)
 Through-translation: literal translation of common collocations or
names of organizations (i.e. loan / calque translation)
 Recognized translation: using the official or generally accepted
translation of institutional terms VD: điêu khoan ->article
 Compensation: when loss of meaning in one part of a sentence is
compensated in another part
 Componential analysis: comparing a SL word with a TL word which
has a similar meaning but is not an obvious one-to-one equivalent
 Notes: additional information in a translation (e.g. footnotes)
o providing supplemental information
o calling attention to the original’s discrepancies
 Couplets: when the translator combines two different procedures
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Since the mid-1970s,

there have been “sociocultural” approaches to translation studies.

“the cultural turn” “the sociological turn”

(1980s & 1990s) (2000s)
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The cultural & sociological turns
Since the late 1980s & 1990s, new trends of culturally oriented
translation theory have expanded on DTS.
 feminist & postcolonial approaches to translation

 Feminists & postcolonists are committed to the overthrow of patriarchy,

colonialism and capitalism & sympathetic to oppressed minority cultures.
 Their writing styles are “passionately engaged” / “politically correct”.
 They are more tolerant of propagandistic & other contested forms of
translation than the descriptivists.
 Feminists & postcolonists also level serious criticism at the notion that
the target culture always controls translation.
 The history of colonialism is full of cases where an imperial source
culture controlled the process of translating texts into the local target
language of the colonies.
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The cultural & sociological turns
POSTCOLONIAL TRANSLATION STUDIES
 A dominated culture will invariably translate far more of a
hegemonic culture than the latter will of the former.
E.g.: Far more books are translated from English into other languages than
from those languages into English.
 When a hegemonic culture translate texts produced by a
dominated one, the translation tends to be perceived as difficult &
esoteric, whereas a dominated culture will translate a hegemonic
culture’s works accessibly for the masses.
E.g.: + Asia & Africa translate a broad spectrum of North American &
European works, & they achieve high popularity.
+ North America & Europe translate a tiny segment of Asian &
African texts, & they are published for a specialist audience by small
publishing houses.
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The cultural & sociological turns
POSTCOLONIAL TRANSLATION STUDIES

 A hegemonic culture will only translate those works by authors

in a dominated culture that fit the former’s preconceived notion of
the latter.
E.g.: + In Western eyes, Japan is a place of martial arts & ruthless
business dealings, and Japanese books selected for translation into Western
languages tend to confirm these stereotypes.
+ Works perceived as “un-Japanese” will be more difficult to publish
in translation.

 Authors in a dominated culture who dream of reaching a large

audience tend to write for translation into a hegemonic language,
which requires the conformity to some certain stereotypes.
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The cultural & sociological turns

FEMINIST TRANSLATION STUDIES

 The bulk of feminist translation work has been done in a strong activist
mode, embodying resistance to the patriarchy.
Criticism from
 03 main strands of feminist translation studies:
conservatives:
 Recovering the lost / neglected history of Why distorting
women as translators & translation theorists the meaning / import
 Articulating the patriarchal ideologies of ST ?
undergirding mainstream translation theory in the West
 Formulating a coherent & effective feminist practice of translation:
feminist translator translating male writers? male writers being translated
propagandistically? feminist translators trying to highlight traditional
value systems or convert it to a more progressive view? … … …
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The cultural & sociological turns

“The cultural turn” had a new resurgence in the 2000s

 the activist movement within translation studies

 Fundamental assumptions:
 It is impossible for human beings to be morally or ideologically
neutral.
 Translators always intervene in the verbal & cultural actions
to which they contribute.

 Diverse scholars (linguists, literary translators & postcolonial scholars)

have focused their attention on the tendentious changes translators
introduce into the texts they translate.