Towards a General Theory of Translational Action : Skopos Theory Explained
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Towards a General Theory of Translational Action Skopos Theory Explained by Katharina Reiss, Hans J Vermeer (z-lib.org) (2)
2.5.1 Cultural aspects of translation
A language is part of a culture. Cultures use language as their conventional means of communicating and thinking. Culture encompasses a society’s social norms and their expression. Culture is whatever one has to know, master or feel in order to be able to judge whether a particular form of behaviour shown by members of a com munity in their various roles conforms to general expectations or not. 12 With regard to the “language of culture”, cf. Hall (1959); with regard to the validity of norms in communication, see Marten (1972) and Simon (1978). 12 [Kultur ist all das] was man wissen, beherrschen und empfinden können muß, um beur teilen zu können, wo sich Einheimische in ihren verschiedenen Rollen erwartungskonform oder abweichend verhalten. (Göhring 1978: 10) Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer 25 Truth values are of interest to a translator when making an (ethical) decision whether or not to accept a translation commission (e.g. the translation of politi cal propaganda material) – but this is not our concern at this point. Translators must therefore know both the source and the target cultures; they must be bicultural. For, in translation, the value of an event, with regard to its nature or its degree or both, may change. The translator (as translator) is not interested in either objective real- ity or truth values in general but in the value of a historical event as manifested in a text, both in relation to the prevailing norms (culture) and to the specific situation of the text (and/or its author), and in the way this value is affected by translation for a target culture. For example: the reception of a German translation of the Qur’an will be determined by different value judgments about Islam, but perhaps also by a similar attitude towards religion. The attitude of Indians towards animals is similar to the love of dogs in German culture, but completely different with regard to the ‘value’ of a pet. Menander’s moral conceptions differ radically from those of modern central Eu ropean cultures. Looking at the following quotation, you will find that its form, both with regard to style and to the examples, is ‘typically’ US American. [Translation] problems are often as much bicultural as they are bilingual, and bicultural informants […] are needed to determine when a good translation is not a good adaptation [= cultural transfer] into another culture. This is particularly obvious when one tries to translate questionnaire items into a language for whose speakers the cultural substance may be subtly different or even nonexistent. Imagine trying to use a literally translated statement like ‘I would not admit a Negro to my social club’ with Bantus or a statement like ‘I go to church every Sunday’ with Moslems or Buddhists! (Osgood et al. 1975: 17) Due to their biological and physiological condition, humans cannot perceive ‘objective reality’, i.e. objects as they ‘really’ are. What we perceive is only how objects appear to us (‘phenomena’); cf. Geoffrey Hellman’s introduction in Goodman 1977, IXXLVII): there is no such thing as unstructured, absolutely immediate sensory ‘data’ free from categorisation. All perception is tainted by selection and classification, in turn formed through a complex of inheritance, Of worlds and languages 26 habituation, preference, predisposition, and prejudice. Even phenom enal statements purporting to describe the rawest of raw feels are neither free from such formative influences nor incorrigible, in the sense of ‘immune from revision for cause’. Even ‘brown patch now’ may reasonably be revised (without claim of ‘linguistic mistake’!) in the interests of coherence with other judgements, some of which may describe particular experience, some of which may enunciate general principle. The perception of objects as phenomena (in the above sense) is partly common to human nature (or so we assume) and partly culturespecific (e.g. conditioned by particular language traditions). For example: words denoting colour do not have exact matches in other languages; they cannot be distinguished from words that do not denote colour in the same way in different languages (cf. the examples in Vermeer 1963). For example: when you put your cold feet into warm water, the water will seem warmer than when putting your warm feet into water of the same temperature. For example: in modern European fiction, descriptions of situations are rather common (although they may vary from one culture to another with regard to position, length and frequency compared to narrative passages). In Medieval and, even, in modern Semitic cultures, descrip tions of situations are less common (cf. Kindermann 1964: XXXXI, 3.1.). As descriptive and narrative passages are traditional structural elements of fictional texts, they are each assigned a specific value within a particular culture. If the text structure is maintained in trans lation, this value, and consequently its impact on the readers, will be different in the target culture. The perception of objects as phenomena is also partly conditioned by the situation. Culturespecific and situationspecific elements can cause translation problems. Depending on whether a norm refers to the time and place of a sourcetext production or of a text reception either in the source or in the target culture, its value will be different. |
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