Type of lesson: Lecture 11 Topic: Translation and culture

GESTURES AND HABITS
For 'gestures and habits1 there is a distinction between description and function which can be made where necessary in ambiguous cases: thus, if people smile a little when someone dies, do a slow hand-clap to express warm appreciation, spit as a blessing, nod to dissent or shake their head to assent, kiss their finger tips to greet or to praise, give a thumbs-up to signal OK, all of which occur in some cultures and not in others. Summarising the translation of cultural words and institutional terms, I suggest that here, more than in any other translation problems, the most appropriate solution depends not so much on the collocations or the linguistic or situational context (though these have their place) as on the readership (of whom the three types - expert, educated generalise and uninformed - will usually require three different translations) and on the setting. I have attempted to indicate the alternatives below.


SUMMARY OF PROCEDURES
A Culture
Way of life and its manifestations peculiar to one speech community.
(1) Ecology
Animals, plants, local winds, mountains, plains, ice, etc.
(2) Material culture (artefacts)
Food, clothes, housing, transport and communications
(3) Social culture - work and leisure
(4) Organisations, customs, ideas -Political,
social, legal, religious, artistic
(5) Gestures and habits (often described in 'non-cultural* language)
Contrast: universals, i.e. general aspects of nature and humans and their physical and
mental activities; numbers and dimensions
Distinguish: cultural focus, distance (or gap) and overlap
B Frame of reference
Contextual factors
(1) Purpose of text
(2) Motivation and cultural, technical and linguistic level of readership
(3) Importance of referent in SL text
(4) Setting (does recognised translation exist?)
(5) Recency of word/referent
(6) Future of referent
Translation procedures
(1) Transference
(2) Cultural equivalent
(3) Neutralisation (i.e. functional or descriptive equivalent)
(4) Literal translation
(5) Label
(6) Naturalisation
(7) Componential analysis
(8) Deletion (of redundant stretches of language in non-authoritative texts,
especially metaphors and imensifiers)
(9) Couplet
(10) Accepted standard translation
(11) Paraphrase, gloss, notes, etc.
(12) Classifier