The human factor – a prerequisite for a good cross-cultural communication in translation

PARAMETERS IN TRANSLATION

• background knowledge
• previous knowledge about the world
• (semantic knowledge / memory – what is true about the world at large and how it all fits together
• episodic knowledge / memory – what happened to me)

Interrelation between translation, text linguistics and culture

• The info in the whole text #
• to the individual parts

Idiomatic phrases & expressions

• ‘cup of tea’
• ‘rain cats & dogs’ =
• ‘pour with rain’
• ‘rain heavily’
• ‘*rain as if from a pail’ (BG)
• ‘Bardaktan boşalırcasına yağıyor’ (TR) – more or less the same as in BG

Culture inseparable part of translation process

• To what is translator bound: to SL or to TL culture?
• Should TRs stick to SL idiosyncrasies (their idiolect and/or sociolect) or to TL readership?

Format of TXT

• Fairy tales
• once upon a time
• there lived a king
• they lived happily ever after (BrE)
• ‘they lived long and happily, and died together on the same day’ (Rus)
• ‘and they lived long and happily till they died / till the end of their days (BG)

Translation is like a game of chess

• If part of the text is translated wrongly because of lack of lexical knowledge the translation can take the wrong direction, hence the wrong ‘move’ (Levy’s term applied to translation as a decision process; Levy 2000: 148)

Explicitness / implicitness of info in translation Inner translation

• He sent for wood and beams right away, and had a small house or cage built…
• He sent to bring wood and beams as he had to build a house (BG, literal translation)

Implicitness of culture-specific info

• ‘It was Friday night and they’d soon go out and get drunk’ (J. Braine, Room at the Top)
• ‘Where are you girls from?’... ‘Seattle, Washington’
• ‘He sipped his soup/coffee’