This project is conducted to explore translation difficulties induced by culture specific issues. At first, I introduce the relationship between translation and this topic briefly and give the definition of culture specific issues.
Secondly, I review several related literatures and find something useful from them. Then I study some methodologies which have been established by famous translators and scholars in the history, trying to find a proper way to solve this issue.
The fourth part makes an analysis of some cases which are some Chinese idioms and proverbs and their translations.
Finally, I will discus the result of my case study and conclude the whole project.
List of key words
Culture specific issue
Idiom
Proverb
Historical institutional term
Source text
Target text
Introduction
With the rapidly economic development and social progress, especially deepening of globalization, international communication become more and more frequent and translation plays an increasingly important role in the nation affairs and even in our daily work and life. G.Steiner (1975) who has contributed many outstanding literary translation and summaries of translation theories have emphasizes the importance of translation as a key to the understanding of thought, meaning, language, communication and comparative linguistics. At the same time, there are several problems produced during the translation process, and these problems generally would lead to some translation difficulties. This project mainly focuses on translation difficulties induced by culture specific issues.
"Culture specific issues refer to a kind of proper names and cultural terms and phrases related with culture-especially idioms and proverbs-just exist in a group of people who speaks a certain language but not exist in another group of people who speaks another language. When the latter group of people wants to translate these kinds of terms into their language, they will face a problem that they have no equivalent terms in their own language. This problem is called translation difficulties induced by culture specific issues."(Newmark, 2001) Culture specific topic is a complex topic, because all speech events are set in a context of culture, besides, sometimes ST has words which express concepts that are totally unknown in the target culture called a cultural gap. Moreover, this can be concrete and abstract.
Actually, in theory, names of single persons or objects are 'outside' languages, belong to the encyclopedia not the dictionary, no meaning or connotation are both untranslatable and not to be translated.
In this research project, it is supposed to conduct a study to explore on some translation difficulties induced by culture specific issues and try to seek a method to deal with this problem.
The above is the context of this research and research problem. Then how culture specific issues induce translation difficulties and how to solve these problems will be the main problems involving in this research problem. Furthermore, in this research, I will conduct some case analysis to look for and summarize a rational way to solve these translation difficulties.
The research is based on three hypotheses, which are listed as follow:
1. Translation difficulties induced by culture specific issues exist extensively and generally. Once the terms or phrases which are related to culture need to be translated, the problem will produce.
2. It is impossible to find out a perfect solution to deal with the translation difficulties induced by culture specific issues. What translators just could do is to find out a proper solution as possible as they can. This hypothesis is according to Croce (1922), he questioned the possibility of adequate translation.
3. The formation of a proper translation for a culture-specific issue will produced by a rational procedure and the test of time. If the translation finally is accepted by the group of people who speaks target language, the translation can be considered as a successful case.
In addition, the main objectives that I do this study are:
To learn and investigate the translation difficulties induced by culture specific issues, analyze these difficulties and then clarify them.
To consult literatures and summarize how translators deal with these kink of issues in history.
To summarize the procedures and build a simple, rational and authoritative way to help people solve these kind of issues easily.
There are many kinds of culture categories, such as ecological, material culture, social culture, gestures and habits and so on. In this part what will be mainly talked about is just the translation of cultural terms and cultural phrases. Translation of Cultural terms includes translation of proper names and institutional terms, including proper names: historical institutional terms, international institutional terms and national institutional terms.
This research is helpful for our non-translators, translators and my teacher career. No matter non-translators or translators will often face this kind of problems in their daily work and life. Thus, we need a proper solution to solve this issue and this solution should be accepted by almost everyone. The direct outcome of my research is to find out proper translation for several culture specific terms through consult literature and doing case analysis. The ultimate and long-term goal of this study is to build a dictionary for culture specific words and phrases. If so, whenever people encounter this kind of vocabulary, they could find a proper translation of it by looking up the dictionary.
In our ESL teaching, it is inevitable to involve translation of culture specific issues. This research will be beneficial for my postgraduate study and career in the future.
Literature Review
Translation already has a several thousand years of history. During this period, countless of knowledge and ideas on this topic have been established by many scholars and translators. At first, for translation, Tytler (1790) have denoted that 'a good translation is one in which the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another language as to be as distinctly apprehended and as strongly felt by a native of the country to which that language belongs as it is by those who speak the language of the original work.' Komissarov (1973) thought that translation theories are moving in three directions: the denotative (information translation), the semantic (precise equivalence) and the transformational (transposition of relevant structures). Secondly, for culture specific issues, Wardhaugh (1986) considered that if a speaker of a certain language uses certain words to "describe things and speakers of another language lack similar words, then speakers of the first language will find it easier to talk about those things." Moreover, the culture specific issue also involves a problem: If our language and way of thinking are different, how are we able to communicate with speakers of other languages?
Further, how to deal with this issue? As Baker Mona (1992) mentioned: 'the choice of a suitable equivalent in a given context depends on a wide variety of factors. Some of these factors maybe strictly linguistic, other factors maybe extra-linguistic. It is virtually impossible to offer absolute guidelines for dealing with variety types of non-equivalent which exist among languages. The choice of a suitable equivalent will always depend not only on the linguistic system or systems being handled by translator, but also on the way both the writer of source text and the producer of the target text, for example, the translator, choose to manipulate the linguistic systems in question.'
In 1996, the Spanish translator Javier Franco Aixela have stated "culture specific items" and their strategies which were given the definition as "those textually actualized items whose function and connotations in a source text involve a translation problem in their transference to a target text, whenever this problem is a product of the nonexistence of the referred item or of its different intertextual status in the culture system of the readers of target text(Aixela, 2007).
According to Nida and Taber, cultural translation is "a translation in which the content of the message is changed to conform to the receptor culture in some way, and in which information is introduced which is not linguistically implicit in the original" (Nida &Taber, 1969/1982).
Finally, there are some theoretical models of the translation process which were established by Sonia Colina (2003) and Belinda Maia (2003).
They denoted that "a translation belongs to two communicative contexts: one is the context surrounding the text produced for the target culture and another one is the context of the source text. All the time, it is hard to keep a balance between these two contexts."
German translator Christiane Nord (2001) stated that by function translation can be divided into two types: documentary translation and instrumental translation. She denotes that "Documentary translation means the source-culture sender communicates with a target-culture audience via the source text under source-culture conditions. While instrumental translation produces in the target language an instrument for a new communicative interaction between the source-culture sender and a target-culture audience using the source text as a model"
What is functionalism? Nord (2001) also told us: "Functionalism is a contextually based theory of translation that allows for consideration of the contextual factors intervening in the translation process, even if contradictory in nature. Skopos Theory provides a systematic criterion to make translation decisions and resolve conflicts by establishing a hierarchy of factors. Skopos maxim means let your translation decision be guided by the function (result) you want to achieve by means of your translation."
Methodology
In Gary's translation course, there are many translation techniques for cultural specific issues have been introduced. They are exoticism, cultural borrowing, calque, communicative translation and cultural transplantation. First, Exoticism means "the translation carries the cultural features and grammar of SL to TL". Second, for cultural borrowing, the ST expression is transferred verbatim into the TT, "without any adaptation of SL expression into TL forms"(Ghadi, 2010). After a time, they usually become a standard in TL terms, which are very frequent in history, legal, social and political terms. Third, calque, which means loan translation, is a form of borrowing from one language to another whereby the semantic components of a given term are literally translated into their equivalents in the borrowing language, for example, Chinese expression "纸è€è™Žï¼ˆzhi lao hu）" could be translated as " paper tiger". Fourth, "communicative translation is usually adopted for culture specific terms such as idioms, proverbs, fixed expression and so on. In such cases, the translator substitutes SL word with an existing concept in target cultural"(Ghadi,2010). In cultural substitution the propositional meaning is not the necessarily the same, however, it will have similar influence on the target reader. For example, "四海之内皆兄弟(si hai zhi nei jie xiong di)" could be translated as "All men are brothers". Fifth, cultural transplantation denotes the whole text is rewritten in target cultural. "The TL word is not a literal equivalent but has the similar cultural connotations to some extent. It is another type of extreme but toward target culture and the whole concept is transplanted in TL"(Ghadi,2010).
For these five techniques, it is considered that exoticism and cultural transplantation are usually not used for a normal translation, so in these project, cultural borrowing (including calque) and communicative translation will be adopted as main method to do translation.
For translating a text, as Sonia Colina(2003) mentioned, there are several steps for translating process. First step is pre-translation activities which include glossary building, ST analysis, translation brief, TT analysis, comparing ST and TT, studying ST features, example TT analysis and finish the glossary. Translators should build a glossary at first, and glossary will be built by four procedures as follow: review the whole ST and underline all the terms, phrases and expressions they do no understand; try to learn as much as possible about the issues involved in the ST; find the TT equivalents for the words and phrases you underlined and write them down as a glossary and make a list of all the resources you have used. ST analysis and TT analysis are almost similar with each other. For example, for ST analysis, translator should analyze function of ST, address of ST, time or reception, place of reception of ST, medium of transmission and motive for production. Besides, for translation brief, Sonia Colina considered that "the text is translated for adults with general knowledge about Chinese culture but limited knowledge about foreign culture." This brief will have an important influence on translators and will be observed as a rule when they translate an English text into Chinese. Then comparing the difference between ST and TT, finding and analyzing the structural, organizational and syntactic features of ST and analyzing the example TT, finally a glossary will be built successfully. The pre-translation activities are finished here.
Then come to translation stage, in this part I will introduce several translation techniques could be choose to deal with the translation of cultural specific terms. These techniques are listed as follows, which come from Approaches to Translation written by Peter Newmark (2001). 1. Transcription (adoption, transfer, 'loan-words'). This may be described as the basic procedure. 2. Literal translation. This is a 'coincidental' procedure, used when "the SL term is transparent or semantically motivated and is in standardized language" (Abbasi, n.d.). 3. Through-translation ('loan-translation', calque). 4. Recognized translation. When an official SL body produces a TL version of one of its own institutional terms, the TL translator should 'support' it unless he disagrees with the version. 5. Cultural equivalent. 6. Translation label. A translation label is an approximate equivalent or a new term, usually a collocation, for a feature peculiar to the SL culture. "A new collocation would normally be put in inverted commas, which could be dropped on later occasions, in hope that the term is accepted"(Abbasi, n.d.). 7. Translation couplets. 8. Translation triplets. 9. Through-translation. Important national institutional terms that are 'transparent' may be translated literally. 10. Deletion. A term of little importance in the TL culture may be deleted in translation, provided it is marginal to the text, and some indication of function given where required. 11. Naturalization. 12. Acronyms. It is common practice to retain the acronym of an SL institution.
Case study
In this part, I would like to do three case studies to analysis some common way to translate cultural specific issues. Here what only will be focused on are idioms and proverbs.
An idiom (Wikipedia, 2012) is "an expression consisting of a combination of words that have a figurative meaning. The figurative meaning is comprehended in regard to a common use of the expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made. Idioms are numerous and they occur frequently in all languages. There are estimated to be at least 25,000 idiomatic expressions in the English language."
A proverb (Wikipedia, 2012) is "a simple and concrete saying popularly known and repeated, which expresses a truth, based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity. They are often metaphorical. A proverb that describes a basic rule of conduct may also be known as a maxim.
Proverbs are often borrowed from similar languages and cultures, and sometimes come down to the present through more than one language. Both the Bible (including, but not limited to the Book of Proverbs) and Medieval Latin (aided by the work of Erasmus) have played a considerable role in distributing proverbs across Europe, although almost every culture has examples of its own."
As I mentioned before in part of Methodology, exoticism and cultural transplantation are usually not used for a normal translation, so here cultural borrowing (including calque) and communicative translation will be adopted as main method to do translation. Besides, there is no need to do all pre-translation activities, especially glossary building, because I just translate some idioms and proverbs here, rather than a whole text.
In Chinese culture, there are also many idioms and proverbs. Because of big differences between Chinese culture and English culture, translating Chinese idioms and proverbs into English is not an easy work indeed.
Case 1:
Proverb: "ç§ç“œå¾-瓜，ç§è±†å¾-豆。" (zhong gua de gua, zhong dou de dou)
Source Text Analysis: The literal meaning of the proverb in Chinese is that someone must gain what he seeded. The connotation of the proverb is that what did you do decides what result will you get. In Buddhism, the proverb also refers to the effects of a person's actions that determine his destiny in his next incarnation.
Translation brief: The proverb is to be translated for speakers with general knowledge about English culture but limited knowledge about Chinese culture.
Translation samples as follow:
1. Plant melons and you get melons, sow beans and you get beans.
2. As you sow, so will you reap.
3. He which sows thorns is to not happen ago reap grapes.
4. What You Sow, You Reap.
5. You must reap what you have sowed.
Analysis of translation:
Above translations are done and collected by me. Apparently, these samples are all done on the basis of cultural borrowing, because these translations originally didn't exist in English and was built by the translators, just expressing the literal meaning of the original proverb. However, they probably gradually become a standard in English. Certainly, it is hard for translation of idioms to express totally same meaning of original idioms. Besides, as a proverb, generally speaking, more concise, more better.
Result:
So through the analysis, the second translation "As you sow, so will you reap" is considered as the best one.
Case 2:
Idiom: 鸡犬å‡å¤© (ji quan sheng tian)
Source text analysis: This is a famous Chinese idiom which comes from a historical story. The story happened in Han dynasty, telling a king of Huainan called An Liu found a way to be immortals through refining "dan". Then the dogs and chicken living in his yard ate the rest of "dan". At a time, these dogs and chicken also turn immortals, going up to the heaven. The idiom means if a person becomes a high official in the government, the relatives and followers of him will also get promotion. In modern Chinese, the idiom also means a person will have a happy life someday.
Translation samples:
Every dog has its day.
When a man gets to the top, all his friends and relations get there with him.
Analysis of translations:
The first translation actually comes from an English idiom which means everyone will be successful someday or a person can't be unfortunate for the whole life. In Chinese, "鸡犬å‡å¤©ï¼ˆji quan sheng tian）" actually is a derogatory term which used to describe those who got promotion relying on their relatives or friends. However, the first translation of this idiom is a commendatory term or at least a neutral word. It encourages persons to struggle and everyone will get a succeed one day. So the meanings of the first translation and the original idioms are not completely same. For the second translation, it is totally the literal meaning of the source Chinese idiom. It belongs to cultural borrowing. Even though the basic meaning of this translation can be considered as same as the source idiom, it already lost the lasting appeal of the idioms, becoming a common sentence. Of course, it can't express the connotation of the source idiom.
Result:
Through the analysis, the first translation is better.
Case 3
Idiom: "殊途åŒå½’（shu tu tong gui）"
Source text analysis: this is a frequently-used idiom in Chinese. It comes from a Chinese traditional classical philosophy book which is called "周易(zhou yi)". The whole sentence is "天下åŒå½’而殊途，一致而百虑.(tian xia tong gui er shut u, yi zhi er bai lv.)", which means "to reach the same goal by different means; different plans result in the same". The literal meaning of this idiom is that people can arrive at the some destination through different roads. It means someone can reach the same goal by different means. This idiom can be used in many cases such as life, roads, study, work, art and diplomacy and so on.
Translation samples:
All roads lead to Rome.
Different roads lead to the same goal.
Analysis of translations: the source idiom "殊途åŒå½’" is a neutral word. The first translation is a western proverb means there are a lots of ways that can lead you to success. Ancient Rome is a small city in Italy. In the Third century BC, Roman unified the entire peninsula. In the first century BC, Rome became the political, economic and cultural center of Roman Empire which is across Europe Asian and African three continents. Roman Empire built the avenues to all directions with Rome as the center, in order to strengthen its rule. According to historical records, the Romans built 80000 kilometers' hard surface roads in total. These avenues promoted the empire's internal and external trade and cultural exchanges. From the 8th century on, the Roman became the center of Western Europe Catholic. All Christians went to Rome for pilgrims in an endless stream. It is said that, at that time, began to travel from the Italian peninsula and even any a revenue of Europe, as long as constantly go, will eventually arrived in Rome. This translation is made based on communicative translation. And the translation has many cultural connotations. So it is easy to find that there still some difference between the original Chinese idiom and the translation, even though the basic meaning are almost same with each other.
For the second translation, it is just the literal meaning of the source idiom and belongs to cultural borrowing. But it just expresses the basic meaning of the source idiom, but not the connotation.
Result:
The first translation is better.
Discussion
In Newmark's famous work A Textbook of Translation, he has mentioned evaluation of translation. Newmark (2001) denoted that "whether assess the referential and pragmatic accuracy of the translation by the translator's standards. If the translation is not a clear version of the original, translators consider first whether the essential element of the text, usually its facts or ideas, is adequately represented. Next translators should evaluate the text by their own standards of referential and pragmatic accuracy."
He also gave the definitions of the referential and pragmatic, which are helpful for us to make evaluation of translation: "referential denotes the relationship between the translation and the extra-linguistic reality it describes. And pragmatic denotes the reader's or readership's reception of the translation".
The results of three cases which are analyzed in last part are not the perfect translations of each source text. No matter cultural borrowing or communicative translation can not give a translation which has the same meaning with the original text. Anyway, to give a better translation of a culture specific term, a translator should not only be good at source language, but also target language. Besides, the translator also should have a deep understanding on the culture of source and target language. Then, the translator needs to do many preparations and pre-translation activities before translation process. Moreover, the choice of method is extremely important. The translator should choose the most proper technique to deal with the case through studying the features of the source and target language's culture and particular case.
Conclusion
This project is conducted to make a brief study on translation difficulties induced by cultural specific issues. At first, many theories about this issue which have been established by famous translators and scholars will be covered and analyzed. Many methodologies have been applied to this issue in the history. While translation of cultural specific terms is still not an easy job for translators and there is not a perfect technique to solve this issue.
My project tries to analyze these theory and methodology, and make a comparison between these methodologies through having a study on some cases.
Case study in my project has three parts, namely source term analysis, translation sample and analysis of translation. Case study let me have a deep understanding of complexity of translation difficulties induced by cultural specific issues. The two most important and common techniques to solve this issue are cultural borrowing and communicative translation. However, these two methods still have its weakness.
So the result of my project is not that find a prefect way to deal with cultural specific terms, but let readers learn more about these common techniques and when they face these problem, they can make a correct choice among these techniques.
This project will help translators enhance their understanding of this issue and improve the quality of their work.
