Translating Cultures

An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators

David Katan, Mustapha Taibi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138344464
• eBook ISBN: 9781000395624
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This bestselling coursebook introduces current understanding about culture and provides a model for teaching culture to translators, interpreters and other mediators. The approach is interdisciplinary, with theory from Translation Studies and beyond, while authentic texts and translations illustrate intercultural issues and strategies adopted to overcome them.

This new (third) edition has been thoroughly revised to update scholarship and examples and now includes new languages such as Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish, and examples from interpreting settings. This edition revisits the chapters based on recent developments in scholarship in intercultural communication, cultural mediation, translation and interpreting. It aims to achieve a more balanced representation of written and spoken communication by giving more attention to interpreting than the previous editions, especially in interactional settings. Enriched with discussion of key recent scholarly contributions, each practical example has been revisited and/ or updated.

Complemented with online resources, which may be used by both teachers and students, this is the ideal resource for all students of translation and interpreting, as well as any reader interested in communication across cultural divides.

Additional resources are available on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal: http://routledgetranslationstudiesportal.com/

Part I

Framing culture

The culture-bound mental map of the world

1The translator, interpreter and cultural mediator

The aim of this chapter is to:

• Discuss some of the difficulties involved in language transfer;
• Introduce translation and interpretation as activities that involve more than language transfer;
• Introduce the concept of cultural mediator;
• Discuss the nature of mediation in translation, interpreting and cultural mediation;
• Clarify the boundaries between the roles of translators/interpreters and cultural mediators.

1.1 Translation … and culture

1.1.1 Technical translating

“Google’s free online language translation service quickly translates web pages to other languages.

Use this web site translator to convert web pages into your choice of language: …”

At first glance it would seem that technology, such as Google Translate, can seamlessly do the job for us. Google translates the proposition or the dictionary denotative meaning, and little or no loss or distortion of meaning need ever occur. Second, there is no doubt that, today, technical terms are becoming easier to translate. Concerted international efforts are now being made to harmonize legislation and codes of practice across borders (the European Union being just one case in point) and dramatic improvements are being made through ever-expanding online solutions, such as search engines, specialized glossaries, corpus-based tools, Computer-Aided or Machine Translation (CAT/MT) tools, and translator forums (see, for example, ‘The Translator’s Research Toolbox’, Ted Translators 2019). Multiterm Glossaries, in particular, working in tandem with Translation Memory programs mean that a car manual, for instance, will already be 50–75% translated before the translator even lays hands on it. Machine Translation systems, such as Moses, SYSTRAN or DeepL, provide a first draft that bureaucrats and others can then decide to bin, take essential notes from or have properly translated.

Communication at this level has no extra-linguistic context: The text is the authority, and it is clearly spelled out. Anthony Pym (2000:189) calls translation at this level “NANS” (“no-addition-no-subtraction”). It is the type of translation that would be subsumed under effortless communication as described by Reddy’s (1993:295) “conduit metaphor”, which suggests that understanding language is a process of encoding and decoding, like “a marvellous technological duplicating machine”. This form of culture is indeed now global, with business and industry working to the same standards throughout the world. Negotiation of meaning is reduced to the minimum. The language provides, as far as possible, its own context. In fact, Peter Newmark (1988:6) was entirely correct when he stated: “No language, no culture is so ‘primitive’ that it cannot embrace the terms of, say, computer technology”. The fact that it might be necessary to use more text to explain the concept, because the world is categorized in different ways, is certainly not a problem, neither for the translator nor for the target language reader. For example, “to watch sheep by night” sounds perfectly natural in English, yet requires five words. In the Quiché language (Guatemala), however, only one word is necessary (Beekman and Callow 1974:54–55). It is also at this technical level that the client is most aware of and notices the shortcomings of a translator/interpreter. An interpreter or translator without the technical language of, for example, aviation insurance, will clearly not be effective. As a result, many companies are improving their in-service language training instead of hiring external language professionals (Kondo and Tebble 1997:161–162; Olohan 2016:18–19).

The translator, too, is fully aware of having the same problems, as any native speaker called upon to translate patent law, industrial plant specifications or medical papers will know. What can the non-specialist translator make of the following opening sentence from an article on computer systems, entitled ‘Location Awareness in Community Wireless LANs’ (Ferscha et al. 2001:1)?

We have developed a multi-user team awareness framework, Campus Space, that on-the-fly and transparently collects and interprets position information of mobiles from the signal to noise ratio of IEEE 802.11 radios, and cartographically mapped RFID tags respectively.

There are a number of terms here that are polysemous, and whose meaning changes according to whether the term is being used in a specialist sense. The first is the idiomatic expression “on-the-fly”, which might mean (general sense) that the “position information of mobiles” is collected quickly, or (specialist sense) that the information is collected without interrupting a computer program that is already running.

The second is the nominalized adjective “mobile”. The most usual general meaning is ‘mobile phone’; but in the text, we have 11 references to ‘mobile devices’, five to ‘mobile users’ or ‘clients’ and two each to ‘mobile objects’ and ‘mobile stations’. In these cases, a professional interpreter or translator will not only need to have a near-native command of both languages, but also need to know how best to find equivalences. The internet has been of phenomenal assistance in providing not only online translation assistance in a variety of forms, but also immediate access to almost unlimited supplies of similar texts (or genres) written in the target language by native-language speakers. The assistance, though, comes at a price. It will take time for the non-specialized translator, compared to the non-English-speaking IT specialist, who will already have learnt the English terms.

The extract below poses further problems. It is taken from a steel rolling mill brochure, and is a fairly literal translation from the original (in Italian), but whether it is an appropriate translation is another matter:

One of the main features of the complete machine are cantilevered tundish cars running on tracks on an elevated steel structure for rapid change of the tundish ‘on the fly’.

Grammatically it is correct. However, very few native speakers of English would understand the meaning, and more importantly, they would not know if any faux pas had been made in the translation process. Comparison with other, well-written, technical texts would tell us that the translation at the level of discourse is not appropriate. An improvement would be to break the sentence into two and at least add a verb:

One of the main features of the complete machine are the cantilevered tundish cars. These run on tracks on an elevated steel structure, which ensures a rapid change of the tundish ‘on the fly’.

However, the native speaker, having decided that ‘complete’ could be omitted and having simplified the sentences to a perfectly cohesive piece of discourse in English, will still have problems with “tundish ‘on the fly’”. ‘Tundish’ is easily found. It is a large funnel with one or more holes at the bottom, used especially in plumbing or metal-founding. A quick internet search will show us that ‘on the fly’ collocates with tundish, but so does ‘fly’ – neither of which require inverted commas in English. Also, from this extract, neither ‘fly’ nor ‘on the fly’ has a transparent meaning for the non-specialist. It would then take much more further reading to be able to decide which ‘fly’ is more appropriate, whether “rapid” is tautologous (due to ‘on the fly’) and whether “the tundish” is preferable to “tundish” or “tundishes”.

The real problem of understanding the meaning remains. A non-native speaker fluent in metallurgy and the continuous cast steel process will almost certainly be able to co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface to the third edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Framing culture: The culture-bound mental map of the world
• Part II Shifting frames: Translation and mediation in theory and practice
• Part III The array of frames: Communication orientations
• Concluding remarks
• References
• Name index
• Subject index