Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
ALBERT PÉTER VERMES Culture in Translation: Strategies and Operations
90 Albert Péter Vermes a context contribute to the relevance of an utterance and how the possible lack of such assumptions in another context leads to the choice of a certain translation operation. 3. Translation Operations and Translation Strategies For the purposes of description, the various treatments that culture-specific expressions are subject to in the process of translation are categorised here into four translation operations, which are defined by the four possible configurations in which the logical and encyclopaedic meanings of an expression may be conveyed in translation. These configurations can be illustrated in the following way: (1) [+L, +E], (2) [+L, -E], (3) [-L, +E] and (4) [-L, —E], where L stands for logical meaning and E, for encyclopaedic meaning. (1) Transference, as Newmark (1988: 81) puts it, is "the process of transferring a SL word to a TL text as a translation procedure". This is essentially the same as Catford's definition: "an operation in which the TL text, or, rather, parts of the TL text, do have values set up in the SL: in other words, have SL meanings " (Catford 1965: 43, italics as in original). In simple words, this is when we decide to incorporate the SL expression unchanged into the TL text; either because it only contributes its referent to the meaning of the utterance, or because this makes possible the recovery in the target text of some assumptions, even though at the cost of an increased level of processing effort, which would not otherwise be accessible in the target cultural context. (2) Translation, in the proper sense, will mean the process of using a 'dictionary equivalent' of the original. In relevance-theoretic terms this means rendering the SL expression by a TL expression which, preserving the logical content of the original, gives rise to the same relevant analytic implications in the target text as the original did in the source text (English Free People for Hungarian Szabad Nép , the title of a newspaper) but which, by the same token, will activate different encyclopaedic assumptions in the secondary context (since we are dealing with cases involving a lack of certain relevant assumptions). (3) By substitution I will refer to those cases when the source language expression is replaced in the translation by a TL correspondent which is different in terms of logical content (or form, if it has no logical content) but carries with it the same relevant encyclopaedic assumptions as the original (English commuter train for Hungarian ffEV, acronym for 'local railways', English for a song for Hungarian bagóért , or Hungarian Anglia for English England). In a relevance-theoretic framework we could say that
