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

92 Albert Péter Vermes be balanced in the interest of achieving relevance, are taken into account by our operations. As was suggested in some of my earlier papers (see, for instance, Vermes 2003), the translator's strategy concerning the given translation task may be traced down through the regularities in the translator's use of the different operations. Basically, two translation strategies are distinguished in the literature as the two essential ways to relate a source text to the values of the receiving culture, commonly termed foreignising and domesticating. In Venuti's words, domesticating is an assimilationist approach, conforming to the dominant values of the target culture, while foreignising is "motivated by an impulse to preserve linguistic and cultural differences by deviating from prevailing domestic values" (Venuti 1998: 241). Ih this sense, a domesticating translation will typically alter, or even cancel out, assumptions which are absent from, or alien to, the target cultural context, thereby minimising the processing effort that the target reader needs to exert in interpreting the target text. On the other hand, a foreignising translation will aim at preserving such assumptions, thereby making it possible for the target reader to access the originally intended interpretation, even at the cost of a higher level of processing effort, which may, however, be counter-balanced by the increase of contextual effects. It would appear, then, that a domesticating approach will be implemented primarily through the use of modification and substitution, whereas a foreignising strategy will crucially involve the transfer and translation proper of ST expressions into the TL text. 4. The use of the operations in implementing strategies For the purposes of the discussion, I will bring examples from Péter Esterházy's Hrabal könyve and Judith Sollosy's English translation of the novel (see Sources). Every culture-specific expression in the original was recorded and matched with the corresponding textual equivalent (see Catford 1965: 27) in the translation. Recurring expressions were recorded more than once only if they were treated in the translation in different ways. The various culture-specific expressions were categorised into nine classes and were then sorted out according to the operation which the translator applied to them. It has to be noted here that the categorisation is not meant to be determinate or complete; it is simply a way of organising the data, without any theoretical importance attributed to how it is actually done. The reason for this, as already alluded to above, is that I am concerned here not so much with setting up an inventory of categories for the various elements of a culture as with pointing out actual differences between cultures.