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
Culture iri Translation: Strategies and Operations 97 (4b) The keserves , or lamenting song, means for the Hungarians what the blues does for Americans. (5b) He was proud of this discovery, and for this and for no other reason did he prefer the Kurucz to the Labancz. (6) The anti-Habsburg Kurucz soldiers knew how to cry into their wine, not like those pro-Habsburg Labancz. (Sollosy, p. 139, italics as in original) The Hungarian expressions keserves, kuruc and labanc are first all transferred (though it could be argued whether the last two are substitutions, rather), but then the translator, feeling a need to explicate some background assumptions, substituted the expression lamenting song in (4b) and added sentence (6), which does not occur in the original but makes explicit an encyclopaedic assumption implicit in (4a) and (5a). Clearly, the substitutions took place here because the assumptions that they make accessible are necessary for working out the relevance of (5a), and since the target readers do not have access to these assumptions as part of the encyclopaedic entries of keserves, kuruc and labanc , the translator probably thought the readers need help in order that the necessary processing effort is not gratuitously high. 4.4. Modification Modification seems to occur for two main reasons. It may be an obvious solution when a concept is missing from the target culture and the preservation of the logical content would entail an increase of processing effort not justified by the gains in contextual effects. For instance, the Hungarian expression önkéntes rendőr, meaning 'voluntary policeman' is left out in the translation, because in the target culture there is no comparable institution and the concept is not vital in terms of the development of the story, thus the translator decided that the loss in contextual effect is more tolerable here than the potential increase of processing effort which would result from the preservation of the expression. In other instances we find that the translator renders the original by an expression activating a completely different concept, but which, being familiar for the target reader, requires less processing effort (English shoe repair shop for Hungarian harisnyaszemfelszedő, meaning 'stockings mender', English the market for Hungarian közért, meaning 'a kind of grocery shop'). Another typical case is when some encyclopaedic assumptions are not present in the target cultural context and the relevance of the utterance can be ensured in the most cost-effective way by modifying both the logical and the encyclopaedic content of the original (English Silly Billy for Hungarian
