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

Eger Journal of English Studies IV (2004 ) 85-99 Culture in Translation: Strategies and Operations Albert Péter Vermes This paper, by analysing Judith Sollosy's English translation of Péter Esterházy's Hrabal könyve (see Sources), aims to show what happens to culturally embedded expressions in the process of translation, to systematise and, within the frames of relevance theory, to explain the phenomena in question. It is suggested that in translating such expressions translators have four basic operations at their disposal: transference, translation proper, substitution and modification, which are defined here and explained in relevance-theoretic terms. The analysis is based on the assumption that translation is a special form of communication, aimed at establishing interpretive resemblance between the source text and the target text, governed by the principle of optimal resemblance (Sperber and Wilson 1986, and Gutt 1991). The findings suggest that considerations of how the semantic content of such expressions may be preserved in the target communication situation depend heavily not only on what overall strategy the translator chooses to adopt for the given translation but also on whether it can be done in a cost-effective way, in consistency with the principle of relevance. 1. Introduction Li some previous papers (see, for instance, Vermes 2003) I have shown that, since proper names, beyond their referential (identifying) function, often carry some semantic content, the translation of proper names is not a trivial issue but, on the contrary, a delicate decision-making process. I found that proper names are not simply transferred but may as well be translated, modified, or substituted by a conventional TL correspondent. These findings were easily explained on the basis of the assumption that translation is a communicative process, governed by the principle of optimal resemblance (Gutt 1991). It then seems an obvious move to suppose that the descriptive and explicatory apparatus will be applicable to an even wider range of culture-specific expressions, traditionally referred to as cultural realia, and this is what the present study will explore. In particular, it aims to answer two questions. (1) How is the translator's strategy manifested in the operations which are actually selected to tackle culture-specific expressions? (2) How can we explain the choice of a particular operation in a particular context?