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

88 Albert Péter Vermes the presumption of optimal relevance" (Gutt 1991: 101). In other words: the translation should resemble the original in such a way that it provides adequate contextual effects and it should be formulated in such a manner that the intended interpretation can be recovered by the audience without undue processing effort. Apparently, in intercultural situations it is very rare that the original context (in the narrow sense) should be available in the target culture. It is possible perhaps in circumstances where different language communities have shared the same geographical, political, and economic environment for a long enough time to eliminate major cultural differences but in most cases the secondary communication situation will be substantially different to exclude the possibility of complete interpretive resemblance, the ideal case which Gutt calls direct translation, that is, when the translation "purports to allow the recovery of the originally intended interpretation interlingually" (Gutt 1991: 163). This, then, implies that the default is not direct but indirect translation, which covers various grades of incomplete interpretive resemblance. 2.3. Culture and Culture-Specific Expressions Being interested in translation as a process cutting across cultures, it seems in order to clarify here what I mean by 'culture' and 'culture-specific expressions'. Some scholars, like Pym, even use the notion of translation in defining culture: "It is enough to define the limits of a culture as the points where transferred texts have had to be (intralingually or interlingually) translated" (Pym 1992: 26). Translation can thus be seen as an indicator of the existence of cultural differences. In our present cognitive framework, these are best regarded, I think, as differences in the shared cognitive environments of groups of individuals or, rather, the mutual cognitive environments of groups of individuals, which means a shared cognitive environment in which it is manifest which people share it (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 41). Culture, then, in the wide sense, may be defined as consisting in the set of assumptions that are mutually manifest for a group of individuals and cultural differences are differences between sets of mutually manifest assumptions. What we need to pin down more precisely is the actual nature of these differences. There will obviously be assumptions which all humans are likely to hold, due to the existence of phenomena which are universally observable, such as 'People have two legs' or 'The Sim rises in the east'. Other phenomena are not universal in this sense and will give rise to assumptions that, provided they are shared by a whole community of individuals, may be said to be