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 89 culture-specific. Culture-specificity thus means that an assumption which figures in the mutual cognitive environment of one community is not present in the mutual cognitive environment of another. Trivially, any assumption about the language system of a community, and the meanings it can express, will be culture-specific and, in this sense, any expression in a language is culture-specific. However, for our present purposes it seems more useful to exclude from our objects of examination assumptions about the language system. Beyond this, any culture-specific assumption will be our concern, and any expression in a linguistic form which activates any such assumption will be relevant for us in a non-trivial sense. These are what I call culture-specific expressions (or culturally bound, using Duff's (1981) words). At this point, let me briefly explain why I refrain from using the term 'cultural realia'. Klaudy (1994: 112) defines it in the following way: "it may mean an object characteristic of a linguistic community, or the very word which names this object" (my translation). The latter one is obviously an extended meaning, which may be used for ease of expression but which, in my view, also obscures the difference between language and what language may be used to express. Other authors extend the meaning of the term in another direction. Vlahov and Florin (1980: 51), for instance, distinguish three groups of cultural realia: geographical, anthropological and sociopolitical, including categories like geographical objects, plant and animal species, foods, drinks, clothes, occupations, tools, music, instruments, festivals, customs, nicknames, measures, administrative units, organisations, institutions, social movements, social classes, political symbols, military units and ranks etc. The list is clearly not complete, and it need not be, but it shows that the term may be understood in a very wide sense to include all possible aspects of a culture. Yet it obscures another crucial point, which is that what we are interested in is not the complete inventory of a culture but, rather, what makes a culture different from another. I think the term 'culture-specific', in the sense outlined above, highlights much better the main idea that what we are concerned with in translating from one cultural context into another is, first and foremost, the differences between these contexts. In this sense, I share the view, expressed by Valló (2000: 44), that in a given situation anything that carries some special meaning for the intended audience may become culture-specific, and the question of culturespecificity can be resolved only with regard to the relationship between two languages. Or, I would rather say, with regard to the relationship between two cognitive environments. For this reason, I do not think it is necessary to make a complete Üst of categories that define a culture. What is more important is that we need to be able to assess how specific assumptions in