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Strategies and Operations 95 'alehouse' is further loaded with the encyclopaedic assumption that the expression is outdated, old-fashioned, and its use in the translation would thus have resulted in the closest possible interpretive resemblance with the original. Thus, while (2b) is a close enough rendering of the original in terms of logical content, part of the context is lost. However, going back to (lb), we see that the target expression, tavern, compared with the original expression, (la) kocsma

, meaning something like 'a cheap pub', gains in encyclopaedic content in just the opposite way: it activates assumptions relating to the past, whereas the original does not. Thus the translation in (lb) serves the purpose of compensating for the loss of contextual assumptions later in (2b). The same can be observed in (3b), where the English word pitcher also brings in encyclopaedic assumptions about long-gone days, not activated by the Hungarian original (3a) korsó

, which simply means 'beermug'. 4.3. Substitution When a particular expression makes reference to a concept which is not present in the target cultural context, it can sometimes be substituted by a target language expression that activates a different concept, which is, however, similar to the original in terms of relevant encyclopaedic content and, being familiar for target readers, will ensure the relevance of the whole utterance for a reasonable processing effort. The substitution may effect a partial change of logical content (English bologna for Hungarian parizer

, a kind of cold meat, English shopping bag for Hungarian cekker

, a kind of shopping bag,) or a complete change (English (union) dues for Hungarian (szakszervezeti) bélyeg

, '(union) stamp'). The fact that substitution dominates the situation schemas category is no surprise. Situation schema expressions, in my interpretation, include phraseologies, idioms, proverbs and conventional metaphors and the like, all being characteristic ways of how members of a culture categorise the wide range of possible situations. This is obviously an area of cognition where cultures tend to be very different. Moreover, these schemas are so deeply rooted in the thinking of people and are so easily activated in the proper context that to exchange them for different ones would surely result in a great amount of extra processing effort. In these cases, it is not the logical content of the expression which carries relevant information but the encyclopaedic assumptions which are activated by the expression and for this reason, almost all examples of such expressions in the original are substituted by ones native to the English cultural context (English simple as a pie for Hungarian pofonegyszerű

, 'simple as a slap'), that is, they are domesticated. In the same way, expressions activating assumptions