Scribd
Upload
504 views26 pages

Culture and Translation - A Powerpoint Presentation

This document discusses the relationship between culture and language/translation. It covers several topics: how culture is rooted in and infused within language down to structural levels like grammar and vocabulary; how cultural shifts impact translation; and the cultural contexts of the UK and France. Culture pervades all aspects of language and translation must account for cultural differences between languages.

Uploaded by

anne
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
504 views26 pages

Culture and Translation - A Powerpoint Presentation

This document discusses the relationship between culture and language/translation. It covers several topics: how culture is rooted in and infused within language down to structural levels like grammar and vocabulary; how cultural shifts impact translation; and the cultural contexts of the UK and France. Culture pervades all aspects of language and translation must account for cultural differences between languages.

Uploaded by

anne
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 26

LANGUAGE

AND
CULTURE
LIT 505
PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega
CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Topics:

• Culture with its roots in Language


• Culture infused in Language
• Cultural Shift and Translation
• The UK and French cultural contexts

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION
Culture
/ˈkəlCHər/

pervades language in ways that reflect several senses of the term.


Culture ranges from high to low, from Homer of the Odyssey to Homer
of The Simpsons.
It splits into two senses:
 Anthropological - Which refers to the totality of
practices that distinguish a community ,large or small

 The narrower sense of artistic enterprise.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Translation
/transˈlāSH(ə)n,tranzˈlāSH(ə)n

the replacement of textual material in one language by equivalent


textual material in another language. In this definition, the most
important thing is equivalent textual material. Yet, it is still vague in
terms of the type of equivalence. (Catford, 1965)

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Culture in both senses pervades language down to


the deepest structural levels.
It is unsurprising that the most superficial linguistic level, vocabulary, should
convey cultural reference, given that words, quite obviously, convey meaning,
both in denotation and connotation.
One form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis states that culturally important
elements will undergo ‘codability’, the unintuitive term used to describe
compactness of encoding.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

It emphasize the influence of language on culture,


is of most interest where ‘grammatical words’ like
pronouns are concerned.

Example:
languages having ‘T/V’ or dual-pronoun systems oblige
their speakers to reflect on the relationships they contract
in terms of power or solidarity; these are latent in other
languages, or appear in different forms, and call for
ingenious strategies in their rendering.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION
• Culture with its roots in Language
Culture pervades language down to the deepest structural
levels’. The three structural levels commonly referred to
in linguistics are pronunciation, grammar and
vocabulary – in the jargon, phonology, morpho-syntax,
and lexis..
English has the advantage of being able to use compound
noun phrases as attributive adjectives, and French can really
do nothing with sequences like this, as is shown by the ten
words used to render the English.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

From the viewpoint of a near-bilingual student of translation, the blemish is


obvious enough, but in specialized discussions, it is easy to forget that
translations are made for monolinguals, who have no basis of comparison,
and that the statement made earlier, that ‘expansion of linguistic material from
the source to the target language implies translation loss’, is hard to test

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION
Culture infused in Language
The ‘infusion’ metaphor, by contrast, implies an
indissociable alliance of language and culture.

Consider the following limerick:

Said Watts-Dunton, ‘However one searches, The Pines


remains Putney’s best purchase. But let’s give old Algy a
Touch of nostalgia By changing its name to The Birches.’

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

The text is a curious blend of high and low culture. Its appreciation depends (at
least) on acquaintance with one of the minor by-ways of English literature; the
alcoholic Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne (‘Algy’) spent his later years in
the care of his friend Theodore Watts Dunton, at a house in Putney called The
Pines.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

The last line refers to Swinburne’s taste for flagellation.


This information is in the province of high culture, but the way in which it is
expressed is less easy to define along a simple high–low polarity, and indeed
any attempt to define it in this way shows that the polarity metaphor is
unsuitable, for culture varies along more than one dimension.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION
The deepest or most ‘structural’ ways in which
culture and translation interact are to be seen in
pronunciation and grammar

So for instance, in informal French a speaker has the option between quelle
and quoi (what?) as question words in sequences of the following type.

The symbol ‘~’ here means ‘varies with’. The second


variant is the more informal, and has what some linguists
have called a ‘QU-final’, structure, such that the
interrogative word appears phrase-finally.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Social identity can be thought of, admittedly in an atomistic way, as being


composed of a bundle of cultural attributes like sex, age, class, regional origin,
ethnicity, etc. This view can be methodologically convenient, but ignores
obviously the fact that social identity is experienced as a complex whole.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Cultural shift and translation

Cultural changes have been more rapid and more momentous than at any
previous time, and even if this belief is in part due to the wish to feel that one
has lived through a historic epoch, there is solid evidence from sociolinguistics,
and no doubt other social sciences, to show that cultural change has been, at
least since the 1960s when reliable linguistic data began to become available, on
a large scale and in the direction of what one might call informalization.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

To speak of formality implies relations between people, and indeed it is easier to


think in terms of less stiffness in interpersonal contacts, and in culture generally,
than to point to the very complex societal mutations underpinning the
tendencies.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Cultural shift and translation

According to Javier Franco Aixela (1996) cultural asymmetry between two


linguistic communities is necessarily reflected in the discourses of their
members, with the potential opacity and inaccessibility this may involve in
the target culture system".

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Cultural shift and translation

He also considers translation as a means which provides the TL society with


a variety of strategies, ranging from conservation to naturalization, against
the backdrop of the sense of otherness which conveys this difference with a
set of cultural signs capable of questioning or even denying our own culture.
Javier Franco Aixela (1996)

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION
Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
He made a notable contribution to the good-bad genre
that is perhaps most conveniently
known as ‘crime fiction’, a popular-cultural category that includes narratives
variously labelled thriller, crime, detective, noir, policier, etc. He is perhaps a
borderline candidate for inclusion in the ‘good-bad’ category Hard-boiled fiction.
as practiced by Hammett was more veridical, to the extent that fiction can be; the
crimes described in the stories seem at all events to be more likely to occur than
the typical country-house murder.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

• The UK and French cultural contexts

Wheatcroft suggests (2005: 271): ‘Both in academic discourse and in


practical politics, class conflict has been superseded by “culture wars”;
and the other great truth of the age is that the right has won politically
while the left has won culturally’.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

• The UK and French cultural contexts

The obvious socio-historical explanation of the political victory of the right


is to be found in the economic history of the past thirty or so years, which
saw monetarism mobilized in response to the oil shocks of the 1970s. The
view also entails that all art should be didactic or at least ‘committed’, and
explains the contrasting critical fortunes of the spy novelists Ian Fleming
and John le Carré.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

What is especially notable in France is an attitude of social or cultural


conservatism in several French commentators whose stance is on the
political left. The French situation shows the obvious fact that the political
terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are in large measure nation-specific.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Perhaps the most striking example of a French intellectual who is not


notably right-wing but who has attacked cultural democracy is Alain
Finkielkraut; the title of his book, La Défaite de la Pensée (1987),
speaks for itself.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

The popular culture tends very strongly to be assimilated


to high culture, just as middle-class language very often
adopts, at least in the contemporary period, working-
class linguistic forms.

This phrase, like ‘the cultural victory of the left’, is rather vague but implies an
ability to distinguish between politico-sociological and aesthetic judgements.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

The shift to cultural populism is no doubt common to most


comparable nations, but the top-down role played by the French state
gives the country a curious uniqueness that does line up quite closely
with its self-perception. Much translation has little to do with culture,
dealing as it does with purely functional issues

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Conclusion:

Although even computer manuals will be required to conform, to


culturally specific politeness, norms, and the recent term
‘glocalization’, adapted to translation, reflects this need. That the
market for culture is increasingly global and a commonplace.

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega


CULTURE AND TRANSLATION

Reference:

/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Language-and-Culture-Routledge-Handbooks-in-Linguisti
cs.pdf

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cfc2/90ce618df4448236d16b317f43b28925610d.pdf

PRESENTER: Rose Ann T. Gega

You might also like