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Abstract:
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A Japanese acquaintance who has been living in Denmark for more than
40 years formulated his difficult mission of undertaking translation tasks
in the following way: “Once I deeply understood the two cultures [Denmark
and Japan] and the cultural differences/nuances of conceptual
meanings existing in the two countries, it became impossible for me to
translate culturally-specific terms into the other language. Existing language
resources [dictionaries etc.] are in this context useless”. What he
was frustratingly expressing is that it becomes virtually an impossible
task to precisely translate or convey the meaning of a Culturally-Specific
Concept (CSC) if no exact equivalent concept exists in the Target Language
(TL) culture. Despite this inherent frustration, communicators or
translators are still required to convey such CSCs into a TL in an optimal
manner such that a TL reader can instantly infer the original meaning of a
given Source Language (SL) concept. In short, the key issue is whether
there can be found a way to solve this inherently frustrating situation
which even skilled human translators cannot easily cope with ?
The challenge of translating CSCs from an SL is not only caused by the
absence of equivalent concepts in a TL culture, but also due to differences
of the background knowledge possessed by the two parties involved in a
cross-cultural communication scenario. Sperber & Wilson (1986) emphasize
that, although all humans live in the physical world, mental representations
are constructed differently due to differences in our close environment
and our different cognitive abilities. Because people use different
languages and have mastered different concepts, the way they construct
representations and make inference is also dissimilar. Since an individual
possesses a total cognitive environment that is the set of facts
based on his/her perceptual ability, inferential ability, actual awareness of
facts, knowledge he/she has acquired and so on, it is much easier to
achieve a so-called “asymmetric” coordination between communicator
and audience (Sperber & Wilson, 1986).... |
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