Cultural translation

cultural translation

“Language is probably the most widely and most frequently used symbol. Through its daily use each member of a cultural group continually reasserts and reaffirms its symbolic world and communicates with others.” (Whorf qt. in Maerman, 1998:103).

Two texts are said to be equivalent when they “play equivalent social and communicative roles. They prototypes are not identical in content, but they are socially equivalent.” (Neubert, Shreve, 1992:79)

A translator switches cultural universes...

Switching cultural universes People having different languages as their native ones are bond to have different perception of the surrounding and, thus, different perception of others. What in one language is considered funny does not have to be happy in another; which explains the phenomenon of, so called, British humor. One-to-one correspondence between two languages is seldom, even in terms of everyday speech. Voloshinov argued “whenever a sign is present, ideology is present too” (1973:10). There are historical, political also cultural differences to be taken into consideration when comparing language perception of two nations. An extremely well known American line: ‘be good’ translated literally into any other language will have different, sometimes even polar meaning, as it is in the USA immediately associated with a line from ‘Star Wars’ and conveys an additional message that will not be encoded in another language. That leads us to a conclusion that utterances should not be looked upon as words but meanings. Differences between cultures mirrored in languages are also very well seen when collocations are discussed. The word ‘horse’ is considered a counterpart of Polish ‘koń’. Unlike in the example with the word ‘girlfriend’, the meanings of the two words greatly overlap in both cultures. However, if we take into consideration a phrase: ‘a talking horse’, the meaning of its Polish equivalent ‘gadający koń’ is much narrower. The English collocation is immediately associated by the listener with Ed, the talking horse, a character of a well known in America film, and, thus, with a concrete character. Even though the film is known in Poland as well, its influence on the culture is very little in comparison to that in the USA and the phrase ‘gadający koń’ will not be as meaningful as in English. In such a situation it is better to find some other, parallel in meaning phrase to translate this one, instead of transferring it literally.

Cultural elements are omnipresent in animated movies, i.e. Shrek

‘I hate these ball shows. They bore me to tears. Put over to Wheel of Torture.// I'm not flipping anywhere, Sir, until I see Shrek and Fiona.// Bad wizards on you, guys.’

why Sir Justin...?

At that time Justin Timberlake was Cameron Diaz's - Fiona's voice - boyfriend

In the American version the Donkey’s language is that of an Afro-American. His utterances are ungrammatical and, thus, the character’s speech is slangish, i.e. ‘Hey, man. This don’t feel right. My donkey senses are tingling all over. Why don’t you just drop that jug of voodoo and let’s get outta of here (…) And if you think I’m gonna be smearing baby rub all over your chest… think again.’ The character is very outstanding in the American version. This impression is heightened by the fact that the character has easily recognizable Eddie Murphy’s voice.

Puss in Boots

The character appears for the first time in the second part of the movie, when the king hires the Puss to kill Shrek. Apart from the fact that there is a character called Puss in Boots appearing in the Grimm’s brothers fairy tales, the character evokes associations with Zorro. He was given Antonio Banderas’ voice, is very good at fencing and follows a code of honour. His pattern of speech is also non-standard English, but it is language of a foreigner, for example: ‘Oh, mercy! Please! I implore you. It was nothing personal senor. I was doing it only for my family. My mother, she's sick My father lives on the garbage. The king offered me much in gold... and I have a little brother...’ What is more, he uses Spanish words from time to time like: ‘No problemo, boss. In one of my nine lives I was the great burglar of Santiago de Compostella!’ He is presented as a Spanish character, which is underlined at the very end of the movie, when he sings Ricky Martin’s song Living la Vida Loca and takes a shower on the stage just like the famous singer in his videoclip.

Colloquial language The best example of a colloquial language in the movie is the Ugly Step Sister’s line, that is uttered by Larry King: ‘Hey, buddy. Let me clue you in. There’s only one fella who can handle a job like that.. And frankly.. he don’t like to be disturbed.’ Another one is Donkey telling Puss in Boots: ‘You little hairy… licking sucker…’

“Kolego, patrz mnie na usta. Jest tylko jeden szpenio, co weźmie tę chryję na warsztat. I wierz mi, radia to on słucha w pogodę.”

so... what should translators do?

1. Be aware of the parallels!
2. If there is no chance not to lose the meaning, try to compensate. i.e.

Mama? Err... Mary! A talking horse.Mama? Ee, czy jest suchy chleb dla konia? (trans. Bartosz Wierzbięta)

There are two basic strategies to deal with cultural equivalence

Domestication -replace the unknown context with known one, characteristic for the nation's culture

Foreignisation -leave the original cultural context

At this point it is appropriate to dwell upon Venuti’s two strategies of translation, that is domestication and foreignisation (1995: 47). The latter one is used when a translator decides to stay close to the culture of the source text rather than to substitute it by some familiar to the target viewer concepts. Domestication constitutes the opposite. A translator tries to make the text work in the target culture (Venuti 1998: 240). Even though Venuti himself advocates that “[t]ranslation (…) inevitably domesticates foreign texts, inscribing them with linguistic and cultural values that are intelligible to specific domestic constituencies” (1998: 67), it has become customary to use the two terms to compare and/or contrast translation.

• Venuti, Lawrence (1998). The Scandals of Translation. London: Routledge.

Well folks, it looks like we're up chocolate creek without a popsicle stick. (…) Because we're gonna need flour. To co, mamy tak stać jak ten cieć przy hałdzie żwiru i czekać na cud? (…) Bo Muchomorek mi się skarżył. (trans.) Bartek Wierzbięta

Peter Newmark notices in About Translation that there are occasions in which there is ‘a need for creativity’ (1991:8), those occasions are: 1. Cultural words. 2. Transcultural words. 3. Concept words with different emphases in different communities. 4. Peculiar syntactic structures. 5. Cultural metaphors. idioms, proverbs, puns, neologisms. 6. Significant phonaesthetic effects. 7. Quality words with no one-to-one equivalent. (see Newmark, 1991:8)

How about a game of parcheesi? Ale najpierw zagramy w chińczyka? (trans. Bartosz Wierzbięta) We are not going. And that's final. Nigdzie nie jedziemy, a zupa była za słona! (trans. Bartosz Wierzbięta) The sun’ll come out, tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar... I’m coming Elisabeth! W czasie deszczu osły się nudzą… Panie proszą panów, dlaczego tu nie ma klamek? (trans. Bartosz Wierzbięta) risking life and lip... niepomny przepisów BHP (trans. Bartosz Wierzbięta)

Polonizacja :)

Since Bartek Wierzbięta has a monopoly in Poland on translating animated movies, a new term has been introduced to describe his extraordinary way of transferring the cultural heritage, that is “polonizacja”. The first one to use it was probably Aleksandra Urbańska, who describes it as a translation technique introduced by Wierzbięta, when a translator often changes the literal meaning of utterances, introduces new ones to create a humorous effect and convey the cultural undertones. (Urbańska, 2003)

• Urbańska, Aleksandra (2003). „Siła głosu tłumacza dialogów w dubbingowanych filmach animowanych”. Retrieved 24 March 2008 from http://www.elaborat.prv.pl/strony/alex1.htm

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