Cultural Approaches to TranslationDAVID KATAN

There are numerous cultural approaches to translation, given the numerous defi nitions of both “culture” and “translation.” We might say that both culture and translation revolve around difference. We notice culture as difference, and we require translation when dif-ference signifi cantly affects communication. The approaches may then be divided according to how difference between self and other should be managed in translation. In the fi rst case, “translating from cultures,” differences should be explained. In the second, “translating for cultures,” differences should either be reduced (domestication) or highlighted (foreignization). The fi nal approach, “translating between cultures,” gauges the likely tolerance for difference and attempts to mediate or reconcile differences, creating an interspace.

In all cases, it is understood that texts are seen to relate to larger contexts, or frames of interpretation; and that translation involves a form of intervention which goes beyond language transfer.

Translation From Cultures

Malinowski was a pioneer in terms of cultural approaches to translation, though he was neither a linguist nor a translator. As an anthropologist he realized that explaining “the native view” of the magic in Trioband stories to an English audience required more than a literal translation, and hence he was “continually striven to link up grammar with the context of situation and with the context of culture” (1935, p. 73). The context of culture is a wide encompassing frame relating to assumptions regarding appropriate behavior, practices, and values as cued by language (Halliday & Hasan, 1989, p. 47; see also Katan, 2004).

Take, for example, the following passage from novelist Jane Austen. At a certain point, Emma fi nds “her hand seized—her attention demanded, and Mr. Elton actually making violent love to her.” The context of situation, pre-Victorian, will inform us that the language cued “courtship”; but to actually understand Emma’s attribution of “violent” we would need to know the context of culture, such as how to court 19th-century style, and at what stage the language and behavior would be considered “violent.” More generally, as Goffman (1974/1986, p. 25) put it, readers need to know “What is it that’s going on here?” and to have ways of giving meaning to that practice or, as he says, of accessing “schemata of interpretation” (p. 8).

If the interpretative frame, or schema, is an internal cognitive representation, then the “thick description” is what the anthropologist will use to help the outside reader access that interpretative frame. Appiah (2000, p. 427) suggests the same approach for translation, defi ning “thick translation” as “translation that seeks with its annotations and its accom-panying glosses to locate the text in a rich cultural and linguistic context.” The translator here is a visible frame maker explaining cultural differences to the target reader, often through extratextual devices. The famous Victorian translation of The Thousand and One Nights, for example, became well-known for its explanatory notes on the manners and customs of Muslim men. Yet there are few examples of this type of intervention (Snell-Hornby, 2006, pp. 98–9). This is because most translators and scholars still feel that the use of any extratextual notes is not only a sign of translator indecision or inadequacy, but also off-putting for the reader. So, traditionally, this has been the approach to scholarly works only, such as the translations of the Bible. For the time being, thick translation remains a seldom-used cultural approach.

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Translating for Cultures

The fi rst translator to offer detailed considerations about the context and to offer a more acceptable cultural approach to translation was Bible scholar and translator Eugene Nida. Though he professed an anthropological approach to explaining the source-text culture, he actually had much more interest in allowing readers to read and respond to the Bible in translation in the way the gospel writers had originally intended. However, as he notes, “Reader response can never be identical to the original due to different historical, cultural and environmental contexts” (1964, p. 159).

Reducing Difference

Nida’s approach, then, was to translate through dynamic (or functional) equivalence: “Translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, fi rst in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style” (Nida & Taber, 1969, p. 12). The target words would then trigger the same associations and emotional effect as those of the original text. Hence Nida’s provocative suggestion to substitute the meekness of “the lamb of God” for Inuit readers with the image of a meek “seal of God.”

According to this approach, a translation is unsuccessful when the reader begins to experience a “culture bump” (Leppihalme, 1997, p. 4), which is “where a reader of a TT [target translation] has a problem in understanding a source-cultural allusion.” Today, audiovisual (AV) translation scholars are particularly aware of the “lingua-cultural drop in translational voltage” (Antonini & Chiaro, 2005, p. 39). The area of intervention revolves around omitting, glossing, retaining, or substituting references such as “institutions” and “pastimes” through to “celebrities and personalities.” The approach is linguistic, hence nonverbal aspects of signifying cultural practices, such as the use of color, sound, kinesics, and proxemics, meaningful to one audience but not to another, are rarely discussed.

Nida himself was heavily infl uenced by Chomsky, and used semantic structures to tease out culture-bound meanings. A development of this linguistic approach has been success-fully used with comparable corpora. Tognini Bonelli and Manca (2004), for example, show how “Children and dogs welcome” (a standard collocate in accommodation brochures) must be translated differently if dynamic equivalence is to be maintained. The cultural approach here is to analyze target-language collocation frequency lists. In this particular case, Italian dogs are never “welcome,” but “accepted.” Even more interesting is the fact that children in Italian accommodation brochures are not only not “welcome” but not even mentioned. Children, by default, are always welcome. Hence, assumptions about “children” are clearly dependent on the context of culture.

So far, culture and the context of culture have been perceived as fi xed and rather structured entities, framing an original or translated text. During the 1980s, a new loosely defi ned school of thought began to appear in translation studies, subsequently labelled as the “cultural turn” (Snell-Hornby, 2006, p. 56). The emphasis now was on the text as an integral part of a larger network or system of cultural signs, and no longer bound by the search for the formal or dynamically equivalent mot juste.

Deconstructionism and “the death of the author” were extremely infl uential. They paved the way for the functionalist approach, which was to focus translators’ attention away from text-based equivalence toward the skopos: “the function that the target text is intended to fulfi l” (Vermeer in Nord, 2005, p. 27). Reducing difference was no longer primarily linked to fi delity with the original text, but now to target-text coherence within a reader’s par-ticular world. However, to do so, the translator would still have to construct a particular (and static) context of culture.

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Also important was the idea of translation as rewriting (Lefevere, 1992) and of trans-lation as anything that the culture accepts as such (Toury, 1995, p. 26). This rethinking of the relationship between the text and its particular contexts meant that there could be no defi nitive translation, and that now the difference between “a translation” and “an adapta-tion” was blurring. As a result, translation studies had fi nally broken “the two thousand year old chain of theory revolving around the faithful vs. free axis” (Gentzler, 2001, p. 71).

Thus, the cultural approach favored by the functionalists considers not only culture-bound terms and collocations, but also culturally appropriate genre styles and norms (Reiss & Vermeer, 1984; Toury, 1995). This has led to a growth in studies on the subject known variously as “comparative stylistics,” “intercultural rhetoric,” or “comparative pragmatics” (e.g., Wierzbicka, 2003; Bührig, House, & Ten Thije, 2009). These studies tend to focus on models of appropriate writing style across languages and, in some cases, the culture-bound motivations fostering such styles (e.g., Katan, 2004).

The “cultural fi lter” became a popular analogy. Like a pair of sunglasses, the fi lter dis-torts the way in which reality is perceived, and hence also accounts for the differences in interpreting meaning across linguacultures. For some, the fi lter should be used actively by translators for non-fi ctional texts only (e.g., Bührig et al.). For others (e.g., Katan, 2004), cultural and other perception fi lters are an integral part of interpretation of any text.

An approach designed not just to reduce but to eliminate any trace of source-text culture came originally from the software industry, which needed to “localize” (American-based) products around the globe. The task required making modifi cations to products and services so that they could sell just as well in local markets worldwide. The cultural approach here involves, for instance, not only adapting the examples and illustrations in the instruction manual for the various languages, but also adapting the language of the software instruc-tions and responses in the computer or phone. Many other features need to be adapted, such as the type of guarantee and often the plug itself. Also, colors and graphics will often be modifi ed to meet local cultural norms. Ideally, to improve effi ciency, products and documentation will be market-ready, already “internationalized” (i.e., free of an American context of culture) and hence ready to be localized into all languages through more auto-mated translation.

The translation of comic literature has also been considered a form of localization (Zanettin, 2008), where not only is the dialogue adapted according to the sensitivities of the receiving culture, but there is often new editing, additional cover art, lettering, and retouching. Donald Duck in Italian, for example, becomes an Italian icon known mainly by his new surname Paparino (Duckling), and is more respectful to his elders; while in Arabic he never kisses. However, comic writing has yet to be internationalized.

Though comics may be retaining their local voice, many translation scholars have noticed that much of the domestication is actually producing a more standardized approach to translation worldwide, and where internationalization does take place it tends to follow an Anglo-American style. The result is a rationalized monocultural “McDonaldization” of translation (Katan, 2004). So, for reasons of effi ciency—or hegemony according to post-modernist thinking (Robinson, 1997)—the translation industry is being streamlined into a universal way of thinking and practicing, as envisaged through one local (American) set of appropriate translation strategies and writing styles. In its favor, we have a startling number of instant multilanguage versions of manuals, software, games, (Hollywood) fi lms, and even breaking news. Also the concept of a global norm and lingua franca (English) regarding academic and scientifi c production fosters the global dissemination of ideas and helps those from minority languages earn international recognition. Also, oppressed groups such as the Dalits (traditionally regarded as an Untouchable caste in India) have found themselves a new voice and an appreciative audience through translation into English,

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bypassing local caste opposition and able to make an international case for justice at home (Kothari, 2007).

On the other hand, these voices fi nd themselves standardized in English: “the literature by a woman in Pakistan begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan” (Spivak, 2000, p. 400). And translation out of English, constrained through lack of time and space (and in the end money) means that readers and viewers learn to live with “translationese” or “dubbese,” as the Anglo-American style is squeezed, unlocalized, into other language spaces on computers, phones, and fi lm.

Hence, in this more global view of culture, difference is indiscriminately reduced. The “other,” through economies of scale, is classifi ed rationally, simplifi ed and stereotyped, reducing any in-depth understanding. In the academic and scientifi c world of discourse “epistemicide” (Bennett, 2007) may take place, whereby the straitjacketing of academic ideas to an Anglo discursive style might actually result in the loss of ideas.

What is being seen is gatekeeping on a global scale, where information and translation is controlled in such a way that minority voices (writing styles, literatures) have diffi culty in being heard as different. Lefevere (1992) introduced the term “patronage” to describe the economic and political power issues involved in gatekeeping the translation of literature. As a result, American fi lm, TV, and fi ction are routinely translated, while all other nation-alities’ output is not—due principally to issues of patronage rather than to inherent merit.

Highlighting Difference

As a response to the above, postcolonial thinkers are attempting to delimit the spread of what they see as an Anglo-American monoculture globalizing the planet. Culture here is ideological and a sign of power. “Difference” is now seen in terms of inequality, superiority, and inferiority. This approach pits itself against the dominating colonial master voice in translation (Venuti, 1998), to safeguard the voices of the subaltern languages and literatures. This is no easy task when the very essence of translation itself entails the removal of one language in favor of another, and the voices themselves (in translation) will be reinterpreted through the limiting cultural fi lters of the target reader discussed earlier.

The cultural approach, here, attempts to expose and empower the translator, seen no longer as invisible and working passively within the system, but as “committed” or even as “an activist,” aiming to consciously intervene against those gatekeeping activities that tend to exclude minority voices. The more activist translators may intervene by subscrib-ing publicly to an anticapitalist stance, by refusing to translate for the dominant culture, by making the hidden ideologies explicit in the text, by manipulating the target text covertly against the original intent, and by producing noncommercial or alternative translations in support of minoritized groups (Baker & Chesterman, 2008; see www.babels.org).

Committed translation scholars have also focused their attention on how translators tend to work within the dominant gatekeeping system, and how they have intervened on foreign texts, distorting them to fi t what they believe to be superior Anglo style. The Victorian poet-translator Edward Fitzgerald is a case in point. His cultural approach to translating a peripheral culture is writ clear: “It is an amusement for me to take what Liberties I like with these Persians, who (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little Art to shape them” (Lefevere, 1992, p. 4). The result was the lauded, and very English, translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the inclusion today of many of Fitzgerald’s stanzas in the Oxford Book of Quotations.

Also well known in English are Rabindranath Tagore’s own translations of his Bengali poems, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913—the fi rst time it had been given to an Indian. Sengupta (1990, p. 58) suggests that this was due to his ability to efface his poems in translation and create “the stereotypical role that was familiar to the coloniser, a voice that not only spoke of the peace and tranquillity of a distant world, but

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also offered an escape from the materialism of the contemporary Western world.” And herein lies part of the problem: To be read and appreciated, the original voice may well be distorted by the “other” to fi t a domestic mold, and “difference,” as a result, may well remain stereotypical, linked to a deterministic context of culture.

The postcolonial approach, then, is an attempt to break that mold, focusing on the hybrid nature of cultural, or rather “transcultural,” identity (Tymoczko, 2007, pp. 120–39). Postcolonial postmodernist theorists now use the term “cultural translation” to talk about individuals who have crossed these artifi cial cultural borders into a third space. Those who have done so are themselves, like British–Indian writer Salmon Rushdie, “translated men” (1991, p. 17), freed from their original culture to write in their own terms, using their own brand(s) of foreignized English. However, cultural translation has little to do with the translating of texts.

Translation is involved, though, as Robinson notes (1997, pp. 88–113), when these voices are to be translated into other languages. He outlines three approaches: “literalism” (fol-lowing House); “métissages,” the mixing of multiple races and ethnic language; and fi nally deliberate “mistranslations” from the dominant language. However, the last two approaches pose a fundamental problem for practicing translators and their readers. For there is little observable difference between a translation regarded as a text which has successfully subverted the established order, breaking the domestic mold, and one that is considered incoherent and “bad” due to its stilted language, signs of interference, and mistranslation. Indeed, the postcolonial approach has been criticized for its lack of utilizable methodology and its elitist approach, while Singh (2007, pp. 77–8) suggests that “perhaps it is time to take a RE-TURN to the study of language and renew the connection between translation studies and the study of language.”

Translating Between Cultures

The fi nal approach to be discussed is indeed a return to language, focusing as it does on “intercultural communication”—a term popularly used in translation studies (e.g., by the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies and The Translator), though not always properly understood. For some translation scholars, intercultural com-munication is understood as equalling language-based “functional equivalence” (Bührig et al., 2009, p. 1)—which takes us back to Nida’s approach.

More relevant for translation is the interculturalists’ view. First, “an intercultural situation is one in which the cultural distance between the participants is signifi cant enough to have an effect on interaction/communication that is noticeable to at least one of the parties” (Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009, p. 3); second, meaning is not innate in the text, but is constructed through fi lters according to contexts of situation and culture. This cultural approach focuses on difference between self and other in terms of communicability and in terms of reader tolerance of cultural distance.

The translator, here, fi rst gauges the relative distances (in terms of cognitive environ-ment, appropriacy, norms, values, and beliefs) between the source and target contexts of culture, and second, as privileged reader, negotiates levels of tolerance for difference according to original and new intentions. This requires bicultural competence and the ability to (dis)associate and take a third perceptual position (Katan, 2002).

Importantly too, in contrast with House, the concept of ideal or model reader (Eco, 1984) is essential here, for it is necessary to build a plausible model of both original- and target-reader reaction. Yet clearly this necessity is open to further criticism. Second-guessing reader reaction will lead once again toward determinism: the static view of individuals ready-labeled as belonging to idealized or model cultures. Hence the need for the translation to

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take place within the “mediation space,” as proposed by Wolf (2007, p. 113), open to new and evolving hybrid solutions, with the aim of reconciling differences according to text and readership tolerance for difference. The translator as a mediator also fi lters meaning accord-ing to her own, at times confl icting, “professional” or “committed” role to fi nd out, indeed, “What is it that’s going on here?” between the two cultural worlds.

SEE ALSO: Cultural Linguistics; Culture; Culture and Context: Overview; Intercultural Discourse; Language, Culture, and Context; Linguaculture; Linguistic Imperialism; Norms of Translation; Translation, Localization, and Internationalization; Translation Theory

References

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Appiah, K. A. (2000). Thick translation. In L. Venuti (Ed.), The translation studies reader (pp. 417–29). London, England: Routledge.

Baker, M., & Chesterman, A. (2008). Ethics of renarration: Mona Baker is interviewed by Andrew Chesterman. Cultus, 1, 10–33.

Bennett, K. (2007). Epistemicide! The tale of a predatory discourse. Translation and ideology: Encounters and clashes (Special issue). The Translator, 13(2), 151–69.

Bührig, K., House, J., & Ten Thije, D. (Eds.). (2009). Translational action and intercultural com-munication. Manchester, England: St. Jerome.

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Gentzler, E. (2001). Contemporary translation theories (2nd ed.). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Goffman, E. (1974/1986). Frame analysis. New York, NY: Harper & Row.Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1989). Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social-

semiotic perspective. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.Katan, D. (2002). Mediating the point of refraction and playing with the perlocutionary effect:

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Katan, D. (2004). Translating cultures: An introduction for translators, interpreters and mediators (2nd ed.). Manchester, England: St. Jerome.

Kothari, R. (2007). The translation of Dalit literature into English. In J. Munday (Ed.), Translation as intervention (pp. 38–53). London, England: Continuum.

Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation, rewriting and the manipulation of literary fame. London, England: Routledge.

Leppihalme, R. (1997). Culture bumps. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.Malinowski, B. (1935). The language of magic and gardening. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press.Nida, E. A. (1964). Towards a science of translating with special reference to principles and procedures

involved in Bible translating. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.Nida, E. A., & Taber, C. (1969). The theory and practice of translation. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.Nord, C. (2005). Text analysis in translation: Theory, method, and didactic application of a model for

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Reiss, K., & Vermeer, H. J. (1984). Groundwork for a general theory of translation. Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer.

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Robinson, D. (1997). Translation and empire: Postcolonial theories explained. Manchester, England: St. Jerome.

Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary homelands: Essays and criticism 1981–1991. London, England: Granta.Sengupta, M. (1990). Translation, colonialism and poetics: Rabindranath Tagore in two worlds.

In S. Bassnett & A. Lefevere (Eds.), Translation, history and culture (pp. 55–63). London, England: Pinter.

Singh, R. (2007). Unsafe at any speed? Some unfi nished refl ections on the “cultural turn” in translation studies. In P. St-Pierre & P. C. Kar (Eds.), In translation: Refl ections, refractions, transformations (pp. 73–84). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Snell-Hornby, M. (2006). The turns of translation studies. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.Spencer-Oatey, H., & Franklin, P. (2009). Intercultural interaction: A multidisciplinary approach to

intercultural communication. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.Spivak, G. C. (2000). The politics of translation. In L. Venuti (Ed.), The translation studies reader

(pp. 397–416). London, England: Routledge.Tognini Bonelli, E., & Manca, E. (2004). Welcoming children, pets and guests: Towards functional

equivalence in the languages of “Agriturismo” and “Farmhouse Holidays.” In K. Aijmer & B. Altenberg (Eds.), Advances in corpus linguistics: Papers from the 23rd international confer-ence on English language research on computerized corpora (ICAME 23) (pp. 371–85). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi.

Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive translation studies—and beyond. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Tymoczko, M. (2007). Enlarging translation: Empowering translators. Manchester, England: St. Jerome.Venuti, L. (1998). The scandals of translation. London, England: Routledge.Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction (2nd ed.). Berlin,

Germany: De Gruyter.Wolf, M. (2007). The location of the “translation fi eld”: Negotiating borderlines between Pierre

Bourdieu and Homi Bhabha. In M. Wolf & A. Fukari (Eds.), Constructing a sociology of translation (pp. 109–19), Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Zanettin, F. (2008). The translation of comics as localization: On three Italian translations of La piste des Navajos. In F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in translation (pp. 200–19). Manchester, England: St. Jerome.

Suggested Readings

Brisset, A. (2010). Cultural perspectives on translation. International Social Science Journal, 61(199), 69–81.

Hermans, T. (2003). Cross-cultural translation studies as thick translation. Bulletin of SOAS, 66(3), 380–9.

Katan, D. (2009). Translation as intercultural communication. In J. Munday (Ed.), The Routledge companion to translation studies (pp. 74–92). Oxford, England: Routledge.

St-Pierre, P., & Kar, P. C. (Eds.). (2007). In translation: Refl ections, refractions, transformations. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

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