2.4 Different views to non-equivalence at a word level especially culture- specific concepts
One of the most challenging tasks for all translators is how to render culture- specific concepts in a foreign language. Indeed, we will see how much attention has been paid to this problem by translation theories. (Newmark, 1987) define culture as the manner of life and its appearance that relate to a community that uses exact language as its way of expression; he also said that culture is object , processes , institutions , customs, idea peculiar to one group.
While (Deretti, 1980) define culture as the whole thing that individual have produced, discovered, constructed, changed, and progressed during life. (Demo, 1987) define culture as total of knowledge, a way of life, creative and moral, main beliefs, laws, habits, as well as the capability acquired by humans as members of a community.
(Albó, 2005) defines culture as an idea connected to personality asserting that citizens have the tendency to distinguish themselves as parts of a group due to the common distinctiveness they share with its other members and also to the differences they develop in relation to others.
While (Sapir, 1986) points out that no two languages are ever completely similar to be taken as indicating the same social reality in the worlds in which various societies exist are distinctive worlds, not simply the same world with different labels attached.
The idea of equivalence has a lot of disparagements and challenges. If equivalence is taken as the heart of translation, the second issue will about cases of nonequivalence in translation.
As (Baker, 1992) points out, the complicatedness and the difficulties in translating from one language into another is posed by the idea of nonequivalence, or lack of equivalence. This crisis can be seen at all language levels initially from the word level up till the textual level. She explores a variety of nonequivalence troubles and their achievable solutions at the word, above word, grammatical, textual, and pragmatic levels.
She takes a bottom-up approach for educational reasons. She goes on with her nonequivalence debate from the word to more upward levels. She claims that translators must not miscalculate the increasing consequence of main idea options on the way we understand the text. She also acknowledges the reality that there are translation troubles created by nonequivalence. She classifies common difficulties of nonequivalence and gives suitable strategies in handling such cases.
(Baker, 1992)cultural specific concepts are those SL words may state an idea that is entirely mysterious in the target culture. They possibly will cover something to do with a spiritual belief, community custom, or even a kind of food. For instance, in Arabic, we have Jihad, as a holy word which is unidentified in the majority of the other languages. The second group is SL idea is not found in the target language which reveals that the SL word can state an idea that is identified in the target culture but basically not lexicalized.
She also gives an example of landslide has no accurate equivalence in various languages. She also points out that the SL word is semantically problematical and reveals that a particular word can occasionally state a difficult meaning than an entire sentence. The other is that the TL lacks a superordinate or a hyponym which means that the TL possibly will have an exact word (hyponym) but no general words (superordinate), and vice versa. For instance, under house, English has a diversity of hyponyms which have no equivalence in several languages such as Arabic, for example in English we have: bungalow, cottage, croft, chalet, hut, and manor, lodge and so on. Diversity in meaningful is an extra difficulty of nonequivalence at the word level shown by (Baker, 1992) which show that there may present a TL word which has the similar propositional meaning as the SL word, but possibly will have a dissimilar meaningful meaning.
Terms like homosexuality offer fine examples homosexuality is not a naturally uncomplimentary word in English, although it is normally used in this way. On the other hand, the equivalence expression in numerous other languages is naturally more badly and would be reasonably not easy to employ in a neutral context without suggesting strong dissatisfaction.
(Nida, 1945) holds out that almost all would identify that language is most excellent classified as a branch of culture when dealing with several kinds of semantic problems, mainly those in which the culture under consideration is quite different from his or her own, for instance, the English expressions the houses of Commons are culture-bound. Similarly, the expression brother-in-law loses its meaning when translated literally into Arabic akh fi al-qaanun - a brother in the law.
While English applies this expression to the brother of your husband, the brother of your wife, the husband of your sister, the husband of your husband's sister, and the husband of your wife's sister, so Arabic expresses itself differently.
Most significantly, in Qur'an translation, schools of exegesis have considered as the major part in the translation. Therefore, intra-language translation plays a major function within the target text. Translating the Qur'an text is the difficult job due to the fact that the translation process is fraught with pragmalinguistic and cross-cultural limitations. The Qur'an translator, for example, must be aware of the cultural Muslim tradition that draws a difference between exegesis tafsiir and para-transfer opinion tail.
(Nida, 1964) states that a person who is engaged in translating from one language into another must to be always conscious of the dissimilarity in the entire variety of culture shown by the two languages pragmatic and contextual divides among the source language and the target language.
He also shows that the semantic associations between the words of various languages have no one-to-one sets of correspondences or even one-to-many sets. The associations are always many-to-many, with more of scope for ambiguities, unclear, and unseen boundaries. Furthermore he identifies two kinds of equivalence, formal and dynamic, where formal equivalence keeps its concentration on the message itself, in both type and content. In this kind of translation one is concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, and concept to concept. He calls this kind of translation a gloss translation; which aims to let the reader to comprehend more of the SL context as possible.
(larson, 1984) stress that there is rarely completely equivalent between languages. Because of this, it is often essential to translate one word of the source language by a number of words in the target language in order to give the similar meaning. The fact that the target language is spoken by people of a culture which is often very dissimilar from the culture of those who speak the source language will mechanically make it hard to find lexical equivalents. The lexical difference will make it necessary for the translator to make various adjustments in the process of translation. This shows that, in translating, we often encounter source language lexical items that do not correspond semantically and grammatically to target language expressions.
(Schnorr, 1986) identifies the place where a lack of cultural specific of nonequivalence can be found:
1. Festivals and celebrations: Such as standing day in pilgrimage in the Islamic World, which is an extension for the example derived by Schnorr (the idea of "Guy Fawkes Day "in the United Kingdom) in the Islamic world?
2. Dressing and national traditions: Such as "Sari "in India and "shal" "a type of head garments in the Arab World". Tools and objects: Like "Mugwar" "a tool for fighting in Iraqi Arabic".
3. Historical facts: Such as the restoration in England and Al-twabeen in the Islamic history.
4. Spiritual terms such as "minister, priest" in Christianity and "Ayatollah "in Islam.
5. Educational and specialist knowledge.
A number of scholars have accepted the importance of the problem that appears at a culturally specific terminology of translation for example, (Pistor-Hatam, 1996) argument of translations from Persian to Ottoman Turkish beginning of the fourteenth century, remarks that Arabic tarjama2 meant to interpret, to care for way of explanation, rather than to transfer from one language to another as take place in its recent practice.
(Hagen, 2003) scripts of a related period and position _ Persian-Ottoman translations in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries _ claims that the difficulty of translation into Anatolian Turkish starts with terminology, since translating the Arabic-Turkish term tercume as translation does not fully render the idea. In local usage tercume covered a much wider capacity, by transferring a text or parts of it into another language.
(Jedamski, 2005) puts a variety of terms that appear to have been used almost synonymously for translation in Malay, for example, terkarang (written, composed), terkutip (quoted, copied) and dituturkan (arranged), indicating that no single term was sufficient to describe the multiple and creative activities.
(Levy, 1984) states that any reduce or remove of complex expressions in translating were morally wrong. The translator, he supposed, had the responsibility of discovering an answer to the most discouraging of the problem, and he stated that the practical view must be selected taking into account all the aspects like appearance, style and sense. If the principle of sameness cannot exist between two languages is accepted, it becomes likely to come close to the issue of loss and get into the translation method.
(Nida, 1964) found rich materials about the reasons of failure in translation, in particular regarding the complication with a translator when he or she found a term or ideas in the SL that cannot be found in the TL. He cites the case of Guaica, a language of southern Venezuela, where there is small trouble in finding suitable terms for the English murder, stealing, lying, etc., but where the terms of good, bad, ugly and beautiful cover a very different area of meaning. When such difficulties are faced by the translator, the whole issue of the translatability of the text is raised. (Catford, 1965a) identifies two types of untranslatability, which he calls the linguistic and cultural. On the linguistic rank, untranslatability take place when there is no lexical or syntactical alternate in the TL for an SL it Catford's class of linguistic untranslatability, which is also introduced by (Popovic, 1971).
In linguistic untranslatability, he insists, because of variations in the SL and the TL, whereby cultural untranslatability is of the absence in the TL culture of a significant situational feature of the SL text. For instance, he combines the different concepts of the term bathroom in an English, Finnish or Japanese context, where both the object and the use made of that object are not at all alike.
But (Catford, 1965b) also claims that more concrete lexical items such as the English term home or democracy cannot be said as untranslatable, and holds that the English phrases like I'm going home, or He's at home can 'readily be provided with translation equivalents in most languages' while the term democracy is international.
The English phrases can be translated into the major European languages and democracy is an internationally used term. But he ignores to take into consideration two significant factors, and this seems to symbolize and add a slight approach to the issue of untranslatability. If I'm going home is transferred to as Je vais chez moi, the sense meaning of the SL sentence (positive self speech aims to carry on in place of residence and/or origin) is only insecurely produced. And if, for example, the phrase is spoken by an American stay for some time in London, it could either mean a return to the immediate 'home' or and Beyond.
(Kashgary, 2010) religious vocabulary are culture-specific they have taken as a symbol group of translation nonequivalence since they cannot be correctly translated by giving their dictionary equivalents. The lexicon equivalents of these terms may be measured within the framework of Nida's estimate in translation where equivalents are specified only to estimate the meaning in universal terms and not the details since the content of these terms is extremely dissimilar from the content of their equivalents.
(Korzeniowska and Warszawa:, 1994) the entire culture-specific concepts which take place in the source language but are completely unknown in the target language are the most notorious for the making the problems with finding equivalents. There possibly will be also circumstances where the source culture and source language build different distinctions in meaning from the target culture and target language. The target language may also lack a more specific concept or term (hyponym) or a more general one (superordinate). Also a literal, word for word, translation would be completely difficult: the speakers of English would neither understand the nature of this establishment in reference to source language culture, nor associate it with any institution of a similar type present in their system. Translators are always under pressure to reproduce the exact meaning of the original in the translated text.
(Davies., 2003) defines culture as the set of principles, way of thinking and behaviors shared by a group and accepted by learning. These culture specific items are different among cultures as a variety of countries have a dissimilar history and experience of life. When the source text expression is found as being strange to the target audience, the strategies for dealing with nonequivalence should be applied in translating. Different types of nonequivalence should be treated using different translation strategies .While he works in the field of translation with more consideration on the translation trouble of culture specific items such as different traditions, dress, or references to a variety of types of food. He identifies a number of measures that are used in translation of culture specific items:
1. Preservation takes place when translators decide to preserve the source text term in the translation when the strategy of preservation is used; the source language concepts are transferred to the target language.
2. Addiction occurs when the translator decides to remain in the original item but add the text with whatever materials is judged necessary. When this plan takes place in translation, the source language term or expression is transferred to the text but extra information is provided.
3. Omission this plan takes place when a difficult cultural specific item is removed away and there are no any replacements for it in the target text. When a translator faces complications to translate culture specific items, the items may be simply omitted in translation.
4. Globalization this is the method of changing culture specific references with ones which are more impartial or common, in the sense that they are available to audiences from a wider range of cultural backgrounds. In addition he states that the apply of this strategy may create loss of effect in translation. The strategy of globalization means that the culture-specific items of the source language are changed from the ones that have a smaller amount of cultural associations.
5. Localization this occurs when translators attempt to fix a reference tightly in the culture of the target audience. In other words, this translation plan is used when culture specific references are changed by ones that are more common to the target audience and this strategy is dissimilar to globalization because it helps to keep away from the loss of effect and at the same time it does not affect harmfully the meaning of the translated items. For example, the source culture dish that sounds out of the ordinary and unusual to the target audience is changed from the one that is common and well-known in the target-culture.
6. Transformation this translation plan may create some change in meaning. The target text may be a little unlike the source language text. The scholar gives the example of transformation about the sweets when the source languages for example, English sweets are described as vomit-fl avoured while in the target language French it is mentioned that sweets taste rubbish.
7. Creation this refers to the cases when translators build culture specific references that are not established in the original text. In other words, the target text may include references that are not present in the original text.
(Tymoczko, 1999) points out proper names belong to the group of culture-specific terms are intensively with a lot of information and often have etymological meaning. Names may offer information about an individual. For example, in several cultures, a proper name may propose what the status of a person holds in society a lower or a higher and gender. Translation of proper names is difficult since different patterns of naming takes place in different cultures. In addition, language construction has an influence on the method of naming. For example, Lithuanian is an inflectional language and certain inflections are used to create feminine and masculine proper names. Confirm For instance, inflections -a and -Ä- are generally used with feminine names. Names Vida and BirutÄ- can be taken as examples. There are endings that are used to form masculine names: -as Tomas, -is Algis, and -ius as Darius.
He notes that the names should be transferred untouched in textual rewritings. In other words, proper names should be remained in the target language without any changes. However, these preserved names may sound strange to the target audience. This may happen because different sound patterns dominate in different languages. He also remarked that the essential feature of languages is that they have different sound repertories. Therefore, the source language names may be changed from the ones that are more common to the target readers.
Another reason why source language names should be replaced by the ones that sound more ordinary for the target audience is the fact that some cultures are particularly aggressive to strange sounding names. Finally he states that in some cultures there is a particular struggle to foreign names, proper names are changed in translations in order to keep away from foreignness in the target culture.
