Cultural Problems in Translation and Brief Solutions

Cultural Problems in Translation – language is a product of culture and surely it develops along with the cultures of the speakers. The culture itself involves so many things including the habits, customs and even perspectives or views of the community. Meanwhile, translation itself can be defined as the process to change a sort of contexts from one language to another. Then, as one language may be only had by a certain culture, it results some problems anyway. The problems in translations include several cultural aspects which have such crucial complication. It is in line with what has been said by Catford, it was that the central problem of translation is about finding out the equivalence of a word or a sentence. As you know, a word in one language often doesn’t have any equivalence in another one.

Translability and Untranslability Concepts

During the looking for of the equivalence, the translators must face some translability and untranslability concepts. Sure, the problems occurred due to the translability concept will not be as difficult as those in the untranslability. In term of unstranslability, the text sometimes cannot be translated properly. The words or sentences from original language are then changed into those from target languages in which both only have similar meanings not the exact ones. Sure, if there are too many unstranslability cases in a context, it can cause many shifts in meaning. Something to be worried is that the message of the context cannot be delivered then. It is probably more relieving since in these modern days, many new terms tend to be more global. It is particularly those which are related to the technology. As an example, “internet” will be translated as “internet” in any language. However, for the terms as the products of traditional cultures, they are those which should be solved.

How to Solve the Problems

As it has been mentioned above, it is really possible for a translator to translate a word from original language into another word from target language with similar meaning. Yes, similar means that both are not exactly the same. However, it seems that the wiser way is by not translating the term at all. Meanwhile, the translator can give something like footnote at the lower part of the page regarding the foreign words that cannot be translated. Sure, this way is considered as the more effective. Besides, it can be a chance for readers to learn more about the cultures where the original language comes from.

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Cultural Problems in Translation and Brief Solutions

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