Azərbaycan Respublikası “ÇAĞ” Öyrətim İşlətmələri

 
 
 
 
 
 

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THE ROLE OF TRANSLATION IN CULTURE STUDIES 
AND INTER-CIVILIZATION DIALOGUE 
Alina ECHON MENDOZA 
Odlar Yurdu University 
Translation and Pedagogical Faculty 1 course 
Rəhbər adı: Bekirova A
. 
 
EPILOGUE 
Then noticing that he was an author of numerous masterly translations she asked 
the expert why he didn’t try to write a novel by himself. – No, I wouldn’t say so, 
because I once tried to write a novel. When you are writing a novel you’re obviously 
writing about people or places ,something or other, but what you are essentially doing 
is expressing yourself. Whereas when you translate you’re not expressing yourself. 
You’re performing a technical stunt. I realized that the translator and the actor hadt 
to have the same kind of talent. What they both do is to take something of somebody 
else’s and put it over as if it were their own/I think that you have to have that capacity. 
So in addition to the technical stunt, there is a psychological work out, which translation 
involves: something like being on stage. It does something entirely different from 
what I think of as creative poetry writing. Willard Trask(1900-1980) 
I wanted to start my presentation with well-known Bible story about The Tower 
of Babel. As we know after the flood, people filled the earth again. And they all 
spoke the same language and could talk to each other. They wanted to build a gigan-
tic tower that could reach all the way to heaven. This tower would make them feel 
very same important. But God said,”If speaking the language makes them think 
they can build a tower to heaven, then I will give them all different languages». And 
He did. Now when they spoke, strange words came out! They could no longer un-
derstand each other .And so they could no longer build their tower up to heaven. 
Even nowadays the communication between people is very important. That’s 
why we can not underestimate the indispensable role of translation in culture studies 
and inter-civilization dialogue. Correctly and masterly made translation can solve 
many problems including: religious, literary, scientific, and philosophical. Even can 
resolve conflicts in international relations .But there is a problems in translation 
itself: for example: the online translators that all of us have ,not correctly reflect the 
true meaning of the word. Another problem is a problem of phonetic speech per-
ception, which can also lead to misunderstandings. The problem I'm going to touch 
on is idiomatic translation, untranslatable proverbs and the oddities of translation 
they can lead to. Various strategies opted for by translators in rendering idioms seem 
to play a crucial role in recognition and perception of connotations carried by them. 
If a novice translator renders a literary text without paying adequate attention to the 
idioms, the connotations are likely not to be transferred as a result of the translator’s 

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failure to acknowledge them. They will be entirely lost to the majority of the readers: 
consequently, the translation will be ineffective. As long as there is a problem there 
should be a solution. In my opinion to avoid the oddities of translation at the inter-
national, intercivilizational and intercultural level, all the translators should know 
some important rules. Firstly to be familiar and constantly improve in the study of 
peoples culture and language that you want to translate a given text. Otherwise there 
will be some oddities of translation like this: 
Students of Alabama University have collected the most paradoxical mistakes 
made by American companies due to inaccuracies in translation and misunder-
standing of actualities existing in other countries. 
General Motors attempt to enter the market of Latin America with their new 
car Chevrolet Nova ended in a fiasco. Later it became clear that,”Nova” in Spanish 
meant “won’t budge” or “won’t go”. 
Or manufacturer of baby products Gerber started selling baby food in Africa. 
There was a picture of smiling baby on the box. Later Gerber marketers were surprised 
to learn that it is common in Africa to portray the content of the product on the package 
due to great number of illiterates .For example you will find image of a porridge on 
a package of oat flakes. guess how disoriented were illiterate Africans seeing baby’s 
picture on the box. 
We could also think of English headache medicine advertisement .There were 
three pictures –a man on the left holding his head where its clear that he’s got a 
headache, the next picture –he takes a miracle pill, the last picture –he is well, singing 
a winning song. Then the advertisement was translated into Arabic, for sale in Egypt, 
but the pictures were left the old ones. It was fail- not to know that Arabs are accus-
tomed to read from right to left. 
Besides taking into account very specific cultural realities translator should be 
aware of linguistics and literary techniques to address such translation oddities at 
the following .Here goes the list of oddities: 
In the lobby of a Moscow hotel across from Russian Orthodox monastery: 
You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet com-
posers, artists and writers are buried daily except Thursday. 
On the menu of a Swiss restaurant: 
Our wines leave you nothing to hope for 
Outside a Hong Kong tailor shop: 
Ladies may have a fit upstairs 
From the Soviet weekly: 
There will be a Moscow Exhibition of Arts by 150.000 Soviet Republic painters 
and sculptures.These were executed over the past two years. 
In a Swiss mountain inn: 
Special today- no ice cream. 

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In Tokyo bar: 
Special cocktails for the ladies with nuts 
In a Copenhagen airline ticket office: 
We take your bags and send them in all directions 
In Budapest zoo: 
Please do not feed the animals. If you have any suitable food -give it to the guard 
on duty. 
And the last t and the funniest one: 
In the office of a roman doctor: 
Specialist in woman and other diseases 
The linguistic and literary techniques are those: 
1. Paraphrase – is restatement of a text or passages, using other words. 
2. Omission-purposeful omission is the leaving out of particular nonessential 
details that can be assumed by the reader. According to the context and attitudes/ 
gestures made by the characters in the stories. It allows for the reader to make their 
own abstract representation of the situation at hand. 
3. Compensation- means that one either omit or play down a feature such as 
idiomaticity at the point where it occurs in the target text. 
The third and the most efficient rule which should guide the translator is a self–
development. The translator who wants to succeed in their profession and avoid absurd 
incidents must always evolve. As far as we all know in the internet community has 
long used such words as LOL, OMG, FYI. They have long been a feature of text 
messages and now the abbreviations OMG and LOL have been recognized in the 
Oxford English Dictionary. The abbreviation for Oh My God (OMG) and Laughing 
Out Loud (LOL) are joined by FYI (For Your Information), IMHO (In My Humble 
Opinion) and Wag (Wives and Girlfriends) as new entries on the latest edition of 
the Oxford English Dictionary Online. The dictionary says that the first quotation for 
OMG is from a personal letter from 1917 while LOL was first used 1960 but denoted 
Little Old Lady. The rise of the term Wag follows a report in a newspaper that the 
staff at the England football team’s World Cup training camp referred to the players’ 
wives collectively as Wags. it has since become a popular term used in the media. 
So the conclusion : 
1. to know better the cultural characteristics of the target language country  
2. to use various literature strategies  
3. to be reside in self-development 
Translation is an exacting art. Idiom more than any other feature of language 
demands that the translator be not only accurate but highly sensitive to the rhetorical 
nuances of the language. 

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CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE 
Turkan ALIYEVA 
Qafqaz University Translation 3
rd
 Course 
 
It is probably safe to say that there has never been a time when the community of 
translators was unaware of cultural differences and their significance for translation. 
Translation theorists have been cognizant of the problems attendant upon cultural 
knowledge and cultural difference at least since ancient Rome, and translators almost 
certainly knew all about those problems long before theorists before articulated them. 
Some Renaissance proponents of sense-for-sense translation were inclined to accuse 
medieval literal translators of being ignorant of cultural differences; but an impressive 
body of historical research on medieval translation is beginning to show conclusively 
that such was not the case. Medieval literalists were not ignorant of cultural or lin-
guistic difference; due to the hermeneutical traditions in which they worked and the 
audiences for whom they translated, they were simply determined to bracket that 
difference, set it aside, and proceed as if it did not exist. 
Cultural knowledge and cultural difference have been a major focus of translator 
training and translation theory for as long as either has been in existence. Long debates 
have been held over when to paraphrase, when to use the nearest local equivalent, 
when to coin a new word by translating literally and let’s to transcribe some of them: 
Electrolux tried to sell vacuum cleaners in the US with the slogan “Nothing sucks 
like an Electrolux”. 
An American t-shirt maker in Miami printed up shirts for the Hispanic market 
promoting the Pope’s visit. The Spanish translator made o tiny little gender error with 
the definite article, so that, instead of “ I saw the Pope” the shirts read “ I saw the 
Potato”. 
Frank Perdue’s chicken slogan, “it takes a strong man to make a tender chicken“ 
was translated into Spanish as “it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate”. 
3M introduced its scotch tape in Japan with the slogan “it sticks like crazy” > 
The Japanese translator rendered the slogan as “it sticks foolishly”. 
Ford had a series of problems marketing its cars internationally. Its low- cost 
truck the Ftera meant “old ugly woman” in Spanish. Its Caliente in Mexico was found 
to be slang for “streetwalker”. 
Nike made a television ad promoting its shoes, with people from different countries 
saying “Just do it” in their native language. Too late they found out that a Samburu 
African Tribesman was really saying “I don’t want these give me big shoes”. 
Beginning in the late 1970s, several groups of scholars around the world began 
to explore the impact of cultural systems on translation- notably the impact of the 
target-culture system on what gets translated, and why, and how the translation is used. 

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And beginning in the late 1980s other groups of scholars around the world began to 
explore the ongoing impact of colonization on translation – especially the surviving 
power differentials between “first- world” and “third-world’ countries and how they 
control the economics and ideology and thus also the practice of translation. We will 
be looking at these theories below, under the heading “ Intercultural Awareness”. 
Another important question is, as Anthony Pym puts it, ”what then is a culture? 
”Noting that “ those who travel on foot or have read the diachronic part of Saussure 
know that there are no natural frontiers between languages” he goes on; 
How might one define the points where one culture stops and another begins? 
The borders are no easier to draw than those between languages and communities. One 
could perhaps turn to a geometry of fuzzy sets or maybe even deny the possibility of 
real contact altogether, but neither mathematics nor ideological relativism are able 
to elucidate the specific importance of translation as an active relation between cultures. 
Although questions like the definition of a culture are commonly thought to be 
beyond the scope of translation theory, their solution could become one of translation 
studies’ main contributions to the social sciences. Instead of looking for differentiated 
or distilled cultural essences, it could be fruitful to look at translations themselves in 
order to see what they have to say about cultural frontiers. It is enough to define the 
limits of a culture as the points where transferred texts have had to be translated. That is 
if a text can adequately be transferred without translation, there is cultural continuity. 
And if a text has been translated. it represents distance between at least two cultures. 
Cultural difference is largely a function of the distance they move, the distance 
from the place or time in which they are written to the place or time in which they are 
read; and it can be marked by the act or fact of translation: native speakers of English 
today read Charles Dickens without substantial changes. But they read William 
Shakespeare in “ modernized English,” Geoffrey Chaucer in “modern translation” and 
Beowulf in translation. Watching The Benny Hill Show on Finnish television in the 
late 1970s I often had no idea what was being said in rapid-fire culture-bound British 
English slang and had to read the Finnish subtitles to understand even the gist of a 
sketch. As we approach cultural boundaries, transferred texts become increasingly 
difficult to understand, until we give up and demand a translation- and it is at that point, 
Pym suggests that we know we have moved from culture to another. 
Another interesting point is that, do men and women of the same culture under-
stand each other? Deborah Tannen says no, and has coined the term: genderlect” to 
describe the differences. Do adults and children of the same culture understand each 
other? Yes and No. Sometimes we think we understand more than we actually do, 
because we gloss over the differences, the areas of significant misunderstanding; 
sometimes we think we understand less than we actually do, because ancient cultural 
hostilities and suspicions make us exaggerate the differences between us. 
The important thing to remember is, we do go on. Trained to become ever more 
suspicious of our “immediate” or “intuitive” understanding of a text to be translated, 

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we doggedly go on believing in our ability eventually to work through to a correct 
interpretation. 
Thwarted over and over in our attempts to find a target language equivalent for a 
culture bound and therefore apparently untranslatable word or phrase we keep sending 
mental probes out through our own and the Internet”s neural pathways , hoping to turn 
a corner and stumble upon the perfect translation. 
It almost never happens. We almost always settle for far less than the best. But we 
go on questing. It is perhaps our least reasonable, but also most professional, feature. 
And no matter what else we do, we continue to immerse ourselves in cultures. 
Local cultures, regional cultures, national cultures, international cultures, border 
cultures, school cultures and so on. 
 
 
LITERARY TRANSLATION AND ITS PROBLEMS 
Əli HÜSEYNOV 
Translation 3
 
 
Literary studies have always, explicitly or implicitly, presupposed a certain notion 
of `literariness' with which it has been able to delimit its domain, specify, and sanction 
its methodologies and approaches to its subject. This notion of `literariness' is crucial 
for the theoretical thinking about literary translation. In this paper, I have attempted 
to analyze various recent theoretical positions to the study of literary translation and 
sought to understand them in the context of the development in the field of literary 
studies in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The recent developments in 
the literary studies have radically questioned the traditional essentialist notion of 
`literariness' and the idea of canon from various theoretical perspectives. I have 
contrasted the traditional discourse on literary translation with the recent discourse in 
order to highlight the shift in the notion of `literariness' and its impact on translation 
theory. 
The traditional essentialist approach to literature, which Lefevere (1988:173) 
calls `the corpus' approach is based on the Romantic notion of literature which sees the 
author as a quasi-divine `creator' possessing `genius'. He is believed to be the origin of 
the Creation that is Original, Unique, organic, transcendental and hence sacred. 
Translation then is a mere copy of the unique entity, which by definition is uncopyable. 
As the translator is not the origin of the work of art, he does not possess `genius', and 
he is considered merely a drudge, a proletariat, and a shudra in the literary Varna 
system. This traditional approach is due to the Platonic-Christian metaphysical under-
pinning of the Western culture. The `original' versus `copy' dichotomy is deeply rooted 
in the Western thought. This is the reason why the West has been traditionally hostile 
and allergic to the notion of `translation'. 

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The traditional discussion of the problems of literary translation considers finding 
equivalents not just for lexis, syntax or concepts, but also for features like style, genre, 
figurative language, historical stylistic dimensions, polyvalence, connotations as well 
as denotations, cultural items and culture-specific concepts and values. The choices 
made by the translators like the decision whether to retain stylistic features of the 
source language text or whether to retain the historical stylistic dimension of the ori-
ginal become all the more important in the case of literary translation. For instance, 
whether to translate Chaucer into old Marathi or contemporary are very important. 
In the case of translating poetry, it is vital for a translator to decide whether the verse 
should be translated into verse, or into free verse or into prose. Most of the scholars 
and translators like Jakobson (1991:151) believe that in the case of poetry though it 
is "by definition impossible ...only creative transposition is possible...". It is the creative 
dimension of translation that comes to fore in the translation of poetry though nobody 
seems to be sure of what is meant by creativity in the first place. The word is charged 
with theological-Romantic connotations typical of the `corpus' approach to literature. 
The questions around which the deliberations about translation within such a 
conceptual framework are made are rather stereotyped and limited: as the literary 
text, especially a poem is unique, organic whole and original is the translation possible 
at all? Should translation be `literal' or `free'? Should it emphasize the content or the 
form? Can a faithful translation be beautiful? The answers to the question range from 
one extreme to the other and usually end in some sort of a compromise. The great 
writers and translators gave their well-known dictums about translations, which ref-
lected these traditional beliefs about it. For Dante (1265-1321) all poetry is untrans-
latable (cited by Brower 1966: 271) and for Frost (1974-1963) poetry is `that which 
is lost out of both prose and verse in translation '(cited by Webb 203) while Yves 
Bonnefoy says `You can translate by simply declaring one poem the translation of 
another" (1991:186-192). On the other hand theorists like Pound (1929, 1950), 
Fitzgerald (1878) say" ...the live Dog is better than the dead Lion", believe in freedom 
in translation. The others like Nabokov (1955) believe "The clumsiest of literal trans-
lation is a thousand times more useful than prettiest of paraphrase". Walter Benjamin, 
Longfellow (1807-81), Schleriermacher, Martindale (1984), seem to favour much 
more faithful translation or believe in foreignizing the native language. While most 
of the translators like Dryden are on the side of some sort of compromise between the 
two extremes. 
Lefevere has pointed out that most of the writings done on the basis of the concept 
of literature as a corpus attempt to provide translators with certain guidelines, do's and 
don'ts and that these writings are essentially normative even if they don't state their 
norms explicitly. These norms, according to Lefevere, are not far removed from the 
poetics of a specific literary period or even run behind the poetics of the period 
(1988:173). Even the approaches based on the `objective' and `scientific' foundations 
of linguistics are not entirely neutral in their preferences and implicit value judgements. 
Some writings on translation based on this approach are obsessed with the translation 

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process and coming up with some model for description of the process. As Theo 
Hermans (1985:9-10) correctly observes that in spite of some impressive semiotic 
terminology, complex schemes and diagrams illustrating the mental process of de-
coding messages in one medium and encoding them in another, they could hardly 
describe the actual conversion that takes place within the human mind, `that blackest 
of black boxes'. Lefevere notes, the descriptive approach was not very useful when 
it came to decide what good translation is and what is bad. 
Most of recent developments in translation theory look for alternatives to these 
essentializing approaches. Instead of considering literature as an autonomous and 
independent domain, it sees it in much broader social and cultural framework. It sees 
literature as a social institution and related to other social institutions. It examines the 
complex interconnections between poetics, politics, metaphysics, and history. It 
borrows its analytical tools from various social sciences like linguistics, semiotics, 
anthropology, history, economics, and psychoanalysis. It is closely allied to the discip-
line of cultural studies, as discussed by Jenks (1993:187) in using culture as a des-
criptive rather than normative category as well as working within an expanded concept 
of culture, which rejects the `high' versus low stratification. It is keenly interested in 
the historical and political dimension of literature. 
`Paradigm shift' to use Theo Hermans' phrase or the `Cultural turn' in the discip-
line of translation theory has made a significant impact in the way we look at trans-
lation. Translation is as a form of intercultural communication raising the problems 
that are not merely at the verbal level or at the linguistic level. As Talgeri and Verma 
(1988:3) rightly point out, a word is,' essentially a cultural memory in which the his-
torical experience of the society is embedded. H.C.Trivedi (1971: 3) observes that 
while translating from an Indian language into English one is faced with two main 
problems: first one has to deal with concepts which require an understanding of 
Indian culture and secondly, one has to arrive at TL meaning equivalents of references 
to certain objects in SL, which includes features absent from TL culture. The awareness 
that one does not look for merely verbal equivalents but also for cultural equivalents, 
if there are any, goes a long way in helping the translator to decide the strategies he 
or she has to use. Translation then is no longer a problem of merely finding verbal 
equivalents but also of interpreting a text encoded in one semiotic system with the 
help of another. The notion of `intertextuality' as formulated by the semiotician Julia 
Kristeva is extremely significant in this regard. She points out that any signifying 
system or practice already consists of other modes of cultural signification (1988:59-
60). A literary text would implicate not only other verbal texts but also other modes 
of signification like food, fashion, local medicinal systems, metaphysical systems, 
traditional and conventional narratives like myths, literary texts, legends as well as 
literary conventions like genres, literary devices, and other symbolic structures. It 
would be almost tautological to state that the elements of the text, which are specific 
to the culture and the language, would be untranslatable. The whole enterprise of fin-
ding cultural equivalents raises awareness of the difference and similarities between