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Cultural Approaches to Translation

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 k Carol A. Chapelle wbeal0293.pub2.tex V1 - 05/25/2019 9:48 P.M. Page 1

Cultural Approaches to Translation

DAVID KATAN

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 Trobriand 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” (Malinowski, 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).
Take, for example, the following passage from novelist Jane Austen. At a certain point,
Emma finds “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).
k k
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 (2012, p. 341) suggests the same approach for translation,
defining “thick translation” as “translation that seeks with its annotations and its accompa-
nying 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. For example, the Victorian translation of Middle Eastern folk tales,
The Thousand and One Nights, became well known for its explanatory notes on the man-
ners 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
is also off-putting for the reader. Certainly this approach fosters a disassociated cognition
of “the other” rather than an associated, or experiential response. So, traditionally, this has
been the approach to scholarly works only.

Translating for Cultures

The first translator to offer detailed considerations about the context and to offer a more
experiential 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

The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Edited by Carol A. Chapelle.

© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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2 CULTURAL APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION

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” (Nida, 1964, p. 159).
During the 1980s, a new loosely defined school of thought began to appear in transla-
tion studies, subsequently labeled as the “cultural turn” (Snell-Hornby, 2006, p. 56). The
emphasis for translators was now widened to include the context: “In the same way that the
surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator
treats the text in isolation from the culture at his or her peril” (Bassnett, 2014, p. 25).
Two main schools of thought arose, the linguistic, which argued for the transformation
not only of the linguistic signs but also of the cultural, so as reduce perceived difference,
thus encouraging the reader to experience the affect; while the cultural studies approach,
engendered from the field of comparative literatures, argued to highlight difference to allow
the reader to experience the differences themselves, and hence (at least in theory) the original
author’s intent.

Reducing Difference
Nida’s approach was to translate through dynamic (or functional) equivalence: “reproducing
in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first
in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style” (Nida & Taber, 1969, p. 12). The target
text words would then trigger the same associations and emotional affect 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.”
This cultural approach comes into operation when it is likely that the reader will begin to
k experience a “culture bump” (Leppihalme, 1997, p. 4): “where a reader of a TT [target trans- k
lation] has a problem in understanding a source-cultural allusion.” Today, audiovisual (AV)
translation scholars are particularly aware of questions of linguistic and cultural represen-
tation (e.g., Ranzato & Zanotti, 2018). The area of translator intervention revolves around
omitting, glossing, or substituting cultural references such as “institutions” and “pastimes”
through to “celebrities and personalities.” The approach is predominantly 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. Though
the approach is predominantly focused on reducing difference, “retention” (or “borrowing”)
of original terms is also foreseen.
Translating beyond the level of cultural specific terms tends to focus on the culture-bound
characteristics of the genre, and compares features such as collocation and transitivity
through the analysis of comparable corpora designed to highlight cultural patterning.
For example, Tognini Bonelli and Manca (2004) discovered that the standard collocate
in UK accommodation brochures, “Children and dogs welcome” does not exist in a
comparable corpus of Italian brochures. Indeed, children are not even mentioned, due to
the inconceivability of classifying them as anything but “family.”
The study of comparable corpora has led to a growth in studies on the subject known vari-
ously as intercultural rhetoric (Connor, 2011), or as cultural conceptualizations, which Sharifian
(2017) subsumes under the term cultural linguistics. These studies tend to focus on models
of appropriate writing style across languages and, in some cases, the culture-bound moti-
vations fostering such styles. Indeed models of cultural communication norms provided
by interculturalists such as E. T. Hall and Hofstede are often employed as templates for
translation (e.g., Katan, 2014).
The preferred cultural approach here is that of modulation, where the receiving culture’s
preferred generic style or register is adopted, so Chinese or Italian directness would be trans-
lated following the Anglo preference for indirectness to retain equivalent levels of perceived

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CULTURAL APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION 3

politeness. Point of view is changed (or rather filtered); the translated text is read as if the
original writer were a member of the target linguaculture.
The cultural filter became a popular analogy. Like a pair of sunglasses, the reader’s filter
deletes and otherwise distorts the way in which the text is read. The filter also accounts for
the general (or “to be expected”) differences in meaning across languages. For some, the
filter should be manipulated actively by translators to redress the balance for nonfictional
texts only (e.g., Bührig, House, & Ten Thije, 2009). For others, cultural and other perception
filters are an integral part of interpretation of any text, and any cultural approach starts with
an understanding of universal filtering (Katan, 2009).
Deconstructionism and “the death of the author” have been extremely influential in mov-
ing the emphasis away from text-based equivalence toward the skopos: “the function that
the target text is intended to fulfill” in a particular context (Vermeer in Nord, 2005, p. 27).
Reducing difference, no longer linked to equivalence with the original text, is here related to
target text coherence within a (model) reader’s particular context of culture. This approach
has also been termed cultural transediting (Stetting, 1989). However, one of the criticisms of
this approach is the assumption that the reader, her culture and context of culture are essen-
tialist, static, and structured entities; and “culture” itself only changes according to national
boundaries (Baker, 2009, p. 222). Indeed, essentialist framing can easily lead to mindlessly
stereotyping (Katan, 2019).
One cultural approach focusing specifically on the cultural filter is transcreation (see Katan,
2016) as it is based on exploiting the familiar in the reader’s world to best enter and experi-
ence the strange in the new text world. It differs from pure domestication through the focus
on experiencing the foreign. A well-known example comes from De Campos (in Viera, 1994,
k p. 70), who translated Goethe’s Faust for the Brazilian readership as Deus e o Diabo no Fausto k
de Goethe (God and the Devil in Goethe’s Faust) using a Brazilian cultural allusion, the pop-
ular 1964 Brazilian film Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (God and the Devil in the Land of the
Sun). The approach here is on the creare aspect of translation, and may involve significant
addition either to the text or to the screen (Katan, 2018). As such it resembles the thick trans-
lation anthropological approach. The difference, however, is that the reader is encouraged
to experience the addition as part of the text, that is, a stealth translation (Grunebaum, 2013,
pp. 158–61), rather than as a didactic footnote.
An approach designed not just to reduce but to eliminate any trace of source text cul-
ture came originally from the software industry, which needed to localize (US-based) prod-
ucts around the globe. The task required making modifications 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 electrical plug itself. Also, colors and graphics
will often be modified to meet local cultural norms. Ideally, to improve efficiency, products
and documentation will be market-ready, already internationalized (i.e., free of a US con-
text of culture) and hence ready to be localized into all languages through more automated
translation.
The translation of comic literature has also been considered a form of localization (Zanet-
tin, 2014), where not only is the dialogue adapted according to the sensitivities of the receiv-
ing 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 sur-
name Paparino (Duckling), and is more respectful to his elders; while in Arabic he never
kisses. However, comic writing has yet to be internationalized.

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4 CULTURAL APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION

Though comic and other writing often takes on a new local voice, many translation
scholars have noticed that much of the domestication is actually producing a more stan-
dardized 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. So, for reasons of efficiency—or hegemony according
to postmodernist thinking (Robinson, 2014)—the translation industry is being streamlined
into a universal way of thinking and practicing, as envisaged through one local (US) set
of appropriate translation strategies and writing styles. In its favor, through automation,
it allows for a startling number of close-to-instant multilanguage versions of manuals,
software, games, and even breaking news.
This the concept of a global norm and a lingua franca (English) regarding academic and
scientific production fosters the global dissemination of ideas, and helps those from minority
languages earn international recognition. Also, oppressed groups such as the Dalits (tradi-
tionally regarded as an Untouchable caste in India) have found themselves a new voice and
an appreciative audience through translation into English, bypassing local caste opposition
and able to make an international case for justice at home (Kothari, 2007).
On the other hand, these voices find 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, 2012, p. 334). 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 film.
Hence, in this more global view of culture, difference is indiscriminately reduced. The
other, through economies of scale, is classified rationally, simplified, and stereotyped, reduc-
k ing any in-depth understanding. In the academic and scientific world of discourse epis- k
temicide (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 difficulty in
being heard as different. Lefevere (1992) introduced the term patronage to describe the eco-
nomic and political power issues involved in gatekeeping the translation of literature. As a
result, US film, TV, and fiction are routinely translated, while all other nationalities’ 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
equates with ideology and 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 filters 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 efface minority voices. This Venuti (2008) terms resistance translation. The translation is
designed to upset the receiving culture’s point of view, and attempts to move the reader
to the writer by preserving some of “Discontinuities at the level of syntax, diction, or
discourse [which also] allow the translation to be read as a translation” (2008, p. 21). The

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CULTURAL APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION 5

approach certainly leads to a less accessible text, though Venuti is careful to point out
that fluency is not abandoned, but “reinvented” (p. 19). Clearly, though, this approach is
most appropriate for those who are already conversant with aspects of the other language
and cultural practices, and are ready to interpret their own culture bumps for what they
are—rather than as part of the original author’s intent.
Activist translators may also intervene 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. This approach is most often discussed with respect to news
reporting, and to interpreters in conflict zones (Baker, 2009).
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 fit what they believe to be superior Anglo style. The Victorian
poet-translator Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 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” (cited in Lefevere, 1992, p. 4). His adaptation of the Persian quatrain into an
original English language work of his own can now be found under his own name 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 first time it had
been given to an Indian. Sengupta (1990, p. 58) suggests that this was due to Tagore’s ability
k to efface his poems in translation and create “the stereotypical role that was familiar to the k
coloniser, a voice that not only spoke of the peace and tranquillity of a distant world, but 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 fit 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, 2014, pp. 120–39).
Postcolonial postmodernist theorists now use the term cultural translation to talk about
individuals who have crossed these artificial cultural borders into a third space. Those who
have done so are themselves, like British–Indian writer Salman Rushdie, “translated men”
(Rushdie, 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 (2014), when these transcultural voices
are to be translated into other languages. He outlines three approaches: literalism; mestiza
(or métissages), the mixing of multiple races and ethnic language; and, finally, deliberate
mistranslations from the dominant language, which may be likened to Venuti’s resistance.
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 interfer-
ence, 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.”

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6 CULTURAL APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION

Translating Between Cultures

The final 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
journal), though not always properly understood. For many translation scholars, intercul-
tural communication is understood as equaling 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’ own view. First, “an intercultural sit-
uation is one in which the cultural distance between the participants is significant enough to
have an effect on interaction/communication that is noticeable to at least one of the parties”
(Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009, p. 3), which suggests that the relationship between original
and receiving texts (and their contexts) are strictly related. Second, meaning is not innate in
the text, but is constructed through filters 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 (model) reader tolerance of cultural distance.
The translator, here, first gauges the relative distances (in terms of cognitive environ-
ment, appropriacy, norms, values, and beliefs) between the source and target contexts of cul-
ture; and, second, as privileged reader, negotiates levels of tolerance for difference accord-
ing to original and new intentions. This requires bicultural competence and the ability to
(dis)associate and take a third perceptual position (Katan, 2009, 2019). Of course, it is also
true, as Baker (2009) notes, that the translator also filters meaning according to her own, at
times conflicting, professional or committed role.
Importantly too, the concept of ideal or model reader (Eco, 1984) is essential here, for it is
k necessary to build a plausible model of both original and target reader reaction. Clearly, this k
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. What Katan (2019) suggests is a form of mindful or strategic essentialism,
where the translator is acutely aware of the imagined readers. They will nevertheless be real,
and different, enough to take the translator out of her own limited world, to begin to inves-
tigate “What is it that’s going on” between the two cultural worlds. Hence the translation
can 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.

wbeal0061.pub2 SEE ALSO: Audiovisual Translation; Cognitive Approaches to Translation; Cross-Cultural

wbeal0145.pub2
wbeal0289.pub2 Pragmatics; Frame Analysis; Functional Approaches to Translation; History of Translation;
wbeal0437.pub2 Intercultural Interaction; Language, Culture, and Context; Linguaculture; Linguistic Impe-
wbeal0442.pub2
wbeal0512.pub2
rialism; Translation Theory
wbeal1446.pub2
wbeal0661.pub2
wbeal0709.pub2
wbeal0718.pub2
wbeal1224
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Suggested Readings
Asad, T. (1986). The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology. In J. Clifford &
G.E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 141–64). Berke-
ley: University of California Press
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Abstract: There are numerous cultural approaches to translation, given the numerous
definitions of both “culture” and “translation.” We might say that both culture and transla-
tion revolve around difference. We notice culture as difference, and we require translation
when difference significantly affects communication. The approaches may then be divided
according to how difference between self and other should be managed in translation. In
the first case, “translating from cultures,” differences should be explained. In the second,
“translating for cultures,” as Schleiermacher famously wrote, “either the translator disturbs
the writer as little as possible and moves the reader in his direction, or disturbs the reader
as little as possible and moves the writer in his direction.” So, differences should either
be reduced (domestication) or highlighted (foreignization). The final approach, “translat-
ing between cultures,” gauges the likely tolerance for difference and attempts to mediate or
reconcile differences, creating an interspace.
k In all cases, it is understood that texts are seen to relate to larger contexts, or frames of k
interpretation, and that translation involves a form of intervention which goes beyond lan-
guage transfer. An overarching approach, then, to “culture,” suggests that the translator be
“mindful”: to context and perspective and be sensitive to the ways the situation changes.

Keywords: Culture; Intercultural Communication; Linguistic Anthropology; Translation

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