Cultural transfer in translation: Innovative approaches to preserving intercultural aspects of a text

Abstract

The paper analyses cultural transfer in translation. In exploring innovative approaches to preserving intercultural aspects of a text, we turn to the concept of culture. The concept of cultural stems from the diversity of phenomena and realities that it encompasses and denotes in the speech of native speakers and in the meta-language of researchers of various disciplines who use it. Without granting it the status of a unifying term, the article hypothesizes that culture is a travelling, interdisciplinary concept used in sociology, comparative law, cultural studies, translation studies, pragmatic linguistics, and interlanguage communication as a unit for the cultural transfer of concepts. The paper defines the concept of culturama, drawing on research from other fields, and considers its characteristics as a minimal, autonomous unit responsible for cultural transfer in translation, carrying cultural information and being a "resistance" for intercultural translation, which is not equivalent to interlingual transfer. A minimal unity of meaning, not necessarily reduced to monolingualism, cultural also develops related shades, a number of significant nuances that are still poorly understood. The results of the study show their dependence on the sociocultural context, on a specific situation of communication. We classify cultures into historical, cultural, and literary ones, and divide them into simple and compound ones. In addition, we distinguish between fixed cultures in the lexicon, which refer to an already known situation, such as clichés, proverbs, idioms, and fixed cultures in a literary work, which are sometimes allusively derived from the previous category. Being on the borderline between quotation and allusion, the latter type of cultural signs either avoids identification -implicitly, communication through translation does not take place -or is deliberately distorted by the translator himself in order to achieve the expected evocative effect in translation or is inadequately "preserved".