Cultural Difficulties In Translation Essay

The Cultural and Language Difficulties in Translation Translation of any text is always a difficult endeavour because it automatically involves two entities – two languages, cultures, ideas, etc. – and the translator’s job is to figure out how to make them correspond and cooperate. There are some types of texts, however, that make that problem even greater and these include some of the texts we have looked at in class. Pictures, graphic novels, poems, and personal narratives present an extraordinary challenge to the translator because of many implicit cultural and language differences that are very demanding to translate. The personal stories we looked at present quite a hurdle for a translator mainly because they are very culture specific.

Since pictures are extremely culturally coloured, these may in fact be the most arduous forms of media to translate. This is an area of translation where the translator has really no standard to fall back on and s/he need to decide how to solve the situation himself/herself. The question arises, again, whether adding some sort of notes to the picture ruins or enhances the experience of the viewer, and the opinions seem to be divided on that matter. If the picture would be completely alien to the target readers, however, some sort of added description by the translator is extremely helpful. Graphic novels are even more challenging in this respect because the entire plot of the novel mainly depends on the pictures. So if the target audience is not familiar with the cultural and historical background of the novel, this would be very burdensome to rectify by the translator. The novel Cuba: My Revolution by Inverna Lockpez, for example, would be quite problematic to translate into Slovene since the knowledge of an average Slovene on that period in time is probably very different from that of an average American due to which aspects a culture deems more important than