Cultural Realia Analysis

Tsvetelina Todorova, faculty number 25720, group 2

Cultural Realia and the Limits of Translatability

As Gideon Toury states, translation inevitably involves at least two languages and two cultural traditions. Essentially, a translator’s role is to transfer the message, meaning and cultural elements along with the cultural context that is embedded in a text from one language to another. With that said, translators often encounter the problem of how to treat the cultural aspects that are implicit in a source text and how to successfully convey them when translating in the target language. Thus, special attention should be paid precisely to those cultural-specific words and expressions which carry a local, vernacular overtone. It is namely the

Vlahov and Florin, for example, categorize them in three large groups: geographical and ethnical realia which include geographic formations, man-made geographical objects, flora and fauna that are special to a certain place and also names of people and nicknames; art and culture which include food and drink, clothing, places of living, furniture, pots, vehicles, names of occupations and tools, music and dance, musical instruments, feasts, games, rituals and their characters); and socio-political realia including administrative territorial units, ranks, offices and representatives. Similar is the categorization suggested by Newmark (1988) who classifies cultural words into five categories: ecology, material culture, social culture, political and administrative organizations and gestures and habits. According to Klaudy (1997), realia has two meanings: they either denote objects, ideas, symbols or habits (some of which are connected with eating and drinking) which are specific to a given language community, or name these material things or concepts. As a whole, it can be induced that though there are different classifications of cultural realia, they are based on the same types of cultural implications found in and typical for a particular culture and basically cover the cultural categories of geography, ethnography, politics and religion which are then further subdivided into different subcategories such

Such is the case with translating fudge in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: in the Bulgarian translation it is rendered as шоколадови бонбони с орехи, as no word for such a dessert exists in Bulgarian. Another instance is the translation of foghorn as корабна сирена в мъгла taken from the same book: “Hagrid … blew his nose with a sound like a foghorn” is translated as “Хагрид ... се изсекна със звук на корабна сирена в мъгла.“ Conveying by description is also evident in the translation of cat-flap, something that is not present in Bulgaria: “He himself fitted a cat-flap in the bedroom door” and its rendition in Bulgarian: “сам изряза в долния край на вратата дупка като за