Culture-Bound Words and the Didactics of Translation
The translation of texts characterized by a large number of culture-bound words is, on the one hand, a good approach to explain to translation students, particularly in the first year of their studies, that translating is a difficult compromise to reformulate a text from the source language/culture into the target language/culture in the best possible way. On the other, students tend to focus too much attention on the difficulty of translating culture-bound words. This paper aims to circumscribe the phrase “culture-bound word” (Realia) highlightening that it serves not only to denominate products created by humans, but everything particular to a region, for example, various aspects of the natural landscape and stresses that sometimes the difficulty to understand culture-bound words is not so much a question of different languages as one of different regional cultures within the same State. The question of the border between “term” as such and “culture-bound word” is treated and the author finds a criterion for the distinction in the theory of the dogmatics of fundamental rights, as applied by Jagodzinsky (1997) in a sociological study on moral values with reference to a clear kernel (Begriffskern) and a less distinct contour (Begriffshof). Furthermore, the paper discusses the classification of the various ways to translate culture bound words in different communicative situations, but, at the same time, on the basis of concrete examples, promote student awareness that “no matter how elegant the different strategies proposed to “solve” the problem of realia, the problem remains without any definitive solution in the end” (Florin 1993).
