Cultural Sensitivity in Translation: A Double-Edged Sword
The various cultural aspects of nations worldwide shape the languages that humans use, rendering the relationship between language and culture similar to a mirror, whereby both have reflections on one another.
This often creates a gap in every language for a particular set of concepts or elements, posing a challenge to the job of a translator when translating a text containing culture-specific elements.
A question is then raised with every translation problem on how to address such a gap and which decision is best to be taken.
Language and Nature
Nature, including geography, wildlife, and climate, constitute a major part of a nation’s culture. These aspects are reflected on the lexical focus of a language, making each language rich in a unique aspect that closely relates to its nature.
For example, while Arabic has several names and descriptions for horses and lions, which symbolize chivalry, nobility and pride in the Arabian culture, we find that English and other western languages lack such a lexical variety.
Meanwhile, the Eskimo languages (i.e., Inuit and Yupik) spoken by the indigenous peoples of the Arctic are believed to have more than 50 words to describe snow and ice[1], two concepts that are limited in the desert-oriented landscape of the Arab world.
Not only does geography affect the language in terms of the words it has, but also in terms of the symbols denoted to its elements. Speaking of the wildlife, the owl, for instance, is a bird that symbolizes wisdom, fortune, and good luck in the Western culture, which is the exact opposite of its representation in the Arabian culture, where it is a bird of ill omen and an embodiment of evil spirits or anticipated death.
Culture and Literature
In the opening line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate”, Shakespeare wonders if it is fair to resemble his beloved one to a summer day, and the answer turns out to be that she is more lovely and pleasing. For a person living in England, where winter is often harsh and gloomy while summer is stunning and awaited, this metaphorical image is complimentary indeed.
On the other hand, the Arab region and its desert-oriented geography and weather have a different view of a summer day, which evokes in the mind the blazing sun, burning sand, and even barren lands! The translation of Sonnet 18 into Arabic is, therefore, not an easy mission. Yet, the poem was beautifully rendered in several attempts, each tried to capture the beauty of a summer day in the Arabian culture, such as this translation that reads:
"ألا تشبهين صفاء المصيف؟ بل أنتِ أحلى وأصفى سماء"
Back translated into English, this line is dubbed: “Aren’t you similar to the clear sky of a summer day? You are even loveliest and finest.” Depicting a beautiful feature of a summer day in the Arabian culture, we see how Dr. Mohamed Anani, the translator of this poem who is also nicknamed "The Dean of Translators", is creating a smart and impressive blend between language and culture, giving a re-birth to Shakespeare’s masterpiece to the Arabic audience.
Jokes: A Challenging Cultural Product
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, was well-known for inaugurating his speeches with relevant anecdotes or jokes. Nonetheless, when delivering his speeches to a non-English speaking audience, he is often met with complete silence contrary to the laughs he usually gets.
It was that one time, however, when the Japanese audience surprisingly burst out laughing after a funny story he told in the opening of a Japanese college. Feeling surprised and pleased at the same time, Carter kept asking the Japanese interpreter how he managed to translate the funny story. Trying to be evasive at first, the interpreter eventually admitted to the President that he just said: “President Carter told a funny story. Everyone must laugh.[2]”
These are a few of many examples that underline how cultural differences pose serious difficulties to the translator as opposed to the structural variations within languages. Eugene Nida, a well-known translation theorist, further suggests that words derive their actual meaning from their cultural setting, making culture a vital factor that contributes to a word’s both connotative and denotative senses.
Cultural Communication: Theory & Practice
For Peter Newmark, translation theories are an attempt to identify and solve the problems that exist in a certain context, suggesting that a cultural focus creates a translation problem due to a cultural “gap” or “distance” between the source and target languages.
Similarly, Lotman’s theory states that "no language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture, and no culture can exist which does not have at its centre the structure of natural language.[3]"
In her book “In Other Words”, Mona Baker believes several linguistic problems in translation can be titled as “non-equivalence terms”, and the selection of the used strategy depends on the context and purpose of the text.
These terms of non-equivalence include culture-specific elements, which are either abstract or concrete concepts and often relate to a certain food, social custom, or religious belief. Baker adds two further translation problems, which are the use of loan words in the source text, in addition to the lack of a specific term (hyponym) in the target language that can be an equivalent of a term used in the source text. Such terms usually denote specific concepts in the source language environment.
There is also the case when a concept in the source language is not lexicalized in the target language, whereby the idea is existent but with no specific terms.
An example of that can be depicted in “Moby-Dick” or “The Whale”, an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville, who details the voyage of the Pequod, a whaling vessel whose captain is determined on finding the white sperm whale.
While Arabic lexical richness is mainly desert-oriented rather than marine-oriented, the translator of Moby Dick Ihsan Abbas had to be innovative to render the spirit of the novel to the fullest.
In the preface that explains the etymology of whales, Melville kept on using “whaleman” and “whaling”. To accommodate the target language to the source text, Abbas derived Arabic specialized equivalents for both terms, which are “حوّات” and “تحويت” respectively instead of “صائد الحيتان” and “صيد الحيتان”.
One might wonder why the direct translation is not sufficient, that is, “whale hunter” and “whale hunting”. However, in Melville's whale-centred novel, whaling, and subsequently the job of a whaleman, do not only refer to the killing and hunting process, but also “the occupation of catching and extracting commercial products from whales” as defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Abbas’s coinage of these two words from the Arabic root “حوت” to include further senses to the practice other than merely hunting was exceptional indeed.
These kinds of translation problems can be rendered through a number of strategies as Baker suggested in her book. One is the translation by cultural substitution, in which the translator uses a term that has a different proposition but a similar impact. Critics, however, argued against such a deviation from the source text.
Other strategies include using a loan word with an explanation; the translation by paraphrasing using related words; and finally, omission, which may seem extreme, but it is a possible strategy if the overall meaning would not be affected although a translation loss would be inevitable.
Translation Today…
After all, one can only be certain that language and culture have been closely intertwined since the beginning of civilizations, making their concurrence essential for proper communication.
In today’s translation industry, the translation process is not only vital in literature and politics, but it is also becoming increasingly crucial for businesses, economies, and trade.
For linguists and professionals in translation service companies, this means that being bilingual and bicultural is the key to seamless and native-like communication, while the lack of cultural awareness could induce miscommunication, financial losses, and even conflict!
Cultural Miscommunication and Conflict
The famous incident we can recall here is the mistranslation of the statement made by Japan’s Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki in response to the declaration of surrender terms sent by the US counterpart. His reply in Japanese that read “Mokusatsu” was translated into “let’s ignore it” and “it’s not worthy of comment”, while in its cultural context it means “no comment for now”[4]. This mistake was believed to have been the spark fueling the US rage and prompting the atomic bombing of Japanese cities in 1945.
Many may also recall the cold war that took place between the US and USSR in 1956 that was accompanied by severe tension in relations, not to mention that some people anticipated that it could be the beginning of War World III. But who knew that the reason behind this tension was the interpreter?
It all happened when Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev used the Russian phrase “my vas pokhoronim” in a speech he delivered while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow, and Khrushchev's personal interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev translated this phrase into English as: “We will bury you”.
Khrushchev is known for his preference to use jokes, proverbs, and metaphors in communicating his messages when giving speeches, a challenge that his personal interpreter constantly faced[5]. Amid the speculations of what this phrase actually meant, we find that its literal meaning - if the expression “my vas pokhoronim” is pasted into Google translate - would mean “we bury you”, a quite less intense version of the interpreter’s suggestion “we will bury you” but the same after all.
In all cases, it is agreed that the mistranslation lies in translating the expression too literally. Linguists suggest that “my vas pokhoronim” can be interpreted in several ways such as: “we will live to see you buried”, “we shall be present at your funeral”, “we shall outlive you” and “we shall outlast you”, all of which are less of an open threat like “we will bury you” although still considered a provocative statement.
Others have also suggested that it could mean: "Our communist system will bury your capitalist system", noting that this phrase is used in the writings of the philosopher Karl Marx, who used this expression to stress the inevitable existence of communism, while indicating that capitalism is doomed to fail, and workers are the ones to bury capitalism.
Even in this context, the expression remains unfriendly, but the implications would be less intense compared to the direct threat “We will bury you,” which caused the intense political tension between the two countries back then.
Point is…
Without cultural awareness, grave linguistic errors may keep occurring, placing the onus on professional translation companies to possess the utmost cultural awareness in order to avoid risky implications.
1 Source: The Canadian Encyclopedia; accessed from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuktitut-words-for-snow-and-ice
2 Source: Article titled “The Time A Japanese Interpreter Made Everyone Burst Into Laughter By Translating Jimmy Carter” accessed from https://theuijunkie.com/jimmy-carter-joke/
3 Source: Article titled “Cultural Implications for translation” accessed from http://www3.uji.es/~aferna/H44/Cultural-implications.htm
4 Source: Article titled “The Worst Translation Mistake in History” accessed from https://pangeanic.hk/knowledge_centre/the-worst-translation-mistake-in-history/#
5 Source: Article titled “How A Mistranslation Almost Started WW3” accessed from https://medium.com/exploring-history/we-will-bury-you-how-a-mistranslation-almost-started-ww3-4a285162e2b9
