Translation of Cultures
Cultural translation is a term which must be also studied through cultural anthropology, a field of anthropology focused on cultural issues among humans. This discipline questions translation through cultural differences. Indeed, translation studies are not only based on language issues, but also on cultural contexts between peoples.
An anthropological translator of cultures needs to deal with the issues between the source and the target language, that is to say he must respect at the same time the cultural source of point of view and the target culture. Wilhelm von Humboldt shared this opinion of translation in a letter addressed to A.W.Schlegel, dated July 23, 1796: “All translation seems to me simply an attempt to solve an impossible task. Every translator is doomed to be done in by one of two stumbling blocks: he will either stay too close to the original, at the cost of taste and the language of his nation, or he will adhere too closely to the characteristics peculiar to his nation, at the cost of the original. The medium between the two is not only difficult, but downright impossible”
Read more about this topic: Cultural Translation
Famous quotes containing the words translation of, translation and/or cultures:
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)
“Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.”
—Harry Mathews (b. 1930)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)