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JoLIE 4/2011

TRANSLATION OF CULTURAL TERMS: POSSIBLE OR

IMPOSSIBLE?

Ioana Irina DurdureanuAlexandru Ioan CuzaUniversity of Iai, Romania

Abstract

This paper aims at answering the very question of the possibility or impossibility of the

translation of culture, by presenting some of the most popular theories related to the

culture-bound terms and their equivalents. Translation and culture are so interrelated thattranslators can no longer ignore cultural elements in a text. That is why, before analysingsome translation theories related to cultural studies, it is very important to establish what

culture is and what the problems raised by its passage into a different community are. Everylanguage has its own way to perceive reality, which influences the way in which reality is

expressed by the members of a community. When translating, people find out things about

others, about a world which is not theirs. If translation did not exist, it would be difficult tocommunicate with people from other countries, by communication meaning not only the

transmission of words and phrases but also the sense of a text, because what translators

should translate is messages, senses, and texts. Different translation scholars offer various

ways in which translation problems could be solved so that the receiving audience mayperceive the culture and the otherness of another world. Finally, to a certain degree and

losing a part of the otherness of the source culture, culture can be translated by using sometranslation methods like the so-called equivalence, according to the functionalist theories.

Keywords: Informational transfer; Translation of culture; Cultural turn; Culture-boundterms; Equivalence; World knowledge.

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