Teaching Cultural Translation: A Functional Approach Based on the Interpretive Theory of Translation

Abstract

Cultural transfer appears to be one of the main problems often referred to in translation studies in Thailand. These discussions usually combine language differences with cultural disparity. The former implies diverging linguistic expressions, and the latter an absence of cultural referents or referents with different connotations in the receptive culture. In order to solve problems originating from cultural discrepancies, translation theorists encourage information addition rather than functional adaptation, which they consider as an unfaithful translation. This article puts an emphasis on the functional analysis of culture-bound elements as well as on the analysis of the translation users. This procedure should help translation students make an appropriate choice of rendition, which restores the function of the given cultural referent. In so doing, they will have taken into account the users’ needs and expectations while conforming to the Interpretive Theory of Translation’s rules of fidelity: i.e., being faithful to the author’s intended meaning and to the translation users by means of functional equivalence between the original and the translated texts.