Cultural Reference and Translation

As discussed in the 3.3 section, conventional elements or cultural facts are an important part of representation as it can be seen as a bridge that connects audience to a literary work. The understanding of the existing conventional elements at a given time creates a shared space for all members within a group or a society. Toury opines that:

As is well known, every culture community tends to codify phenomena of various types which have semiotic value for its members, linguistic and non- linguistic alike. Every set of codified items forms a repertoire, ie., an aggregate governed by systemic relations which govern the availability of certain items and the unavailability of others for certain uses within that culture (1991: 187).

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Repertoire, as Toury calls it, or shared awareness of cultural references, constructs understanding and intimacy between members of a society. Hebdige (1979) and Cain (2001) also see this shared space as markers of identity, through which much can be told about the lifestyle or age group of an individual. It is obvious that Chick Lit as a product of popular culture (see section 2.2) makes extreme use of various repertoires to portray its characters and to communicate with its readers. However, despite the fact that popular culture has become a global phenomenon, translating cultural references stills appears to be problematic, due to what Pym (2010) calls the movement of a text. When an Irish- based work of Chick Lit is translated into Vietnamese, it moves away from its source context and becomes subjected to “a change of values”, because Vietnamese readers understand the text based on their awareness of what already exists in their culture. This is similar to what Hoffman describes in her book Lost in Translation about watching football in a foreign country, where “you can only keep your eye on the ball, it seems, if you have a rough prior idea of its trajectory.” (Hoffman,1991: 135). Having a basic understanding of football from previous experience, the viewer still does not understand the significance of the match or have a connection to the game as much as the local supporters. The understanding of elements of popular culture existing in translated Chick Lit is similar to the football game in Hoffman’s metaphor. Take the following extract for example:

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That Christmas, Holly had spent a disgraceful amount of money in Brown Thomas on the most beautiful white dress she had ever seen (Ahern, 2007: 12).

An average Vietnamese reader, as observed in chapter two, may understand the act of shopping for a beautiful dress but will most probably not fully understand the information about the background and social status of a shopper who can afford the luxuries on offer in the upmarket department store of Brown Thomas in Dublin. This is a simple example to illustrate the idea that the cultural connotations in any text are often the ones that cause most problems for the translators. The translator should take into consideration what is called "cultural patterns of behaviour and presuppositions" (Nida & Reyburn, 1981: 62). It can be understood that a certain term of a specific culture may signify different implications or nuances. Such idea is pivotal when taking the representation of women into account because all the cultural references related to a female character may reveal different information about her in the original context. These elements, however, may not have the similar meaning when they are translated into the target language. The challenges that the translation of culture-specific terms pose are increased when the cultures to be analysed are deeply unrelated as in the case of my research. However, it could be argued that in the time of Internet and globalization, such difficulties can be overcome if the translator conducts a research through available sources on the Internet, or possesses a wide knowledge of both of his/her own culture and of the culture of the original texts.

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Several studies have been conducted to find out the best possible solutions for translating cultural reference among which the following options were suggested by Newmark (1988):

Transference: According to Newmark (1988:81), transference (emprunt, loan word, transcription) is the process of transferring a SL word to a TL text as a translation procedure.

When a translator decides to apply this method, he/she must be completely sure that the readership will be able to fully understand the meaning and implications of the SL term. In fact this can only be possible with terms that have already been internationally recognised. It would problematic for a translator who considers using transference to translate objects or concepts related to small groups or cultures. For example, any TL readership will definitely understand cultural terms such as “pizza”or “Christmas” but when cultural references originated from the smaller culture, it will be more difficult for a TL readership to fully understand such reference in the context of SL culture. For instance, in my research, despite the fact that Ireland is a well-known country in Europe and America, the Irish Embassy in Vietnam was opened only 10 years ago in 2005 and for a long time until 2005, most Irish writers were identified as British. Therefore it is unavoidable that a Vietnamese audience may have problem understandings the Irish cultural references if they were translated by transference. For this reason,

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an alternative method of translating cultural references should be employed. Newmark (1988) names this method as literal translation.

Literal translation the translation of one term in the SL by one term in the TL. For example, the German word “biergarten” can be translated into English as “beer garden”

In the majority of cases, if a literal translation is to be implemented and if a communicative translation is to be attempted and achieved, the translator should combine the literal version with some kind of explanation in order to give the TL readership a full account of the implications and nuances of the SL terminological item. The use of explanation in literal translation is close to the methods called a descriptive equivalent or of a translation couplet.

Descriptive equivalent the explanation of an SL culture-specific term This method is used when the translator, being aware of the difficulty in comprehending the existing references adds a short complementary explanation in the translation. For example, the Irish Leaving Certificate Examination can be translated into Vietnamese as kì thi tốt nghiệp phổ thông của học sinh Ireland và kết quả này còn dùng để xét tuyển đại học (the examination to graduate from school in Ireland and the result of this is used for admission to universities).

Translation couplet a procedure which combines two, or three of the above mentioned

Translation couplet is usually composed of transference along with a descriptive equivalent together. For instance, le baccalaureat can be translated as the

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’baccalaureate’, the French secondary school leaving examination. When applying this method, the reader will not only know what the item involved means (conveyed by the descriptive equivalent), but would also know the original SL name so he/she can identify it (conveyed through the transference procedure). This can be an appropriate method when the cultural reference in question is a key one which the reader might want or need to know.

Some other methods of translating cultural references introduced by Newmark (1988) include:

Cultural equivalent is the substitution of a SL cultural term by a TL cultural term.

Cultural equivalent is useful when the text does not present a high level of technical terminology. This method possesses a high functional value, since it provides the readership with the closest counterpart in the TL. For example, the French word for high school diploma “baccalaureate” can be translated into English as “A level” due to the equal value of these two words in two different educational systems. However, this procedure lacks precision and accuracy, since some of the implications or nuances of the SL term are inevitably lost. Nevertheless, it can be most recommended in texts where the loss of information is acceptable since a communicative translation plays a primary role and where a general, heterogeneous readership is addressed. As can be seen, when choosing cultural equivalent as a method of translating, a translator focuses on creating “functional equivalent” (Newmark, 1988:83) of cultural specific terms. In case

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when there is no culturally equivalent word, a translator can use a method which Newmark (1988:83) calls functional equivalent.

Functional equivalent is the use of a culturally neutral TL term to define the culture-specific term.

This method can be useful in cases where there are limitations and restrictions in correspondence between the SLT and the TLT. For example, Taoiseach can be translated as the Prime Minister of Ireland. This method can also be used when loss of some information can be justified by either the function or the type of the text. The context of translation plays a significant role when it comes to decide if this method is suitable. When these cultural terms are more common, a translator can employ the method of through translation.

Through translation the literal translation of common collocations and names of organisations (Newmark, 1988: 84)

Normally, through-translations should be used only when they are already recognised terms as in an example some international organization as UNESCO, NATO or words such as superman or birthday child. Through translations have an aspect in common with transferences in the sense that their use is limited unless the TL readership has access to the understanding of the SL terms. Lomholt (1991:30) states this procedure as "using an established translation" but also states that "this option is best avoided when translating between cultures, as both the connotations and the denotations of such translations may be wrong."

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As can be seen, while the differences between various methods of translating cultural references is clear, there is an overlap in the definition of through and literal translation since they both mean translating a SL cultural references by terms of TL. Therefore this research will treat these two methods as one under the name literal translation. In addition, as it has already been mentioned from the first chapter onwards, the focus of this research is on the representation of women in Vietnamese translation; therefore, an in-depth analysis of all cultural references appearing in the original texts is beyond the scope of this research. The following analysis of the translation of cultural references will be applied only to those in which cultural references play a crucial role in defining the identity of a female character or in representing a certain feature of these progotanists. Furthermore, cultural references can appear in various forms, from a proper name to certain idioms and expressions, from slang to various styles of swearing, which have specific cultural meaning, therefore this analysis will not divide these cultural references into distinct categories, instead they will be classified according to methods of renderings that have been mentioned in this section.

In brief, cultural references in contemporary female fiction are very important to the representation of its characters because these can give readers a greater understanding of the identity and background of a character. Therefore, further investigation of how cultural references are translated will be conducted and

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analysed in the analysis chapter. Another factor of representation that also carries some cultural elements is paratextuality. The next section will investigate this concept in details.