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J. IGOR PRIETO ARRANZ: (MIS)INFORMING THE READER: TOURIST TEXT TRANSLATION
(MIS)INFORMING THE READER: WRONG ASSUMPTIONS AND
SOME OTHER ODDITIES IN TOURIST TEXT TRANSLATION 1
603
J. IGOR PRIETO ARRANZ
Universidad de Oviedo
If we take any definition of culture, such as Marrocco-Maffei’s, and basically reduce
it, as she does, to “the community’s non-hereditary memory” (1994: 316) (my translation),
we cannot but infer that language is also part of that concept of culture. In fact, languages
do not exist by themselves but belong to (and constitute) their own cultural systems
(Valero 1995: 557). In many ways, then, the semantics of a given language is deeply imbued
with the way of life, the ethnography of the community that speaks it (Cordonnier 1995:
10). Consequently, native speakers of a given language not only know how to handle a
greater or lesser number of (purely linguistic) rules – their competence in Chomskyan
terms- but also have an associated cultural baggage they are endowed with (Sixel 1994: 348),
although they are largely unconscious of it.
Needless to say, this is something that is widely acknowledged nowadays (Santoyo
1994: 9; Rialland-Addach 1995: 91; Carrera 1996: 225; Escobedo 1996: 405; Ramiro et al.
1996: 102), to the extent that some authors even talk about a linguistic-cultural continuum
(Meschonnic 1995: 515) which finds perfect reflection in the now quite widely-used
concept of language-culture (Galisson 1990; Rialland-Addach 1995).
It is not my aim in this paper to go into the intricacies of such a relationship.
Suffice it to say that I shall disregard the well-known Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, according to
which each language organises reality in a different way so that distinctions made in a
language may not be appreciated by the speakers of another (Mott 1993: 30-32). Thus, I
would much rather agree with those who believe reality to be very much the same for all of
us and languages to shape somewhat differently the experience the human being has of the
world (not reality itself). In other words, all of us share the same experience of the world –
after all, we all have the same senses – although that experience is shaped differently
depending on the language we are speakers of (Seleskovitch 1973). This latter view explains
how non-lexicalised distinctions in a language can however be appreciated by its speakers
when taught to do so (Thiéry 1976: 61; Martinet 1993: 243-245; Kellerman 1995: 139;
Cronin 2000: 145-146) and, most importantly, allows for the possibility of translation
between languages and cultures, something the former view seems to object to.
It follows from the above that translation cannot but be regarded as an intercultural
activity (Schweda Nicholson 1995: 44; St.-Pierre 1997: 423; Gémar 1996: 499; Da Silva
1996: 228; Biojout & Chiappa 1996: 499; Mott 1993: 20; Rocha Barco 1994: 402; Polezzi
1994: 73), which both provides an accurate idea of its complexity and somehow limits its
aims, forcing translation theorists to abandon the concept of identity and espouse the less
radical (although equally controversial) notion of equivalence, which implicitly means that
not even two terms in two different languages are absolutely equivalent, equivalence being
1 Al término de esta ponencia y una vez abierto el turno de preguntas y debate, se produjo una intervención desde
el público en la que se vertieron acusaciones acerca de la originalidad de los contenidos expuestos por el ponente. El
resultado final de la polémica fue la redacción del documento adjunto (en anexo) con la petición expresa de que se
incluyera como anexo al texto de la comunicación de Don J. Igor Prieto Arranz.