Dimensiuni ale limbajului n context carceral

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Secţiunea Teoria şi practica traducerii: Ana-Maria Rusu – premiul I; Edita Cârstea – premiul II;
Veronica Lazăr – premiul III.
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CULTURAL ELEMENTS IN TRANSLATION. THE CASE OF STREET CULTURE
Ana-Maria Rusu
Coordonator ştiinţific: lector univ. dr. Bogdan Aldea
Secţiunea: Teoria şi practica traducerii (premiul I)
Cultural and social issues have always represented a very interesting domain of research for a great
number of professionals and dilettantes. Given the fact that a large part of my academic training revolves
around such concepts as cultural awareness and cultural transfer, I wanted a chance to state a personal opinion
on the matter.
The idea of writing a paper about youth culture and the way it is reflected by the street milieu was born
in Greece, as this wonderful country is a very fertile ground both for the production and for the study of street
culture. Also, the training provided by specialists from the School of English in the Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki guided my steps on a very challenging road: sociolinguistics. Given my previous training in the
Applied Modern Languages section, the only suitable approach of this domain would have been the
translation-oriented one.
Thus, the cultural influence in translation, as manifested in the case of street culture is the object of
this paper. In the beginning this theme appeared as a very difficult one, especially because I was never trained
in sociological matters and it was difficult to understand how the whole social system, with its groups,
cultures and subcultures, worked. But little by little it all became logic and the fact that the street culture is
mostly produced by the young prevailed from all the studies I have read. Consequently, the notion of street
culture and the one of youth culture became inseparable and the need of studying them together appeared.
Culture and translation
The notion of culture became widely used in translation studies. As we all know the first translations
were made in Ancient Rome; it was back then that translators noticed the difficulties in dealing with cultural
elements. Throughout the centuries these issues became more and more obvious, as languages and cultures
grew more diverse. Modern theorists have offered several solutions for this matter. Concepts as translation
equivalence (J.C. Catford), cultural, functional or descriptive equivalence (Peter Newmark) or dynamic
equivalence (Nida) have been used in order to indicate ways of solving the problems raised by the cultural
element in the source text (ST). The example of Nida, who changed the lamb with a baby seal in order to
transmit the message of the Bible to the Eskimo, is one meant to demonstrate how translation has to adapt