The Issue Of Directionality When Addressing Culture-specific References In Translation For Dubbing

1. Abstract

Whereas it is true that inverse translation is viewed as a sort of violation of the deontological codes of translation and, if admitted, it is confined to technical and other very specialized fields for they are considered more literal, practice tells us that all sorts of texts are susceptible to be translated into a language other than the translator’s mother tongue.

In fact, there are some specific cases in which reverse translation might be taken out of its cage in pursuit of a truly transcultural loyalty towards the original texts. A clear example of this is the culture-specific references in dubbing translation, which has evolved from an excessive naturalization of the cultural markers to an advocacy of otherness.

2. Theoretical framework

Our paper has two starting points: the widespread belief that translation can only be accomplished properly into the translator’s mother tongue, and the concept of culture-specific references.

Reverse translation, ill translation

The advocate par excellence against reverse translation  that is to say, translating from the mother tongue into the second language  is Peter Newmark (1981, p. 73), who asserts that:

A foreigner appears to go on making collocational mistakes however long he lives in his adopted country, possibly because he has never distinguished between grammar and lexicology. [A non-native translator] will be ‘caught’ every time, not by his grammar, which is probably suspiciously ‘better’ than an educated native’s, not by his vocabulary, which may well be wider, but by his unacceptable or improbable collocations.

David Crystal, in his famous Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987, p. 344), points out the same cautions, although he also takes into consideration the type of text at stake:

On the whole, translators work into their mother tongue (or language of habitual use), to ensure a result that sounds as natural as possible - though some translators have argued that, for certain types of text (e. g. scientific material) where translation accuracy is more crucial than naturalness, it makes more sense for translators to be more fluent in the source language.

We find it necessary to demystify the above-mentioned utterances that all and only into second-language translators are likely to make collocational mistakes and unnatural renderings. Although evidence proves to be true that translations by non-native speakers are usually prone to this kind of errors, it is unfair to over generalize: expertise in the translation business, total immersion in the target language, and a proper use of documentation tools can polish the minor faultiness that a professional translator can have.

Besides, and we should insist in the precept of expertise and professionalism, sometimes an expert professional translator may do a better job into his or her second-language than a novice translator into his or her mother tongue.

For these reasons and the following, there are also supporters of the practice of reverse translation. The most representative one may be Meta Grosman (2000, p. 23), which controversially vindicates that

the theories favoring exclusively translations into the native or first language necessarily disregard the importance of the translator’s comprehension of the source text in his/her second language and, accordingly, embedded in a more or less unfamiliar source culture.

Perhaps the most balanced opinion about reverse translation versus direct translation would be the one proposed by Dominic Stewart (2011, on line), who summarizes the directionality debate as follows:

The translator into a native language feels more confident about encoding the target language but may not fully appreciate all the subtleties of the source language, whereas the translator into a foreign language feels more confident about decoding the source language but tends to be on less firm ground when encoding the target language.

Pokorn (2000, p. 79), in his discussion of the unavoidable use of reverse translation for minority-language works such as Slovene, also remarks that

the advantage of fluency in the target language that native speakers of the target language have is often counter-balanced by an insufficient knowledge of the source language and culture, which means that translations by native speakers of English are not automatically “superior” to those by native speakers of Slovene.

These insights about the importance of source culture leads us to the second element in our discussion.

Culture-specific references: A definition

The term culture-specific reference poses several methodological complexities, starting with its very nomenclature. Depending on the scholar, we would find the following terms: culture-specific references, culturemes, cultural markers. Several authors have suggested a different, while closely related, definition of this phenomenon, but, for the purpose of this paper, just two of the most representative of which are to be mentioned: Mayoral (1994, p. 76) defines cultural references as:

The discourse elements that refer to specific aspects of the source culture and therefore are not understood at all, or are partially or differently understood by members of the target culture.

For Hurtado (2001, p. 611), culturemes are “cultural elements characteristic of one culture present in a text that due to their specificity may pose translation problems.”

Taking into account these two definitions, when a translator has to approach a text in which these elements (cultural-specific references from now on) are present, he or she has to decide how to overcome the breach between the source audience cultural background and the target audience world knowledge. For such a purpose, there are four strategies the translator can choose, which, paraphrasing Pedersen (2005. pp. 4-9) can be summarized as follows:

• To retain the culture-specific reference by either borrowing the original term (“Halloween”), through literal translation (“Acción de Gracias”) or explicitating information so that the reference is accessible to laymen (“La Super Bowl, la final de fútbol americano”).

• To omit the culture-specific reference. This solution may pose ethical problems if we consider that the translator should transpose exactly the same ideas as the original author does.

• To generalize the culture-specific reference by reducing it to its sense (“Homecoming” for “baile”).

• To substitute the culture-specific reference by a similar reference from the target culture (“Junior prom” for “graduación”).

In this continuum of plausible strategies, the different types of preservation would represent what we call foreignization, whereas the adaptation option would typify domestication.

Domestication could be defined as the overall strategy chosen by a translator regarding the culture-specific elements of the text at stake, consisting in making these references more familiar to the target reader or audience. The translator will consequently change the original references and replace them with elements from the new cultural context of the translated work, voiding the sensation of foreignness.

Foreignization, on the other hand, celebrates the otherness of the text by respecting all the original text features, even when the target audience is likely not to understand completely all the nuances and implications of every culture-specific reference of such a text.

These last two terms will be crucial for our following thesis: in non-domesticating translations, reverse literary translation might not pose as many problems as could be expected given its stigmatized status.

3. Reverse translation when translating culture-specific references: Pros and cons

Should the translator opt for a naturalizing strategy, direct translation is undoubtedly the preferred modality, since it is easier to put in equivalent terms realities from the own culture, the one the translator knows better. For instance, a French translator whose source working language is English can identify the American 4th of July with the French 14th of July, since both are national festivities which celebrate freedom with fireworks and parades, and take place in summer. This cultural knowledge, deep enough to establish the relationship between both celebrations, may be more automatic in a native speaker of the target language, who reads the American traditions and immediately links them to his or her own experience.

Nevertheless, Cohen (quoted in Venuti 1995, p. 5) claims that this sort of domestication involves “the risk of reducing individual authors’ styles and national tricks of speech to a plain prose uniformity,” and, even though it has been argued that only scientific texts are suitable for reverse translation because of their urge to inform accurately rather than sound natural, we have to acknowledge that literary and audiovisual translation has yet another aim than naturalness: loyalty to the author’s style. And style involves all kind of aspects, including word choice and cultural references.

Steward (quoted in De la Cruz, 2004. pp. 58-59) also provides good arguments to rethink the aversion towards reverse translation. Although she focuses mainly on touristic pamphlets, we understand that some features of this sort of texts are shared with literary ones, because even when their main purpose is informative, they are also persuasive and tend to use certain rhetorical units and, what is most important for the aim of this paper, touristic leaflets are perhaps the richest texts as far as culture-specific references is concerned:

The reader interested in a text dotted

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