TRANSLATING IDIOMS AND CULTURE
I. Introduction
Idioms are a vital part of each language. Since their meaning can’t be understood by analyzing the single words constituting them, there are problems in the first place in recognizing them and then translating and rendering their meaning.
In order to keep the meaning unaltered, as a translator, you need to have a good level of understanding in both target and source language. If you have that, the step of recognizing the idioms is easier. If the translator does not know that the words have a special meaning together, he may misinterpret what the author is saying, or be puzzled by why is he saying something that is irrelevant. But, in the process of translation we don’t talk only about rendering meanings but also
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The theoretical framework of this paper has been Mona Baker’s In Other Words (1992) that was studied in detail in order to gain some information on the matter.
II. Idioms
Idioms are expressions, words, or phrases that have a figurative meaning which is separate from the literal meaning of the words of which they are made.
Peter Newmark (1988, p.104) considers idioms as being ‘extended’ metaphors that have two main functions: referential and pragmatic. The first one describes “a concept, a person, an object or an action more comprehensively and concisely than is possible in literal or physical language”. The pragmatic function surprises, delights and draws interest.
Mona Baker (1992, p.63) defines idioms as “frozen patterns of language which allow little or no variation in form and often carry meanings which cannot be deduced from their individual components”. She also mentions that a translator can’t do any of the following with an idiom: change the order of the words, delete a word from it, add a word to it, replace a word with another or change its grammatical
First, a brief background in the three dimensions of language discussed throughout this paper. The functional, semantic, or thematic dimensions of language as previously mentioned are often used in parallel with each other. Due, to this fact it is important to be able to identify them as they take place and differentiate between these dimensions i...
Words are like vessels—they are merely novel constructions of sounds empty of meaning until we fill them. They mean only what we discern in them, and nothing more. Words are only our impressions of them—imprecise, indefinite, unclear. A single word suggests infinite shades of intensity, quality, or connotation. They are variable, distinct in each era and dialect, even in each language.
Slang is the key reason words take on new meaning. A teenage girl may say a guy is hot! This does not mean he is sweating, it means he is good looking. This is an example of slang. People familiar with slang will understand this meaning, while those unfamiliar will not. As our culture changes so does our slang and words take on new meanings. Let’s take a closer look at the word burn. Some of the definitions may surprise you.
The Life of Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright. Berlin [etc.]. Mouton De Gruyter, 1998. Print. The.
The term signifying refers to the playful, humorous indirection or innuendo, the talking around an implied meaning, the ambiguous metaphor, the invective that only works if the opponent lacks humor and responds in a literal fashion. Signifying is an attitude toward language, but it is also a social gambit: signifying enables the man and the woman of words to challenge and criticize without becoming committed to any particular claim or meaning: for only the response will tell. For instance, if I say, ‘Yo mama so old, her social security number is ‘1’”, and you say, ‘Fuck you, man”, you’ve lost, you took what was in the figurative and put it in the literal thus committing yourself to the fact that your mom is old. Now, if you reply, “well YO mama so old, when she was in school there was no history class”, or “yo mama so old, when God said ‘let there be light’ she hit the switch” then the signifying can continue.
every example falls into one class or the other, but not both) and obvious (i.e. it is always apparent into which class an instance of humor falls), although this view is not unanimous: ‘conceptual humor and verbal humor are not distinct categories, however’ (Armstrong, 2005). There appears to be on strict definition of the boundary between verbal and referential humor, with classification of examples being left to general intuition. Sometimes translability is proposed as the criterion for distinguishing the two types (e.g. Bergson, 1940; Attardo 1994; Armstrong, 2005). It is certainly true that the two types of humor put quite different demands on the translator, but the ‘transable’ criterion is not well-defined: does it mean ‘ it can be translated into every language’ or ‘there is some language somewhere into which it can be
"The Meanings and Origins of Sayings and Phrases." RSS. Gary Martin, 1996. Web. 21 May 2014.
Pragmatics Aspects: Deixis and Distance, reference and inference, conversational implicature, anaphoric and cataphoric reference, presupposition, entailment, direct and indirect speech acts and speech events, cultural context and cross cultural pragmatics, conversational analysis and background knowledge, denotation and connotation meaning, the four maxims and hedges.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. An Introduction to Language. 8th ed. Boston: Thomson, 2007.
In her analysis, Mona Baker investigates all text equivalences: apart the object of this paper, she studies the grammatical equivalence, the textual equivalence and the pragmatic equivalence. However this paper will be centered only on the micro level.
Similar to many other lively pleasures, humor can only be experienced if it resonates with a person. Without some kind of comprehension, there cannot be any type of reaction. Only once an outlandish statement, inappropriate remark, or unexpected situation, is remotely understood will a person be able to label it comical or sober. Since there are billions of people worldwide with their own languages including it’s respective idioms, euphemisms, the age old saying of “there is truth in every joke” applies to each culture individually.
To show an example to grasp the difference between the two of them, it is enough to claim that in its most basic sense, if the translator cannot find an equivalent for the target language, it is at word level. However, if it is above the word level, the job of the translator becomes tougher because she/he needs to deal with more complicated language elements such as collocations, idioms and fixed expressions as clearly stated by Baker. By referring to the Baker’s reasons for non-equivalence, culture-specific concepts should be counted as the first because it is very obscure that each language reflects its culture in its language and that’s why each language differs from one another. For example, a translator may not find an equivalence for the word ‘speed-dating’ just because it doesn’t exist in the target language. Lack of a superordinate word, specific term; differences in terms of form, expressive meaning and semantic complexity of the languages can be added as other cases where we come across with difficulties. In fact, the skills of the translator is needed at this very point to deal with each situation separately by using various strategies. Using a general word, translating by cultural substitution, paraphrasing and omitting the problematic lexical element can be included as the most common strategies. To refer back to what has been explained previously, the complexity of the translation is determined by such factors. Indeed, interpreters seem to come across with more difficulties since they need to think on the
Language is a means of human communication whether verbally or nonverbally. In everyday life we use language to express our thoughts, feelings ,attitudes,etc.A great amount of social interactions takes place every day over the telephone ,by online chats, face –to face interaction or at workplaces .We use language of different forms for different functions as in to inform, question , and sometimes to strengthen social relationships or just to keep the social wheels turning smoothly. Moreover, understanding one's own language and even other cultures’ language is important to arrive at a successful and effective communication with others . The study of language can be undertaken in various ways .Semantics and pragmatics are two branches of linguistics which are concerned with the study of meaning.
The further type of idioms are irreversible binomial idioms. All in all, every idiom on the sememic stratum and on the lexemic stratum can be, in addition, determined as irreversible sequence.