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Abstract
The paper1 studies to which extent and under which conditions a translator is able "to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work" (Benjamin 2008:82). In some cases, the intrinsic quality of the text (Xie 2006:207) cannot be preserved without transposition of linguistic and cultural patterns or 'culture units'. The definition of cultural information enables the study of different translation procedures of 'cultural words'.
There are two hypotheses: 1. there are various modes of translating culture specific lexis; 2. there are different ideas behind using culture specific lexis in the source texts. The corpus of the research involves three literary pieces and their corresponding translations: A Guide to the Serbian Mentality by Momo Kapor, The Days of Consuls by Ivo Andric and Ezra Pound's poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. The methodology is interdisciplinary and includes contrastive analysis, text analysis, analysis of the lexical items and analysis of translation methods. The paper aims to study the translation methods applied by translators and their translation tendencies. Special attention is given to the translation of cultural words and untranslatable culture-specific lexica in the source texts, and to the translators' recognition and treatment of the aims of using cultural references in the source texts, as prerequisites of successful transposition of source text cultural concept.
Key words: Translation; Cultural information; Cultural words; Cultural concepts; Translation strategies.
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1 Introduction
The aim of the paper is to study different ways of using culture specific lexica and different methods of its translation. The paper examines to which extent and under which conditions a translator is able "to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work" (Benjamin 2008:82). As Brisset (2008:337) argues, "translation is a dual act of communication. It presupposes the existence, not of a single code, but of two distinct codes, the'source language' and the 'target language'. The fact that the two codes are not isomorphic creates obstacles for the translative operation. This explains why linguistic questions are the starting-point for all thinking about translation".
In some cases, the intrinsic quality of the text (Xie 2006:207) cannot be preserved without transposition of linguistic and cultural patterns or "culture units". The paper gives the examples of...