Cultural Interchangeability? Culture-Specific Items in Translation

• Main Author: Ajtony Zsuzsanna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2016-12-01
• Series: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica
• Subjects: realia; translation strategy; intercultural communication; cultural sensitivity
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/ausp-2016-0019

This paper summarizes the results of the translation work carried out within an international project aiming to develop the language skills of staff working in hotel and catering services. As the topics touched upon in the English source texts are related to several European cultures, these cultural differences bring about several challenges related to the translation of realia, or culture-specific items (CSIs). In the first part of the paper, a series of translation strategies for rendering source-language CSIs into the target language are enlisted, while the second part presents the main strategies employed in the prepared translations.