Linguistic and Cultural Asymmetry in Translation from and into Minor Languages

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to extend the asymmetry hypothesis (AH) to include cultural asymmetry between translation from a major into a minor language and vica versa, and to relate the AH to the domestication/foreignization dichotomy (Venuti 2005). In this paper the “minor” language is Hungarian in comparison with Russian and English as “major” languages. The asymmetry hypothesis (Klaudy 2001, 2009) assumes that explicitation and implicitation are not symmetric strategies, as translators, if they have a choice, tend to use the operations involving  explicitation rather than operations involving implicitation. The paper concludes that domestication and foreignization are also asymmetric operations; while translators prefer explicitation on the linguistic level, on the cultural level translators seem to prefer domestication.