Challenges of Cultural Translation (The Translational Adventures of Askeladden)

Abstract

Language is a structural as well as a cultural and an individual phenomenon. So is all and every manifestation of language in discourse, including the discourse acknowledged as translation. Thus, all and any translation, and not only translations of literary texts, face the problem of translating culture, and cannot be reduced to a mere transcoding of lexis and grammar. But the structural, the cultural and the individual planes of language are different in nature, and their coexistence is marked by tension, conflict and unbalance. This fact, in turn, renders translation, including the translation of cultural elements, relatively feasible, and opens up for three main approaches: source-centered translation, target-centered translation and translator-centered (or creative) translation, as exemplified in the translation into Brazilian Portuguese of tales from the Norwegian folklore. It is suggested that a translation which desires to achieve a polyphonic effect, i.e., which strives to avoid silencing the otherness, either of the source or of the target language, will often require the deliberate intervention of the creative approach.