Nataša Pavlović, Darko Poslek: British and Croatian Culture-Specific Concepts

British and Croatian Culture-Specific Concepts in Translation Nataša Pavlović University of Zagreb, Croatia

Darko Poslek Radio 101, Zagreb, Croatia

According to social scientists, culture consists of shared ideas and concepts (beliefs, values, norms, goals), and material possessions of a society that are passed on from one generation to the next.1 Sociologists, therefore, do not use the term culture in the popular sense – one that emphasises the appreciation of the arts, literature, music, or the theatre – but maintain that it includes the whole way of life of the members of a society: how they dress, their habits and customs, family life, their pattern of work, religious ceremonies, and leisure pursuits.2 Likewise, the goods that the members of a society create and which become meaningful for them – say, bows and arrows, ploughs, factories and machines, computers, books, or dwellings – are also highly interesting to the sociologist because they reveal in what kind of environment the society in question lives. Studies have shown that there are some general practices which are found in every culture in the world. In the 1960s, anthropologist George Murdock sought to compile a list of such cultural universals, and said that they included bodily adornment, cooking, family, folklore, funeral ceremonies, games, cooking, music, numerals, religion, and sexual restrictions, to name but a few.3 One can thus say that ‘die’, ‘live’, ‘star’, ‘dream’ and ‘swim’, for instance, are universals since they represent general aspects of nature and humans, and their physical and mental activities. But although some cultural practices may be universal, the manner in which they are expressed vary widely from culture to culture: dwellings, for example, may, and in actual fact do, take many forms, depending upon the environment and technological 1

Scimecca & Sherman 1992: 76. Ibid. 3 Id., p. 84. 2

British Cultural Studies: Cross-Cultural Challenges, pp. 157-168 II Intercultural Perspectives: Language

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development of the particular society. This variety in the expression of cultural practices results in great diversity among the world’s many cultures.4 Every culture, therefore, has its own unique character and contains its own unique patterns of behaviour, which seem alien to people from other cultural backgrounds. Culture is shared by all who live in a society; not to participate in the culture is, quite simply, not to be a member of society. A very important aspect of participating in a culture is being able to speak its language: language is thus a major requirement for either understanding or sharing in the life of a culture. And, indeed, there is no culture or society in the world which has not developed a kind of language in which to communicate.

The aim of every communication, including translational communication, is to convey information about human beings and the extralinguistic reality which surrounds them. The more the interlocutors in an act of communication share the extralinguistic and linguistic experience, the better the chances that communication will be successful. However, if and when communication takes place between monolingual speakers of different speech communities (which use different languages), a translator (interpreter) steps in and helps to remove communicational barriers. For practical purposes, translating can be defined as finding a synonymous expression in another language. So the job of a translator is to extract a message (by comprehension and interpretation) from a given form of words in one language, and then to re-express (by formulating and re-creation) the contents of that message in a different form of words belonging to another language. One can say that translation is a successful interpretation of an act of communication by dint of elements of the linguistic repertoire of another language. It is important, however, to notice that translating, due to the close link between language and culture, involves not just two languages, but also a transfer from one culture to another: it is not enough for a translator (interpreter) to be bilingual and have a good command of both the source and the target languages, he/she has to be bicultural as well. Since every text, either spoken or written, is the result of a particular extralinguistic situation and is determined by its cultural, historical and social contexts, every 4 Even within a single society certain segments or groups of the population will develop subcultural patterns that differentiate them from the dominant society.

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translation is the process of conveying messages across both linguistic and cultural lines. One should be aware that one-to-one translation equivalence is in practice extremely rare. It can be found exceptionally in the translation of some proper and geographical names (St. John is sv. Ivan in Croatian, Vienna is Beč, England is Engleska, the Thames is Temza), the days of the week (Monday can only be translated as ponedjeljak and the other way round), and numerals (one is always jedan).5

At the opposite extreme from the universalities are such words as krš and moors, which will cause a translation problem because there is no cultural overlap between the source and the target language. When a speech community focuses its attention on a particular topic – in which case we talk about ‘cultural focus’ – it creates a whole series of words to designate its special language or terminology: thus the French are known to have numerous words for the various types of wines and cheeses, Spaniards for bull-fighting, Arabs for camels, Eskimos for snow, the Chinese for rice, the English for sports, and so forth.

It is when dealing with such culture-specific elements that translation problems might arise, and references to the source culture’s history, geography, literature, and folklore, for example, may prove impossible to be preserved in the target text. Areas which are a potential source of culture-specific terms – that is, areas in which the source culture may contain some elements and phenomena which do not exist or 5 But we should note that even in these areas there is never full translation equivalence. In the case of numbers, it would be wrong to translate the English billion as bilijun in Croatian, since the only correct rendering is milijarda. Furthermore, English uses a decimal point where Croatian has a comma. English, on the other hand, can use a comma in numerals such as ‘one thousand’, while Croatian uses a point. Names are either not translated or else they have a recognised translation (which again may not be relevant if the name appears, for instance, as part of a street name). With some of the recognised translations there is no one-to-one equivalence: Jakov – Jacob, but also James; Atena – Athens (city), Athena (goddess). Other examples of names which might present the translator with a difficulty are expressions such as John Dow (XY, N.N., Ivica Horvat in Croatian), GI Joe (or GI Jane, for that matter), Tom, Dick and Harry, as well as nicknames: Mick, Paddy – Irac; Scouse – žitelj Manchestera; Geordie – žitelj Newcastlea; Jock, Jimmy – Škot; Ero, Jozo – Herzegovinian. Nicknames of individuals sometimes need to be translated (e.g. Scarface). Generally speaking, the days of the week and the names of the months and seasons can be translated on a one-to-one basis, but one should note that the words summer and ljeto do not necessarily mean the same thing in the two countries. This discrepancy is evident in the proverb one swallow doesn’t make a summer – jedna lasta ne čini proljeće.

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are different in the target culture, and for which there are no adequate target language equivalents – might be categorised as follows:6 Ecology This area includes different aspects of nature, such as winds (bura, jugo), plains and hills (Highlands, Lowlands), and other geographic concepts (Podunavlje; Lake District), as well as flora (blitva, matovilac; watercress), and fauna (sredozemna medvjedica; Jack Russell). The way in which we perceive nature around us can also be different, of which colours are a well-known example. Generally speaking, English has a much broader vocabulary of colours, while Croatian makes use of pre-modification. Everyday life Everyday life encompasses types of dwellings (semidetached house, bungalow, cottage), household appliances (kettle), food (Christmas pudding, gravy; štrukli, mlinci), meals (ručak can be either lunch or dinner, večera can be either dinner or supper; likewise, dinner can be ručak or večera), clothes, including parts of national costumes (kilt, sporran), means of transport (double-decker), public services, especially the names of public service companies (Elektroprivreda, Vodovod, ZET, HPT; British Telecomm, Royal Mail). Material culture Material culture comprises different products, trademarks in particular. There might be a change in the situation for the translator if a product becomes wellknown in the target culture. For example, Croatia’s shift to the market economy saw the introduction of a great number of western products which no longer need an explanation (Big Mac, Mars bar, Fairy liquid, Ariel, Guinness). In the past, we had to add a classifier in the form of a generic noun, or use a generic noun instead of the name of a product. If the source language is Croatian, the name of the product will have to be explained or substituted with a generic noun since it is unlikely that British recipients will be familiar with Croatian products such as Jamnička, Ožujsko or Bajadera. Occasionally, a trademark starts being used as a generic noun, such as Aspirin. This particular trademark is used in the generic way in both English and Croatian, so that it presents no problems for translation; there are others, however, which must be replaced with a generic noun in translation (Kleenex – papirnati rupčić; žilet – razor).

6 This is, of course, only one of the possible categorisations of the areas of culture in which we are likely to stumble upon unshared elements problematic for the translator.


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History These items relate to historical events, institutions, functions, and personalities (ban, banovina; Georgian architecture); literature, including different characters from works of art well known in the source culture (Humpty Dumpty), as well as famous quotations (človištvo najlipša lipost); folklore and tradition (Sinjska alka; Santa Claus). Religion The predominant religion in Croatia is Catholicism, while most Britons belong to one of the Protestant denominations. Translating from Croatian into English does not normally present a problem, as there are a lot of English-speaking Catholics around the world, and the international nature of the church means that there are readilyavailable English words for everything we may need to translate. It is when translating the other way round that we might encounter problems, not so much because there may not be Croatian equivalents for particular concepts and functions, but because they might not be familiar to an average speaker of Croatian. For example, if we translate rector’s daughter as rektorova kći, most Croatians will think we are talking about the offspring of the head of a university. Choosing Catholic functional equivalents can sometimes be misleading and/or sound unusual, as in the following example: vicar’s wife – župnikova žena (lit. parish priest’s wife). Economy Until 1990, the economic system in Croatia was ‘socialist self-management’. This system generated a lot of terms which were difficult if not downright impossible to translate into English. The situation has since changed, and this country now has a free-market economy. The initial problem was how to translate all the concepts related to free-market economy into Croatian (mainly from English and German). A lot of concepts which had to do with the stock exchange, money market, equity or commodities, for example, did not exist, and once they were introduced, people did not know what exactly they meant. A number of terms (the equivalents of which are widely used in English and understood by most people) are still not widely used or understood by non-experts. The names of institutions were also for the most part literally translated from English. Political and administrative functions and institutions Again, an area which was an endless source of translation difficulties during communist rule, which generated its own terminology. Most of today’s concepts and their language expressions are the same as those of the western democracies, one of the reasons being that many of them have been adopted form the West and literally translated since 1990. Some concepts, however, have been given names which had

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been traditionally used at an earlier stage in Croatian history, and these may present a problem for a translator into English (župan, županija, Županijski dom).7 The armed forces The armed forces and their ranks and formations (in Croatian vojska means not only the army, but also the armed forces. The word army sometimes needs to be translated as kopnena vojska). Education The education systems in the two countries are quite different, which results in a lot of gaps (A-levels, O-levels, public school, college; matura, gimnazija, fakultet).8 Forms of address The most notable source of problems in this area is the fact that English has one pronoun, you, where Croatian distinguishes between ti and vi, the latter being used not only for the second person plural, but also as a courteous form of address in the singular. When translating from English we are regularly faced with a choice between ti and vi, and the decision has to be made based on various clues in the source text, of which the first-name basis is only one.9 Croatian, like German but unlike English, tends to use titles in front of people’s names, such as dr., mr., prof. or ing. The translator has to decide how, if at all, to translate such titles. British titles such as lord, lady, Sir have been naturalised in Croatian. A form of address which presents special problems is Ms. Like so many other ‘PC’ terms, this one does not have its Croatian equivalent. Here, again, the language gap reflects the extralinguistic situation: the idea of political correctness has yet to take root in Croatian society (indeed, the term ‘political correctness’ itself still does not have a widely-accepted Croatian translation; politička korektnost is a calque still transparent only to those who are familiar with the English language, and American and British cultures). 7 Klub zastupnikâ is an expression illustrative of the difference in the extralinguistic reality of Croatia’s political life reflected in language. It denotes all the MPs belonging to a particular party, who agree on party policy and make decisions on how to vote on certain issues. British political life has nothing similar to that, but it has its own culture-specific concept, the whip, for which there is no Croatian equivalent. 8 Consider the word diploma, which means ‘(a certificate of) university degree’ in Croatian, but not in English (from which it needs to be translated as svjedodžba o završenoj višoj školi). Likewise, professor, as a title, is used in (British) English only for heads of departments, while the title profesor in Croatian is used profusely (if incorrectly, in the opinion of some scholars) before names of teachers holding a university degree. 9 To make the right decision we must consider the relationship between the two people involved, their age, rank, and other such factors. For this, see the unsurpassed R. Brown & A. Gilman, “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity”, in Language and Social Context, ed. P. P. Giglioli, (Penguin, 1972).


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Gestures and habits Some gestures and habits may be reflected in language, such as the old-fashioned Croatian greeting ljubim ruke (lit. *I kiss your hand.), which reflects the gesture of the time, but has no English equivalent. The expression dobar tek, regularly used in Croatian, has an English equivalent in bon appétit but the latter has not the same distributional value. Work This area is closely connected to economy (see Economy).10 Leisure and entertainment This area encompasses sports (cricket, rugby, curling, hurling; boćanje)11, games (bridge; bela, briškula), places where people go out (pub; kafić, slastičarnica), things they do (karaoke)12, and so forth. Television is an important factor in bringing together distant cultures, which, in turn, facilitates the work of the translator. However, national and local TV networks can be an endless source of culture-specific terms (the names of prominent TV personalities, hosts, their shows, game shows, different programmes that are wellknown to people in the source culture but unknown to people in the target culture). The translator has to help the recipients understand the reference and, occasionally – and this is a very risky undertaking – resort to cultural transplantation, that is, use the names and concepts from the target culture.13 In this area the situation can also change, so that The Wheel of Fortune is now well-known to Croatians (Kolo sreće), but Jeopardy still needs a classifier (kviz ‘Jeopardy’). Also, thanks to satellite networks, we now do not have to explain who Larry King is. If the source language is Croatian, it is unlikely that any of the culture-specific names and concepts from this area will be known to the British recipient (Kviskoteka, Motrišta, Latinica will need a classifier).

10

Plaća or, more formally, dohodak, is illustrative of a work-related term which one will have to be careful about when translating into English. The translator will have to choose between pay, wages, salary and income, each of which has a specific and somewhat different meaning. 11 The names cricket and rugby have become naturalised in Croatian, but the numerous expressions connected to or deriving from these and other typically British sports are not as readily transferred. Consider also the difference between hockey and hokej. In England the word implies field hockey, or else one would specify and say ice hockey. In Croatian hokej by default means ice hockey (cf. American and Canadian English), while the other type is called hokej na travi. Billiards is bilijar, but to distinguish between pool and snooker, Croatian has to be descriptive. 12 This type of entertainment, Japanese in origin, in which people take turns to sing well-known songs over a pre-recorded background music has yet to become part of the Croats’ spare time. 13 There are cases, such as subtitling a TV comedy show, in which the translator has no other choice but to resort to cultural transplantation, or kill the joke.

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What has been said of television is also true, up to a point, of radio, newspapers and magazines.14

An ‘ideal’ translation would be one managing to render the whole communicative value of a text into another language. However, every professional translator and interpreter knows that this is rarely, if ever, achieved, and that the transfer of meaning from the source text to the target text always involves a certain degree of translation loss: the target text will always lack certain culturally relevant features present in the source text because the social and cultural context of the target text is different from that of the source text. When faced with unshared elements of culture (that is, of extralinguistic and linguistic experience) between the original sender and the ultimate receiver, the translator has a variety of procedures at his/her disposal. These include literal and free translation, communicative translation (substitution), borrowing (the use of ‘exotic’ expressions), calques, and cultural transplantation. In all these procedures communication is achieved through the minimisation of differences, and the reduction of ‘the unknown to the known, the private to the common, the unshared to the shared’15. Two translation procedures standing at opposite ends of the translation scale are literal translation and omission of translation. These are often the easiest procedures to follow, and are sometimes totally justifiable. All other procedures, which presume the various degrees of departure from literal translation, require more effort on the part of the translator. In literal translation, the literal meaning of words is taken as if from the dictionary (that is, out of context), but target language grammar is fully respected. The recognised and widely-used translation of secretary of state, for example, is državni tajnik (or državna tajnica, for that matter).16 Such calques, which consist of target language words and respect target language syntax, are unidiomatic in the target language because they are modelled on the structure of a source language expression, and may create comprehension problems in the target text. However, some originally calqued expressions eventually become 14

If, for instance, the mention of the name of the newspaper or magazine that a literary character reads is aimed at contributing to his/her better characterisation, the translator will have to provide that extra bit of information for the readers of the target culture who are not familiar with the connotation. 15 Ivir 1996: 34. 16 Occasionally one can also hear ministar (ministrica) vanjskih poslova, which, as a functional equivalent, is more transparent for native speakers of Croatian. However, the literal translation državni tajnik was probably preferred at first in order to preserve the ‘exotic’ nature of the original term.


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standard target language cultural equivalents of their source language origins. For instance, the Croatian ‘svjetonazor’ was calqued on the German ‘Weltanschauung’, as was also the English ‘worldview’. Not only can literal translation and calquing cause comprehension problems; they can also be misleading as to the semantic content of the message. If one decides to translate Christmas pudding as božićni puding, which is a correct word-for-word translation and is completely in accordance with Croatian syntax, the ultimate receiver might think the English Christmas sweetmeat is really a pudding (a type of custard), which, of course, is not the case. In a nutshell, like all forms of cultural borrowing, calques exhibit a certain degree of exoticism, bringing into the target text the cultural foreignness and strangeness of the source culture. If the translator wants, for various reasons, to signal cultural foreignness in the target text, he/she will resort to the use of exoticisms: a target text translated in an exotic manner is one which constantly resorts to linguistic and cultural features imported from the source text into the target text with minimal adaptation, and which, thereby, constantly signals the exotic source culture and its cultural strangeness. This is often done in combination with a short definition or paraphrase of the term, which is either added within the text or in the form of a footnote. Cultural borrowing, which is based on the transfer of a source text expression verbatim into the target text, is applied when it proves impossible to find a suitable target language expression of indigenous origins for translating the source text expression. Hot dog, for example, is still used in its original form of expression in Croatian, but usually written in italics, although it has been known and in use for a rather long time. Literal translation is, of course, out of the question, and no widely acceptable Croatian equivalent has been offered so far. Cultural borrowing will be most frequent in texts on history or social or political matters: ban, (formerly) the governor of Croatia, can be translated as vice-roy, but it would be more opportune to preserve the former expression in the target text, and add a short definition. As a matter of fact, ban has entered Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, as has slivovitz (
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This procedure is used very rarely and is rather risky. For instance, if we decide to translate a work of literature, which was originally written in a dialect, into a target language dialect, the result might be inadequate and very clumsy. By and large, normal translation practice avoids both wholesale exoticism and wholesale cultural transplantation. When the source text uses a source language expression standard for a particular situation (for example, when one is to introduce oneself to a stranger), the translator will try to find a target language expression standard for an equivalent target culture situation. In this case the translator would be resorting to communicative translation. This procedure is obligatory in the translation of many culturally conventional formulae that do not allow literal translation: for instance, public notices, proverbs and conversational clichés. It is customary in Croatia to end business letters with S poštovanjem, which is easily rendered into English as Yours sincerely…, or as another formulaic expression to that effect. It is normally not translated as *With respect… Likewise, idiomatic expressions, such as to smell a rat, cannot be translated literally, because they would not be appropriate in the context of situation, and would make no sense. If we said osjećati smrad štakora, which is a literal translation of the expression, the semantic content of the original message would be completely lost, and the expression would prove inadequate. Only special contextual reasons can justify opting against a standard communicative translation in such cases. Translators may sometimes decide that the best way to translate a word would be to create a new word (neologism) in the target language, which often has little to do with the formal expression of the original. With the first recognised appearance of AIDS, some Croatian linguists sought to find a Croatian equivalent that would be more suitable for the Croatian grammatical system. One possibility was to use sida, the French abbreviation for the disease, which was apparently more in accordance with the formation of Croatian words; the other was to use the proposed Croatian ‘translation’ kopnica, which is a descriptive equivalence of the disease. The latter, however, has never taken root.17 In direct opposition to extreme source language bias (literal translation) is extreme target language bias (free rendering), where there is only a global correspondence between the textual units of the source text and those of the target text. This procedure is probably mostly used in the translation of literary works, especially poetry.

17

Despite efforts by some Croatian linguists to the contrary, AIDS seems to have gained the upper hand in everyday practice, at least for the time being.


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In order to facilitate communication, the translator may also decide to omit a cultural element present in the original text. A good Croatian-English translator, for instance, would only exceptionally decide to translate Croatian titles and etiquettes into English. So engineers, professors, masters of arts, and doctors of philosophy, for example, who readily and proudly display their titles in Croatian, will as a rule have to do without the mention of their titles in a good English translation. Those have been some of the procedures that translators (interpreters) resort to when having to deal with items of different cultures. Which of them will actually be made use of will depend on several factors, including the structure of the target audience, the type and purpose of the text, the medium used in communication, and the like. The final decision, however, always rests with the translator, who, in his/her effort to overcome communicational barriers between monolingual members of different speech communities, is a cross-cultural conveyer of messages.18 *** This paper has sought to look at some of the difficulties in the area of culturespecific concepts that translators (interpreters) have to overcome when translating from (British) English into Croatian, and vice versa. We have seen that it is extremely important for the translator (interpreter) to be keenly aware of the differences existing between the source culture (and the language in which the text requiring translation is couched), and the target culture (and the language into which the original text is to be rendered). One of the translator’s jobs is, therefore, to minimise these dissimilarities and to reconcile the differences in the extralinguistic experience between the original sender and the ultimate receiver. In order to do so, he/she has several translational procedures (and their combinations) at his/her disposal, none of which, however, is certain to preserve all the facets of the original text. Indeed, the translator must accept the fact that there is always going to be some translation loss, and make an attempt to minimise that loss by making the right decisions every step of the way. Finally, we must always bear in mind that the target text, however painstakingly produced, is at the very best only an approximation to the properties of the source text.

18

It is essential for translators (interpreters) to follow all the latest tendencies in the languages from and into which they translate (interpret). A good Croatian-English translator, for example, will not translate fizički hendikepirana osoba as a physically handicapped person, and would opt for a disabled person instead, for the latter is considered to be more ‘politically correct’.

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REFERENCES Bićanić, Sonia 1995. Some Problems Of Translating Croatian Into English. In J. MihaljevićDjigunović & N. Pintarić (eds), Prevođenje: suvremena strujanja i tendencije. Proceedings of the Croatian Applied Linguistics Society’s Conference on Translating: 13-20. Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo za primijenjenu lingvistiku. Giddens, Anthony 1992. Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hervey, S. & Higgins, I. 1992. Thinking Translation. London/New York: Routledge. Ivir, Vladimir 1985. Teorija i tehnika prevođenja. Novi Sad: Zavod za izdavanje udžbenika. Ivir, Vladimir 1996. Shared Linguistic and Extralinguistic Experience as a Precondition for Translation. In M. Andrijašević & L. Zergollern-Miletić (eds), Jezik i komunikacija. Proceedings of the Croatian Applied Linguistics Society’s Conference on Language and Communication: 33-38. Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo za primijenjenu lingvistiku. Kalogjera, Damir 1995. Kulturalni nagovještaji u prijevodu novinskih naslova. In J. Mihaljević-Djigunović & N. Pintarić (eds), Prevođenje: suvremena strujanja i tendencije. Proceedings of the Croatian Applied Linguistics Society’s Conference on Translating: 29-38. Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo za primijenjenu lingvistiku. Leech, Geoffrey 1990. Semantics. London: Penguin. Maček, Dora 1995. Prijevod u strukturnom i stilskom procijepu. In J. Mihaljević-Djigunović & N. Pintarić (eds), Prevođenje: suvremena strujanja i tendencije. Proceedings of the Croatian Applied Linguistics Society’s Conference on Translating: 183-188. Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo za primijenjenu lingvistiku. Newmark, Peter 1995. A Textbook of Translation. Hemel Hampstead: Phoenix ELT. Scimecca, J.A. & Sherman, A.K. 1992. Sociology: Analysis and Application. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Škiljan, Dubravko 1980. Pogled u lingvistiku. Zagreb: Školska knjiga.

Nataša Pavlović, Darko Poslek: British and Croatian Culture-Specific Concepts

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