Translating Realia (Spanish- English): Translating Strategies [El Tapeo]

Abstract

Translating culture constitutes a great challenge for translators, who have to bear in mind that the way something is translated will affect the target culture (TC) reader’s perception and understanding of the source culture (SC). Thus, translators have the responsibility of bridging the gap between the two cultures involved in the process of translation. The finding of analogues for cultural terms without losing the concept’s cultural identity seems to be almost impossible. For that reason, there is a discrepancy between scholars supporting translatability and others who defend that efficacy and accuracy are terms barely present in the same translation, so that proper cultural translation would be impossible. These disparities have also created a necessity to look for the definition of the notions of culture and translation, as well as for some classifications for the culture-bound terms present in the translating texts and for the possible translating strategies, which would be tools for solving problems of non-equivalence between languages and cultures. The present paper analyses the presence of these cultural translation problems in texts, and shows the strategies proposed by non-professional translators to adapt realia into English. The materials examined include a text named “El tapeo”, written by José Antonio Garmendia, which appeared in the magazine Paradores, and its translations into English, elaborated by a group of Spanish-speaking university students. Besides, the same materials and methods have been used to conduct a minor study on the strategies employed by some English-speaking non-professional translators, meaning to compare results with the former investigation. Results have shown some divergence between Spanish and English language translators, and thus between inverse and direct translation, respectively. Finally, conclusions are based on each study, in which translators faced the text mentioned above, which includes a notable amount of realia in it; and the comparison of their results.