Cultural and Bilingual Translation through Text Analysis

 

Elaine Espindola

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

 

Bearing in mind the hegemonic position English occupies in the present multicultural, multiethnic world, translating into one’s non-mother tongue, i.e., English, has become a natural practice. Typically, what is taught in courses that focus on Translation, English for Specific Purposes, English as a Second/Foreign Language is how to construct a written or spoken oral text without giving full consideration to issues of cultural aspects of the target language. In other words, language is taught with a focus on structural aspects leaving little room for discussion when it comes to matters of cultural elements that are inherent of a language. This is a practice that follows unnoticed leading to scholars claim that translators and English learners as a second or foreign language when translating into his/her non-mother tongue are deemed to failure. Contrariwise, this project/workshop sees language as a potential for making meanings and as such hypothesizes that a non-English speaker is capable of producing a text as effective, fluent and functional as an English speaker as an extensive knowledge of language alone is not sufficient, but an extensive knowledge of source culture contextual information empowers non-English speakers to construe culturally informed texts.

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Keywords: Systemic Functional Translation Studies; Translation Competence; Non-mother tongue translation.