Translation of Cultural Features in Informative Texts: A CDA Approach

Abstract

Tourist books play a significant role in introducing the culture of countries. These tourist books are translated in order to expand the boundaries of the source culture, and to make it known to different countries with different languages and cultural backgrounds. However texts are not left intact during the process of translation. In fact texts undergo ideological changes in the process of going from one language to the other. As Farahzad and Ehteshami (2011, pp. 45-46) observe "the current trend [in translation] is congruent with the doctrine of universality, which would seemingly lead to the obliteration of differences and consequently identities". The present study sought to have a critical look at the translators' choices and the consequences these choices have in representing the culture and identity of the source society. The corpus for the present study included three tourist books and one tourist CD with their translations in English. First, the books and the CD were compared with their translations in order to find the most frequent translation techniques applied in translation of culture specific items (CSIs). Then the results were discussed from the viewpoint of critical discourse analysis.