The Analysis of the Translation of Political Media Discourse-Culture-Bound Elements by Future Diplomats and Journalists

Abstract

The paper focuses on certain aspects of intercultural communication in professional political contexts. With this aim the authors seek to analyze culture-bound elements in German political media discourse, determine their specific role and place in the language system as well as point out the eventual pitfalls on the way to translating them into Russian. Another important point of discussion in the paper is the importance of translation skills for international relations experts: journalists and diplomats. By following the relatively new academic trend of analyzing the use of language in professional contexts, the authors hope to cover a somewhat uncharted territory with this work. The study was aimed at identifying the difficulties that future diplomats and journalists face in solving practical problems, in particular in the process of translating professionally oriented texts. The methods employed include analysis of scientific literature, description, polling and questionnaires, quantitative data assessment and systematization. The primary experiment was conducted under participation of 57 Russian-speaking master students of MGIMO University: future diplomats (65 %) and journalists (35 %). The students were tasked with translating six German texts into Russian in writing, the text in question originating from various German media outlets such as Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle as well as mitmischen.de, the German parliament’s web site for the younger people. The resulting Russian texts were primarily evaluated based on the translation of the 56 German realia (mostly represented in the original text by proper nouns, such as personal names, toponyms, names of political offices, etc.). In accordance with the classification of Ch. Nord the mistakes were divided into pragmatic, cultural and formal groups. The quantitative analysis discovered that cultural mistakes constituted the majority of them. The reason is the lack of correlated denotations in both cultures and of sufficient lexicographic sources. A possible solution to overcome the emerging difficulties is the creation of a digital guide of culture-bound elements of political discourse.

Keywords

• intercultural communication
• professional communication
• political media discourse
• translation
• culture-bound elements