Cultural Translation as a Method of Archaeological Heritage Transfer

Abstract

he article deals with the topical issues of translating museum texts in the genre of archaeological objects catalogue dating from the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD from Russian into English. The aim of the study is to lay a foundation for the application of cultural translation as a dynamic process of adaptation of linguacultural concepts in the communicative space of the Russian museum to ensure the transfer of culture-intensive meanings, in particular to foreign recipients. The material of the study is the verbal content of the exhibition catalogue “Gold of the Sarmatians. Archaeology: from A to Z” of the Volgograd Regional History Museum in Russian and its translation into English. The research methods include receptive and comparative methods, the method of discourse analysis, semantic analysis of the dictionary definitions, as well as modelling of transformative cultural practices. It is established that cultural translation is a creative activity that combines the stages of interpretation, distancing, assimilation, transformation and liberation in the sense of the exchange of cultural knowledge. These stages of translation bring the recipient into a world of cultural relativism as opposed to a world of ethnocentrism, which allows to appreciate the achievements of other cultures and peoples. The informative, associative and concept oriented principles are described, observance of which will allow to perform adequate and equivalent translation of culturally relevant contexts with retaining of aesthetic, informative, representative and expressive functions of the museum text. The most frequent translation techniques are transcription, transliteration, lexical omission, analogue substitution, lexical and grammatical transformation, and replacement.

Keywords

• linguaculture
• culture transfer
• cultural translation
• multilingual museum communication
• museum catalogue
• realia
• translation principles