Zur Erschließung von Kultur in literarischen Texten aus translationsrelevanter Sicht (am Beispiel der deutschen Übersetzung der Erzählung „Таку вже Бог долю судив“ von Mychajlyna Roschkewytsch)

Abstract

The “cultural turn” in the translation studies makes it possible to consider translation as a culture transfer, as a means of intercultural communication. But what is meant by culture? How are the culture-specific actions, meanings, and worldviews represented in the texts? The questions still remain debatable. The paper is devoted to the problem of detection and interpretation of cultural meanings in the literary source text and their transference to the target text. Through the analysis of the existing conceptions, here we develop our own translational definition of the concept “culture” from the translation-relevant perspective. This enables the modeling of translators’ cultural background knowledge, so that they can understand cultural meanings in the original and reproduce them adequately in the translation. Within the cognitive-communicative approach, we define the literary text as an integrative mega-concept having a hierarchical structure of three layers: conceptual, image, and evaluative. The application of this methodology is illustrated on the material of a Ukrainian literary text and its German translation. On the basis of comparative analysis of the Ukrainian original and the German translation, we consider the examples of cultural asymmetries and discuss certain translation solutions for bridging cultural differences. Thus, cultural meanings can be revealed at all three layers of the integrative mega-concept of the literary text. At the conceptual layer, denotative meanings of explicit cultural elements in the text are analyzed. The image layer presupposes decoding of cognitive metaphors, which are the basis of linguistic images. At the evaluative layer, cultural meanings are identified through the analysis of implicit and explicit evaluation actions. The comparison of the integrative mega-concept of the source text and its reflection in the translation reveals most of the incongruities in the image layer as a result of a certain non-congruence in the worldviews of the Ukrainian and German linguocultural communities.

Keywords

• the concept of culture
• cultural meanings
• literary text
• integrative megaconcept