Cultural Issues in Translation

Translation is recognised as an act of culture-specific communication. A translator is the ‘first reader’ of the other culture as is shown in the foreign language text and, consequently, has to present the other in a primary process. For him learning to translate means ‘learning to read’, i.e. to produce meanings which are acceptable for the cultural community the reader belongs to. Each translated text for a target public that has no access to the original, is the source for a different and new way of reading, which implies a major responsibility for the translator. As it has been observed, such interaction between two or more cultures in the process of translation results in a creation of a ‘hybrid’ text, which appears in the target culture by adopting some of the features of the text in the source culture. As a matter of fact, a hybrid text can be described as a product of a compromise between two or more cultures. The paper will concentrate on the kinds of the interaction and intercultural activity, which refer to ‘translating between cultures’. The basis for discussion will be literary texts by Vladimir Nabokov as well as Helen Fielding and lyrics of songs presented in different language versions of the musical Metro.