Empirical Study on the Translation of Culturemes depending on the Degree of Translation Competence. An Exploratory Study

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present an experimental study on the identification and characterisation of culturemes in a foreign culture and their translation into that of the translator. These parameters will be analysed depending on the degree of translation competence.

To carry out this experiment, we set the following specific aims: 1) to observe the identification and characterisation of the culturemes in a given text; 2) to observe the translation of these culturemes to determine their acceptability degree; 3) to describe the translation techniques that have been applied to translate these culturemes and 4) to identify the degree of difficulty of the translation.

We formulate the following first hypothesis: the higher is the acquisition degree of the translation competence, the better will be the identification and the characterisation of the culturemes and the higher will be the acceptability of the translation.

With this hypothesis in mind and to fulfil the main aim and the specific objectives, we have carried out an empirical exploratory study with 20 students from the four years that make up the Degree in Translation and Interpreting at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. All students had German as their first foreign language and Spanish as their mother tongue.

In this article, we explain the conceptual framework and the methodology used through the study. We also offer the analysis and the most significant results of the identification and characterisation of the culturemes, the degree of acceptability of the translations, the translation techniques used and the degree of difficulty of the translation. Finally, we also present the conclusions that we have reached and the outlook for future work on that field.