Teksti kultuuriline võõrasus kui tõlkeprobleem
Cultural foreignness of texts as translation problem

Summary/Abstract: Relying on the on-going discussions on translation studies in Germany – especially in the Göttingen school of literary translation – this article considers foreignness originating from the culture of texts and translation problems arising from that. To begin with, the article gives an overview of the concept of culture, discusses the role of culture in translation studies and defines the relationship between the notions of the 'Self' and the 'Other'. Subsequently, the article looks at the cultural foreignness of texts and ways to cope with this in the translation process. Foreignness is primarily defined through culture-specific elements. For the translator, a text is "foreign" if it contains features which the translator who relies on his own language and culture cannot straightforwardly interpret and integrate into the translator’s own language and culture without any difficulty. The said foreignness of the text may entail both translation problems and the translator’s internal decision conflicts. Based on Huntemann and Rühling (1997), a distinction between two types of foreignness – cognitive and discriminatory – is made in the article. A text or its elements are cognitively foreign to the translator if the latter lacks the theoretical or practical knowledge necessary for understanding the text. Discriminatory foreignness rests on negative allocations of an object and its class or of objects belonging into different classes. By analysing cognitive and discriminatory foreignness, also cultural-specific translation problems are sought to be defined. When a source text contains foreignness manifesting itself in one or another way, the translator is faced with not only inevitable difficulties, but also with contingent problems. As anticipated, the translator needs to deal with problems related to transmission of the cultural other as well as contingently subjective cognitive foreignness. The translator’s problem is not only lessening the cognitive foreignness of the text for himself, but also finding a way to convey the discriminatory foreignness in the form of a translation to the target text receivers, drawing on the potentialities of his own language and culture.

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