Miks eestlane sööb sireliõisi ehk kultuuriliste konnotatsioonide tõlgitavus
Why Estonians eat lilac blossoms or trans-latability of cultural connotations

Summary/Abstract: Most culture-specific words in a text are readily recognizable because they are either related to a certain language and culture or marked as "foreign", and as a rule, they cannot be translated directly into another language. Other culture-specific expressions, however, feature linguis-tic signs which bear no external markers and seem easily transferrable, but still convey connotational meanings that become apparent only in certain cultural contexts. Connotations as culture-specific components of meaning carried by linguistic signs are related to certain cultural or communicative contexts and have an important role in understanding a text and in communication between interlocutors. If generally translation is considered possible, although not unproblematic, on the denotational level, transferring connotational meanings of linguistic signs is found to be more challenging and occasionally even leads to the claim of untranslatability. It is often erroneously believed that one-to-one correlation of linguistic signs on the level of the signifier means similar correspondence on the level of the signified. The problem is deeper, though, because in most cases, connotations of readily translatable words are nowhere stated in writing and depend on a context, which carries information, as well as on culture-specific peculiarities. Therefore, they cannot be translated in the traditional way, but have to be conveyed by different textual means. The article seeks to find answers to the questions such as how the mechanisms of under-standing work, where the limits of translatability are and whether cultural connotations can or should be translated. Since the author is a Germanist, the article is largely based on the traditions of German translation studies.

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