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Cultural Values in Translation Services

For an example of cultural values in translation services, we can refer to American writer, Tom Wolfe, and his chronicling of life in New York. Often there are many references to the price of things. Sherman McCoy says "Once you had lived in a $2.6 million apartment on Park Avenue - it was impossible to live in a $1 million apartment! Naturally, there was no way to explain this to a living soul. Unless you were a complete fool, you couldn't even make the words come out of your mouth. Nevertheless - it was so. It was ... an impossibility!" He [Sherman McCoy] sat with his $650 shoes pulled up against the cold white bowl of the toilet and the newspaper rustling in his trembling hands, envisioning Campbell, her eyes brimming with tears, leaving the marbled entry hall, on the tenth floor for the last time, commencing her descent into the lower depths.

The dollars, on a technical level can be translated into any other currency with no problem whatsoever. But in what frame are we going to understand 650 dollar shoes? An American, within his or her own cultural frame is likely to find the question strange. It is natural (for an American) to talk about the price of things.

For other cultures this is not so. This is part of the out-of-awareness culture Hall cited in his Triad of culture. A French reader's reaction to this use of money is well described by Raymonde Carroll in his book Cultural Misunderstandings , which was originally written with tge title Evidences Invisibles: "Money", he writes, "Someone should talk about money. For a French person, the face of an American could easily be replaced by a dollar sign, A sign of "incurable materialism," of arrogance, of power, of "vulgar, unrefined pleasure".

In fact, if it is at all possible to attach a price to something, as approximate as it may be, that price will surely be mentioned. For an American though, money is simply a useful symbol signifying the type of shoe, apartment, etc. The underlying value depends on the context. Here, dollars indicate the amount of effort, sacrifice, and ultimately success that Sherman, the hero in the book, has had in life.

As we can see, a direct translation leads the reader to a different set of values, and hence distorts the writer's intention. This needs to be considered as part of the value of culture in translation services. This is an example of the danger of a faithful translation, and highlights one of the problems of 'foreignizing' a text. The idea of 'foreignizing' a translation to prevent ethnocentrism comes from Lawrence Venuti. He defines the concept, in Schaffner like this: "Foreignizing ... means taking the reader over to the foreign culture, making him or her see the (cultural and linguistic) differences.... A foreignizing strategy seeks to evoke a sense of the foreign".

However, in this case by leaving the foreign money as in the original, the translation will only strengthen the ethnocentric view that all American eyes are made up of Donald Duck dollars. As some pointed out during the debate with Venuti on the subject: "what is intended to be a non-ethnocentric ... translation ... can be read as being extremely ethnocentric", and "literalism is not always a good way of being non-ethnocentric". Translators who work for ABC Translations understand the culture as well as the language.

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