Critical Essay: “the Role of Culture in Translation” by Monireh Akbari

Abstract

The critical essay is well structured. It consists of introduction, main body and conclusion. Essay explores main ideas, strengths and weaknesses of the article. It also includes comparison with other articles. Critical analysis focuses on themes which can potentially be interesting and even useful for those students who are interested in translation theory and want to continue their scientific career and is considered to be irrelevant for studying at Translation Studies major.

Sociolinguistics which studies various aspects of a "language and society" problem makes an invaluable contribution to the creation of linguistic base of modern theory of translation. Sociolinguistics is a science which brings a lot of new in theory of translation. This science studies interaction of language and society. Sociolinguistics considers a speaker from the point of view of his ethnos, cultural characteristics which distinguish him from other cultures. Thus, an object of this science is a man who refers himself to a certain sociocultural group, has professional and many other personal characteristics.

One of the known works in this sphere is the article “The Role of Culture in Translation” of Monireh Akbari published in the Journal of Academic and Applied Studies in August, 2013. The main idea of the author is to attract attention of modern linguists to a problem of studying of the extralinguistic, namely linguoculturological factors influencing the process and result of translation.

The author gives summary of works of the famous linguists, the article contains excerpts from their works devoted to the theory of translation. At the same time the author notices that even such famous linguists as Nida and Taber at the end of the last century did not include a concept of culture in the definition of the term “translation”. Much attention is paid to specific objectives and their decisions, for example to Culture-specific Items and strategy for their translation. M. Akbari gives as recommended translation algorithms strategies of Javier Franco Aixela, Mona Baker, Newmark, Vinay and Darbelnet. The strategy of translation of cultural specific items (CSI) of Franco Aixela is especially of great importance and interest. He managed to combine and describe in details the each strategy: repetition, orthographic adaptation, linguistic translation, synonymy, limited universalization, absolute universalization, naturalization, deletion, autonomous creation (see more detailed in “Culture-Specific Items in Translation” by Franco Aixelá, Javier).

In my opinion, the article can be interesting or even useful for linguist students, but not for future translators as is not informative for the last ones. The idea of the author is clear to me, but it is impossible to judge Akbari`s contribution to this extensive subject according this article: he refers to scientific