5. TRANSLATION, A MATTER OF CULTURE

The translation process is an as fascinating as problematic art. The difficulties linked to translation come from a series of factors and aspects which are not only linked to the translation field but also embrace cultural matters.

The language is the mirror of a culture and of how it perceives and sees the world, it lives indeed in an interdependence relationship with the culture of which it belongs and it is almost impossible to split them, because when we talk about language we refer to the culture it represents and when we talk about culture we refer to the language through it expresses itself.

There are also terms reach of cultural references and difficult to translate that are even not explained in the dictionaries, because they are so connected to the geographical and cultural reality that will lose their sense and value beyond such reality, and if the translation itself is already an hard work, this becomes worsen when to all of this are added also humorous expressions.

This is the most difficult obstacle a translator has to overcome. He knows that it is hard to keep the comical effect of the source language in the target language, particularly if the effect on which comic is based is the wordplay because in the words are hidden out and out cultural universes, difficult to translate in the other language or perhaps translatable but incomprehensible for the interlocutor of the target language, because he has no structures able to perceive that incongruity and so it will become for him semantically inaccessible...

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