| dc.description.abstract | In a globalised world, international communication across various cultures effaces language barriers and cultural differences. In this context, translation builds bridges of comprehension and appreciation across various societies by bringing closer people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Without translation, the swift exchange of information of today’s world would be almost unattainable. This might be one reason for the rapid development of translation studies over the last forty years, in which its proponents have been striving to establish it as an academic discipline.
Among the many approaches to translation favoured by scholars, to be further outlined in this thesis, one of the most recent ones involves cultural exchange, and focuses on an element that has become a focal point in all recent studies in the humanities, namely identity. At a suprasegmental level, above the identity of an individual or an in-group, lays the national identity, connected with the language and culture of the respective nation. From the multitude of aspects concerning language and culture, this thesis focuses on proverbs, as elements of tightening the relation between the two, and (or rather especially) on their translation, which may - and usually does - produce hindrance in the target reader/ audience’s understanding of the source text, lest it be done with respect to the aforementioned interrelation.
One of the facts that many translators overlook is that translation is an act of communication which calls upon appropriate use of language in order to reach an acceptable target text, especially from the culture and identity perspective. When proverbs are involved, the translator is not, by any means, to disregard the culture of either the source or the target text when translating, since there is no clear-cut delimitation between language and culture. The translation of proverbs has aroused much discussion and debate and continues to do so. Many linguists, as well as translation theorists, have attempted to analyse and explain the process of proverb translation, most often in an interdisciplinary exchange with paremiology, the field of study dealing with proverbs. Some of their cultural significances and usage are alike or even identical, while others present major dissimilarities, which renders the translation process more difficult, if not downright impossible. The research of translational issues in paremiology is going to be inspiring, because of its double perspective, since both English and Romanian are, in turn, source and target languages. In addition, the proverbs in focus cover a wide variety of subjects, this being the main reason why they are tackled on the ground of their parallelism (at semantic, pragmatic, lexical but also syntactic levels). | ro_RO |
