Rethinking the Translatability of Culture: A Sustainable Approach

Heated arguments are still going on about the translation of culture. The hottest point yet is ‘the (un)translatability of culture’. In our age of cross-culturalization, the fossilized Western view of culture as untranslatable is challenged. The concerns addressed by this paper are multifold. First, the translatability of culture is beyond doubt, like any other topic in language since the ultimate objective of translation is to achieve understandability among cultures either by finding a cultural equivalent in the other culture, or explaining the cultural concept via employing specific translation strategies and procedures. The second concern is to put an end to the huge problem of translating culture by proposing practical solutions handled easily by translators and based on well-defined and exemplified four strategies and their pertinent procedures. The third and ultimate concern is to achieve a sustainability approach to translating culture with a view to bringing world cultures closer to one another in terms of communications and mutual understanding. This approach is based on four major translation strategies: (1) neutralization of SL culture; (2) adoption of SL culture; (3) reconciliation between SL and TL cultures; and (4) clash among different cultures. These strategies are strongly related to the ultimate concern of sustainability: while the first avoids cultural sensitivity in the TL, the second implies tolerance among cultures by borrowing from each other; the third is a compromise between cultures; yet the fourth represents a limited challenge among cultures but does not spoil the sense of sustainable rapprochement among the four strategies. Hence, the problem of translating culture can be approached more conveniently than ever, thus achieving globalized understanding among different cultures with the least sensitivity. Finally, a frame of reference is suggested for applying this approach.