Can't see the wood for the trees: An overview of translation strategies from a 'cultural' perspective

Abstract

This survey paper presents an overview of the most popular approaches relating culture to translation strategies in Translation Studies. Examples out of a multilingual specialized corpus of articles published in several prestigious TS journals (1990-2014) are discussed and organized around key notions: equivalence (or analogy), cultural identity, domestication vs. foreignization (Venuti 1995) and culture as a translation problem - within didactic, experimental and empirical approaches. The implicit visions of culture in these approaches are elucidated. A preliminary analysis of the corpus shows that TS faces a large number of problems with regard to 'cultural' understandings of translation as an activity. There seems to be a lack of coherent terminology to label strategies. Empirical testing of domestication and foreignization poses problems that demand further investigation. Taxonomies of translation strategies might be appropriate for didactic purposes.