Developing a transcultural tool for teaching cultures in translation studies

Abstract

This work sheds light on a significant part in the field of translation, which is represented by the challenges in translating cultural expressions or 'proverbs'. It contributes to implementing and assessing the role of situational context established by Halliday (1985) as a tool for developing and teaching cultural knowledge in translation classrooms. Two groups of undergraduate learners from two translation schools were nominated for participating in the research. The first group adopted traditional-based learning, while the second adopted inquiry-based learning, due to the dominant roles of those models in the field. Ten participants from each learning approach volunteered to participate in the experiment. The current research embodies the problem of lacking cultural knowledge theoretically and practically. The former gives a brief introduction on the study context through related studies in the literature. While, the latter answers the research questions by conducting two translation tasks to identify the challenges in translating proverbs and find out the role of cultural dimension and situational context during the process of translation. The research found that low cultural background knowledge was the main challenge which traditional and inquiry-based participants encountered during the cognition process for analysing the meaning of Arabic proverbs. The study showed that situational context enabled the participants to overcome this challenge and master cognitive sub-activities of problem-solving and decision-making by developing participants' cultural knowledge. Additionally, the results acknowledged the role of situational context in assessing participants' cultural background knowledge in both source and target languages.