An Investigation into the Strategies Applied by English Interpretation and Translation-majored Juniors at School of Foreign Languages, Cantho University to Tackle Difficulties of Cultural Terms in Translation

Abstract

In recent decades, culture translation is considered as one of the most important fields in the translation area. Actually, translating cultural terms may not be an easy work for translators, especially to EIT majored students. Accordingly, the translators have to face several challenges related to cultural terms in their translation. In the context of Can Tho University, there are little studies conducted to examine the difficulties of cultural terms and popular strategies applied to tackle these challenges. As a result, to fill the gap of the existing studies, this study was carried out to investigate cultural terms which create difficulties for English Interpretation and Translation majored students, Course 42 of Can Tho University in the translation and common strategies used by students to tackle these challenges. Subsequently, the questionnaire with 34 questions was designed to examine 40 participants from EIT major of course 42. The findings, after that, revealed that students actually face difficulties in their translating cultural terms. In particular, the responses of the current study showed that all typically mentioned cultural terms in the study namely terms of environmental culture, terms of material culture terms of social culture, terms of cultural heritage and terms of linguistic culture created difficulties for participants at various levels. Besides, the responses of the participants indicated that all 15 listed strategies including adaptation, borrowing, calque, compensation, compression, description, equivalence, explicitation, generalization, literal translation, modulation particularisation, substitution, transposition and variation were applied by EIT majored students at Can Tho University to overcome challenges of cultural terms and have more successful translation.