Cultural Presupposition and Decision-Making in the Functional Approach to Translation

Abstract

Baker (1992, p. 259) defined the term ”presupposition” as a pragmatic inference relating to the linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge that a sender assumes the receivers to have or which is necessary to retrieve the sender's message. For example, the sentence ”Bill's wife is beautiful” presupposes the fact that he is married, and the sentence ”Helen regrets being angry with her boyfriend” presupposes that she was angry with him in the past. Regarding the concept of presupposition in translation, what matters is the concept of cultural presupposition because culture-or socio-culture-specific information may exist anywhere in source texts (ST), a detail that a responsible translator should not ignore when translating STs. By following Holz-Manttari's (1984) translation action theory, translation is viewed as a human activity having purposes and involving intercultural transfer. When a professional translator, being an intercultural mediator, translates the Chinese word 豆腐 into English as ”tofu” instead of ”bean curd, ” it may be supposed that the target readers have seen the word ”tofu” and know that it is a kind of Chinese food made from soybeans; alternatively, it may be assumed that the target readers are vegetarians or persons who like oriental meals. However, a problem may occur when a translator discovers that the target readers do not possess the aforementioned knowledge about 豆腐. The translator then has to make a decision to choose either ”tofu, ” ”bean curd, ” or ”bean curd” plus an explanation as the translated version. In Nord's (1997) model, she asserts that a translator should first compare the ST and TT profiles defined in the commission, such as the intended text function and the addressees, to determine where the two texts may diverge before starting translation; then, the translator analyzes the ST to decide on the functional priorities for the translation strategies. Nord then provides a list of intratextual factors for an ST analysis, a presuppositional analysis being one of them. When analyzing the presupposition, a translator may discover that many difficult problems result from the divergence in cultural backgrounds between the TT and the ST readers. When examining the study of translation from a prospective angle, cultural presupposition is considered to play a large role in the impression that a translator makes on the TT readers. A translator providing sufficient or poor cultural backgrounds for these readers, whether consciously or unconsciously, will cause a different effect and impact on them. A translator well acquainted with the concept of cultural presupposition has an advantage to apply it freely to successfully achieve goals based on the translation purposes.