Translation as a Means of Intercultural Communication

Abstract

Translation is considered to be the most economical type of intercultural communication. This idea is announced by Monica Năstase, a Romanian researcher who investigated the difficulty of translating realia words from Romanian into English. Realia are words and expressions for culture-specific items. As realia carry a very local overtone, they often represent a challenge for translators. They are born in popular culture, and are increasingly found in very diverse kinds of texts. In this paper we discuss the translation variants of such realia words as “colac”, “ie”, “mămăligă”, “horă” and “dor” from Romanian into English as they represent translatable lacunas and the interpreter has to be very accurate in transposing them into another language. At the same time we concentrate on the ways of rendering word combinations containing „privacy” lexeme in English, a value which is typical to the English and American cultures, and analyse variants of these realia words translated into Romanian.