Cultural Translation

Another type of technical translation that a translation agency can provide is cultural translation. Viewed broadly, cultural translation is the process of translating the peculiarities and specificities of a given cultural setting in the act of translation. Cultural translation is useful especially when translating texts from a very disparate culture, such as Southeast Asian cultures and texts from the Middle East. Cultural translation, like all forms of specialized and labor intensive technical translations, thrives on the prior knowledge of the translator and the length of stay that he or she had in a particular region on the globe.

An effective cultural translation would only be possible if the translator has had adequate training with a particular discipline that involves international or local cultures, or had lived in a place long enough to know the specific customs and ethos of a culture. This kind of technical translation would be useful for those who wish to do research on foreign cultures and want to study texts that have been written in a particular foreign language. A good cultural translation would be able to transform the cultural content of these kinds of documents and transfer them to the target language, sacrificing little of the much needed cultural content.

Cultural translation thrives on the ability of a translation agency to locate specific translators that has the proper background to handle such tasks. Also, in the case of cultural translation, especially for multi volume works, it would be great to employ translation agencies to do the task for you, because they would have access to several tools that would be useful in deciphering the texts that you have in mind. The modern trend in translation is the use of CAT or computer assisted translation to speed up the process of translation.

Large scale databases like Trados also make the process of translation more efficient and accurate, because in the case of cultural elements, databases will be able to compare past input and compare these to the current input. The disambiguation would be less of a hassle, and the translation would be greatly improved. The use of databases to aid the process of translation is greatly different from non-human assisted machine translations, which only thrives in prior instructions and direct substitutions of words in a particular text. This would not be applicable in cultural translation, not at all, because there would be a lot of ambiguities.