Translation Through Cultural Transfer in the Receiving Language

In the folklore text, the main task of the bilingual ethno-translator is to identify cultural referents, i.e. "culturems" (the smallest unit of a cultural phenomenon or fact, the common element of some forms, structures or types of culture). The proper translation of "culturems" will be the key for the transmission of the socio-cultural atmosphere and of the local flavors of the national specificities in the source text. The translator of fairy tales, in our case, should prove a perfect cultural transfer in the process of conveying a cultural context in the source language. He is required to search and match equivalents, likely to transmit the same emotive reaction to the reader of the receiving language. The process of translating folk texts which include numerous cultural units presents several difficulties: linguistic ones (different grammatical structures), difficulties connected with the socio-ethnological realities which represent an obvious cultural distinction at comparative level between the two languages engaged in the translation act. Consequently, in the receiving text there are no longer found, due to the translating act, those "culturems" that were sacrificed through elimination or omission from the target text.