Nutthaporn Decha. Bridging linguistic and cultural gaps in translating the being Thai column in Kinnaree magazine from Thai into English. Master's Degree(Language and Culture for Communication and Development). Mahidol University. : Mahidol University, 2006.
Bridging linguistic and cultural gaps in translating the being Thai column in Kinnaree magazine from Thai into English
การศึกษาประเด็นทางภาษาและวัฒนธรรมในการแปลคอลัมน์ Being Thai ในนิตยสารกินรีจากภาษาไทยเป็นภาษาอังกฤษ
Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to analyze linguistic and cultural issues of the
Being Thai Column in Kinnaree Magazine, a bilingual production, and strategies
in translating cultural terms from Thai into English.
On the linguistic issues, there are idiomatic and literal translation strategies.
For idiomatic translation, the research mostly identified addition, subtraction, and
alteration strategies. Addition and alteration strategies were found in translation at
both sentence and paragraph levels. However, the subtraction strategy was only
found at the sentence level. The results also indicated that for linguistic issues, the
translation strategies applied were mostly used to deal with differences between
Thai and English grammatical structures.
Regarding the cultural perspective, four major types of cultural terms in the
Being Thai column were identified, namely, ecological, material, social, and
religious cultural terms. Totally, 357 cultural words were identified in this column
in issues from May, 1994 to December 2004. The largest group of cultural terms
concerned material culture, while the smallest group explained social culture. In
translating the cultural terms from Thai into English, the translator sometimes used
a principal strategy, and sometimes a combination of two or three principal
strategies. The principal strategies were using English equivalents, transliteration,
addition of extraneous information, subtraction of the cultural terms, alteration of
the cultural terms, interpretation, and elucidation. The two principal strategies that
were combined to translate a cultural term were English equivalents and
elucidation, transliteration and English equivalents, transliteration and
interpretation, transliteration and addition of extraneous information, transliteration
and the addition of English modifiers. As for the combination of three strategies,
there were transliteration with the addition of modifiers and extraneous
information, transliteration with English equivalents, and the addition of
extraneous information.
In terms of idioms, there were not many idioms in this column. Two main
strategies were used to translate idioms: literal translation, and idiomatic
translation. Idiomatic translation included the strategies of interpretation and
transliteration and elucidation.