Cultural Words REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
‘gap’ or ‘distance’ between the source and target language.” Newmark 1998: 95-103 mentions that the cultural words in several classes below.
1 Ecology Geographical features can be normally distinguished from other cultural
term in that they are usually value-free, politically and commercially. Ecology consists of animals, plants, local winds, mountains, plains, and ice.
Example: SL Blackberry
TL Blackberry 2 Material culture
Food is the most sensitive and important expression of national culture for many countries because food has the widest variety in translation
procedures. Material culture consists of food, clothes, housing, transport, and communications.
Example: SL Hamburger
TL Hamburger 3 Social culture
In considering social culture one has to distinguish between denotative and connotation problems of translation. Connotative meaning in each country is
different; a word may have a positive connotative meaning in one culture but not in another. Social culture consists of work and leisure.
Example: SL New York Times
TL New York Times 4 Organizations, customs and ideas
The political and social life of a country is reflected in its institutional terms. Names of ministries are usually literally translated, provided they are
appropriately descriptive. Organization, custom and ideas consist of political, social, legal, religious and artistic.
Example: SL FBI
TL FBI 5 Gestures and habits
For gestures and habits there are distinctions between description and function made where necessary in ambiguous case. Gestures and habits
often described in non-cultural language. Example:
SL OK TL Oke Iya Siap Baik
Beside the theory of cultural words, the researcher also uses the translation problems theory by Mona Baker. The reason of choosing this theory
is because the researcher found relationships of both theories.
Baker 1995:21-26 mentions several common problems of non- equivalence at word level in translation: culture specific concept, the source
language concept is not lexicalized in the target language, the source language word is semantically complex, the source and target languages make different
distinction in meaning, the target language lacks a superordinate, the target language lacks a specific terms hyponym, differences in physical or
interpersonal perspective, differences in expressive meaning, differences in form, differences in frequency and purpose of using specific forms, and the use
of loan word in the source language. One of the translation problems mentioned above which relates to the
cultural word is culture specific concept. This problem comes when the source- language word may express a concept which is totally unknown in the target
culture. The concept in question may be abstract or concrete; it may relate to a religious belief, a social custom, or even a type of food. Such concepts are
often referred to as ‘culture-specific’. Example:
SL Valentine TL Hari kasih saying
In relation to Newmark’s cultural concept, Brasiene 2013:5 states: One manifestation of culture in language is the usage of words and
phrases that refer to cultural entities. Baker refers to cultural entities as “culture-specific concepts”, Newmark defines them as cultural words,
Nord employs the term cultureme, Gambier names them as culture- specific references, Robinson uses terms realia and culture-bound
phenomena.
By the statement above, it can be said that actually both of cultural word and culture specific concept are the same theories which focus about
cultural entities at the level of word to phrase in a language.