The Role Of The Translator As Communicator

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The Role of the Translator as Communicator across Cultures Nowadays within translation, it is not as black and white as people firstly think. This is within respect to the fact that as well as simply rewriting the words on paper to be comprehendible, we must now also consider the fact that translation and culture go hand-in-hand. This is due to the fact that it is now a common thing that culture and translation are being increasingly linked, as translation mixes two or more cultures within a rewrite. We are seeing more and more that translators are being referred to as “cross-cultural specialists” (Mary Snell-Hornby, 1992) and therefore we must consider their role within the translation field and profession, taking further into consideration the cultural interpreter and mediator and the problems they may face when doing their work. A series of habits, value judgements and classification systems are just a few of the things that each linguistic community have at their disposal, which are sometimes clearly different, but sometimes overlap. Cultures, therefore, create a variability factor that the translator will have to take into account. George Steiner (1975) describes the translator as “a bilingual mediating agent between monolingual communication participants in two different language communities”. This variability factor is where the role of the translator as communicator across cultures is transferred to certain professionals in particular: the cultural interpreter and the cultural mediator. Firstly, the cultural interpreter has the duty of conveying messages in a way appropriate to the language with cultural frameworks involved. This usually involves an interpreter from a particular culture who assists a service provider and their client to understand each other. The cultural mediator on the other hand, facilitates communication, understanding and
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