Translation In Action: The Effect of Vermeers Theory on Translating Cultural Communicative Texts

Translation In Action: The Effect of Vermeers Theory on Translating Cultural Communicative Texts

research study will focus on exploring the implications of Hans Vermeer’s (1989) theory in translating cultural communicative texts. Vermmer proposed his Skopos theory to emphasize the functional approach of translation.

According to Vermmer, translation is a purposeful activity, intended to address the audience of the translation. Therefore, setting the target text purpose is important to produce efficient translation.

This functional approach of translation depends on the knowledge, expectations, and the norms of the target readers, who are influenced by various social and cultural factors. These factors determine whether to preserve the source text or to modify it to meet the needs of the readers of the target text.

While word-for-word, sense-for-sense, literal, and free translation were dominant to translate religious and literary texts before the 20th century, the emphasis is now on communicative and semantic translation.

The functionalist and communicative translation theories moved translation to be considered as an act of intercultural communication (Munday, 2012).

Vermeer argued that every action should have an aim, and, since translation is an action, it must have a specified aim. Vermeer believed that the skopos of any text determines the translation strategies. In other words, every translation has skopos based on the needs of the TL audience.

Vermeer also claimed that the translator is considered to be a text designer whose main task is to create a target text capable of functioning efficiently in the target culture. Therefore, the focus of the present study will be on exploring Vermeer’s theory for translating cultural communicative texts. Cultural communicative texts are written to convey cultural events or projects. Guerra(2012) argued that when translating a cultural communicative text, a translator’s job is bridging the gap across cultures, using various strategies to solve the text problems.

Hence, translation as a means of cross-cultural communication is of great significance to the cultural strategy for Saudi Arabia to transmit the heritage of the Saudi culture.Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the effectiveness of Vermeer’s theory for translating cultural communicative texts.
Problem of the study:

The present study will focus on the problems of translating cultural texts, specifically cultural communicative texts that aim at transmitting Saudi Arabia heritage to the international community. English and Arabic texts will be selected from Al Janaderih documents to examine cross-cultural barriers and how the application of Vermeer’s theory can transcend these barriers for the purpose of establishing authentic communication with the TL readers.

The researcher will focus on two problematic issues. The first one is the barriers that hinder achieving the purpose of the cultural texts. The second issue concerns cross-cultural readability,and how it affects the value of the translation………………………………….