The concept of “context” in English to Spanish translations: a sociolinguistic approach to the translator‟s competence and decisions

Abstract

This paper is in line with the present tendency within interdisciplinary studies which focuses on the relationship between cultural and discursive issues. Since the "pragmatic turn" and the "cultural turn" in translation studies which emerged in the 1970s, translation has been understood by many as a "cultural transfer" (Bassnett 1998). Therefore it seems quite obvious that, besides the "communicative competence" and the "textual competence" in both the original and target languages and cultures, the translator must be skilful at "cultural competence" and "thematic competence" of the texts that are to be translated. Following a discursive as well as a traductological analysis, we discuss two texts belonging to such different genres as literature and film subtitles from English into Spanish. In both of them the target texts are out of step with their corresponding original ones; this cannot be merely attributed to slips of tongue in the use of Spanish as a communicative instrument, but to translation failures in the translator's thematic and cultural competence. In sum, the case in point is that neither the immediate textual context nor the cultural context has been properly attended to in the translating process.