What it is
Cultural filtering is a decision taken once for a whole text and then applied to every culture-specific item in it: how much of the source culture reaches the reader, and in what form. Individual techniques such as borrowing, description and adaptation are the instruments; the filter is the setting they are all adjusted to.
Chesterman lists it as his first pragmatic strategy, Pr1, and describes it as a continuum with naturalization and domestication at one pole and exoticization and foreignization at the other. Franco Aixelá supplies the working detail. He arranges the available treatments of a culture-specific item on a scale ordered by degree of intercultural manipulation, and the ordering, not the inventory, is his argument: each rung intervenes measurably more than the one before it. The conservation group runs repetition, in which the item is carried over unchanged; orthographic adaptation, transcription or transliteration into the target script or spelling; linguistic non-cultural translation, a denotatively close target rendering that still points at the source culture; extratextual gloss, the same rendering with an explanation placed outside the running text; and intratextual gloss, the explanation woven in so as not to interrupt the reader. The substitution group continues with synonymy, a variant used to avoid repeating the item; limited universalization, replacement by another source-culture item that is less opaque; absolute universalization, replacement by a neutral, culture-free item; naturalization, replacement by an item belonging to the target culture; deletion; and autonomous creation, in which the translator introduces a culture-specific item the source does not have.
Venuti's argument about domestication and foreignization sits behind the continuum as its ideological reading, but it answers a different question: who benefits from the fluency of a translated text. Aixelá and Chesterman ask what was done to a given item, which is what a reviser can check.
When it applies
- The text is dense in culture-specific items and inconsistent treatment would be visible: literary prose, marketing copy, tourism material, curricula.
- The commission specifies a readership whose familiarity with the source culture is known, which fixes how much explanation is needed.
- The source item recurs, so the first occurrence sets a precedent that the rest of the text has to honour.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: simit
- Target: simit, a ring-shaped bread crusted with sesame
- Comment: Intratextual gloss: the item is conserved and the explanation carried inside the sentence. One rung above bare repetition, and two rungs below "sesame bagel", which would be naturalization and would import an item from a third culture.
DE>EN
- Source: Der Termin findet beim Finanzamt statt.
- Target: The appointment is at the tax office.
- Comment: Linguistic non-cultural translation. The rendering is denotatively accurate and still points at a German institution, because "tax office" does not name any specific target-system body. The item has been made legible without being relocated.
NL>EN
- Source: Hij haalde zijn vwo-diploma.
- Target: He completed pre-university secondary education.
- Comment: Absolute universalization: a culture-free description replaces a named national qualification. Compare "he took his A-levels", which is naturalization and moves the reader into a different education system altogether.
Watch out for
The commonest failure is not choosing the wrong setting but drifting between settings. A text that conserves a court name, universalizes a school qualification and naturalizes a currency has no policy, and the reader has no stable basis for judging how much of what is described is foreign.
- The scale describes intervention, not quality. A high rung is not a worse choice, and conservation is not automatically more faithful: repetition of an opaque item can leave the reader with less information than a gloss would.
- Aixelá's synonymy is motivated by recurrence, not by cultural distance. It is the choice of a variant to avoid saying the same item twice, and secondary accounts that present it as target-culture substitution have confused it with naturalization.
- In certified and legal work the setting is not the translator's to choose. The conventions of the receiving authority fix it, generally at conservation plus gloss, and deletion is not available at all.
References
- Franco Aixelá, J. (1996). "Culture-specific Items in Translation." In R. Álvarez & M. C.-Á. Vidal (eds), Translation, Power, Subversion. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 52–78, scale at pp. 61–64.
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Translation Library 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Revised edition 2016, Ch. 4.
- Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.