Thwarted Expectations: Investigating Translational Mishaps with Reference to Cultural Disparities

While there are many types of purely linguistic differences between languages which students of translation can be explicitly taught to recognise during their formal training, it is a far bigger task to try to make future translators detect and appropriately cater to relevant cultural differences between a source text and its intended target text. Yet, snags of a cultural character are just as detrimental to translation quality as are linguistic mistakes. The problem with cultural differences between source and target environments in translation is further aggravated by the fact that, in contrast with the finite number of linguistic differences between language systems, the range of variation in differences between cultural environments is virtually infinite.