CULTURAL WORDS AND PHRASES Language and Culture

Culture: the whole way of life of a certain linguistic community. This includes not only material aspects but also conceptual, philosophical, political, religious, and customary in addition to beliefs and traditions. In this sense, language becomes the most integral part of culture, an index of the whole culture.

Nowadays the whole world has become a small village and what happens in the remotest corners of the globe becomes known to the rest of the world in a few minutes. Human beings anywhere in the world have a lot in common. They share life and death and a great deal of what goes on between the cradle and the grave. There are, therefore, a lot of things, material and otherwise, that are common to mankind, i.e. universals, and are indicated linguistically in much the same manner.

Culture and Translation As said before, there are items in the world and aspects in our lives that are shared by all human beings. Theoretically, these items and aspects should create no difficulty to the translator. Thus we assume with some certainty, for instance, that all people have breakfast and most people in the world drink tea.

There are so many differences even in the meanings of such universal words, which make them actually mean different things to different people. In spite of all this, we might be justified in considering that our translation of these words is acceptable if we catch the essence of the meaning that is shared by most communities.

But what should we do when we are confronted with those words or phrases that are culture- bound, i.e. peculiar to a certain linguistic community ? Let,s first try to classify these items, then find out how we should deal with each category.

Translating Cultural Words In dealing with this area of translation, we cannot, and in fact should not, be dogmatic. The approach to the translation of cultural words varies from one linguistic community to another. It depends on many factors. One of the two most important factors is that we do not really belong to the Western culture, neither ethnically, nor linguistically. We use different languages that descend from two different origins

This does not mean that the two communities have been isolated from each other over the centuries. In fact they have been in close contact at least in two crucial eras : the first was the Middle Ages when Arabic culture reigned supreme ; the second is the present time, especially the 19 th and 20 th centuries, when the culture of the West has been having an increasingly deep impact on the Arab World.

This means that there has been extensive and intensive intercultural communication between the two communities for long period of time, and this brings us to the second important factor. Arab Culture was influencing Western culture in the Middle Ages and at the Renaissance and helping it to open up and develop into what we see now. However, the present time with the tremendous progress, changes and upheavals quite familiar to us all has been revolutionizing our lives and thoughts far more thoroughly than ever before, with the WESTERN CULTURE IN THE LEAD.