Cultural Inequivalences from Albanian into English in the Translation of “Pallati I Ëndrrave” by Ismail Kadare

Abstract

This article focuses on cultural translation, especially addressing the issue of cultural inequivalences or losses occurring in the translation of “Pallati i Ëndrrave” written by Ismail Kadare. The main aim of this article is to investigate how different cultural aspects of source text are transmitted into the target text, causing cultural losses. As we might know, cultural losses are defined as the losses of cultural norms, social customs, idioms, and proverbial wisdom that are inherited through generations and comprise the identity of the source culture. Such losses occur during the process of correlating the verbal signs of one culture to another different culture and result mainly from misrepresenting the literariness of the source text and its pragmatic forces. Therefore, to present such cases, many examples of cultural losses are given, which are divided based on different type of losses in both version. Thus, in order to illustrate cultural aspects in literature, we analyze figurative language such as culture items, idiomatic expressions, proverbs in two texts: Albanian (the source text) and English (the target text). The analysis of examples have shown that translation of cultural aspects of the source text was communicatively successful, however, it failed to represent the culture-bound words which represent the implicit level of the source text. In this sense, we argue that figurative language and cultural terms of the source text are unfamiliar for target text and they should be looked at from the perspective of a cultural insider.