The “cultural turn” in the translation studies makes it possible to consider translation as a culture transfer, as a means of intercultural communication. But what is meant by culture? How are the culture-specific actions, meanings, and worldviews represented in the texts? The questions still remain debatable. The paper is devoted to the problem of detection and interpretation of cultural meanings in the literary source text and their transference to the target text. Through the analysis of the existing conceptions, here we develop our own translational definition of the concept “culture” from the translation-relevant perspective. This enables the modeling of translators’ cultural background knowledge, so that they can understand cultural meanings in the original and reproduce them adequately in the translation. Within the cognitive-communicative approach, we define the literary text as an integrative mega-concept having a hierarchical structure of three layers: conceptual, image, and evaluative. The application of this methodology is illustrated on the material of a Ukrainian literary text and its German translation. On the basis of comparative analysis of the Ukrainian original and the German translation, we consider the examples of cultural asymmetries and discuss certain translation solutions for bridging cultural differences. Thus, cultural meanings can be revealed at all three layers of the integrative mega-concept of the literary text. At the conceptual layer, denotative meanings of explicit cultural elements in the text are analyzed. The image layer presupposes decoding of cognitive metaphors, which are the basis of linguistic images. At the evaluative layer, cultural meanings are identified through the analysis of implicit and explicit evaluation actions. The comparison of the integrative mega-concept of the source text and its reflection in the translation reveals most of the incongruities in the image layer as a result of a certain non-congruence in the worldviews of the Ukrainian and German linguocultural communities.
Pope John Paul II, following in the steps of his predecessors, strongly advocated the critical appraisal of the influence of culture on people’s spirituality. This article responds to his directive by seeking to develop an interpretation of how and why contemporary spirituality has changed that will better inform the work of religious educators in Catholic schools. A number of constructs like secularisation, privatisation of religion etc. have been used to describe the significant change in spirituality of many of the young people in Australian Catholic schools over the last 50 years from a more traditional religious spirituality to something that is more secular, eclectic and individualistic. To some extent, this change has been acknowledged; but the religion curricula in Catholic schools still give the impression that all of the students are, or should be, regular church goers – as if Sunday mass attendance was to be the end point of their education in spirituality. An interpretation of change in spirituality in terms of change in cultural meanings has been developed for the purpose of understanding contemporary spiritualities in other than a deficit model. Such an interpretation may be more persuasive in getting Catholic education authorities and religious educators firstly to accept, rather than condemn or ignore, the significant change in contemporary spiritualty; and then secondly, to take steps to address this change positively and constructively in the Catholic school religion curriculum. This article is concerned with the first step – understanding contemporary spirituality; it is intended that the second question will be considered in a follow up article.
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