Cultural elements in Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Jivago from a translation perspective

Abstract

Cultural elements reflect the history, civilization and common knowledge shared by members of a community. In literary translation, the translator is faced with an essential choice: report, translate or adapt cultural references? In other words, the translator must choose the global strategy for transposing culturemes from the source language to the target language: domestication or foreignisation. The paper follows the techniques and strategies for transposing culturemes from the novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak into Romanian: direct transfer, semantic equivalence, cultural adaptation, generalization, annotation, explicitation, omission. In the treatment of culturemes, the translator should be guided by the care of not producing a heterogeneous target text.