The concept of culture is one of the most controversial in Translation Studies. According to Amigo Extremera (2015), a culture is not the set of knowledge about everything related to one or several specific compartmentalized geographical areas (divided into “culturally specific” words).
The term “cultural canon” is more accurate as a way of referring to this kind of “container” around which most reflections on culture in Translation Studies arise. According to this study, there are people who know the cultural canon better than others, but all participate in the culture in different ways, not to a greater or lesser degree.
This is a very interesting way of thinking about what culture is, because it breaks with the idea that there are people more educated than others. This perspective of Amigo Extremera about the concept of culture is especially relevant in literary translation, because when translators are faced with a cultural element that is unknown to them, they always try to find (in a general way) what it means for all the people of a certain geographical area.
What translators must look for is whether this element is in the writer’s cultural canon, and what meaning it has in relation to the writer’s personal experiences. That will give translators a better idea of why writers use that cultural element in their text.
References
Amigo Extremera, J. (2015). ¿Cultuqué? El concepto de cultura en los estudios de Traducción. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.3517.7121
Contino, Lumey (2024). Literary Translation of Narrative Texts.