Translating culture: Translation strategies and techniques for Proverbs

Abstract

This research work aims to analyze the translation strategies and techniques used in translating English proverbs about friendship into Kazakh, with a special focus on their cultural and linguistic adaptation. The objective of the study is to identify the most effective strategies and techniques for preserving both the literal and figurative meanings of proverbs while respecting cultural nuances. The study also aims to highlight the challenges faced by human translators and the shortcomings of AI-based tools in translating culturally loaded content. To achieve these goals, this research uses a qualitative, product-based, and descriptive approach. Fifty English proverbs related to friendship were selected from Kenesbayeva’s bilingual collection English Proverbs and Sayings (2004) and analyzed according to translation strategies such as equivalence, analogy, literal translation, calque, descriptive translation, and antonymic translation. The translations of proverbs about friendship using various AI tools were compared, and their advantages and disadvantages were identified. The results of the study found that strategies of analogy and equivalence are the most effective in translating national linguistic units. While antonymic translation, calque, word for word translation and descriptive translation are used very rarely and often do not fully reveal the figurative meaning in translation of proverbs. This research work proves that human translation has not lost its relevance in translating cultural content. This work makes a great contribution to the field of translation study, linguistics and paremiology, provides practical recommendations for translators working with the English-Kazakh language pairs.