The Translation of Culture E-Book

Bruno Osimo

• Herausgeber: Bruno Osimo
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A culture is a way of perceiving reality. Do not be misled by the verb “perceive”. Some might think that, if the objective reality of a culture is the same, its perception must also be unique for all individuals. But perception is a subjective phenomenon, and what is perceived is not the photograph of reality, but one of the many possible photographs. The individual’s experience also influences her perceptive modalities.

Leseprobe

Bruno Osimo

The Translation of Culture

How a society is perceived by other societies

2019

Copyright © Bruno Osimo 2019

Original title: Traduzione della cultura

Translation from Italian by Bruno Osimo

Bruno Osimo is an author/translator who publishes himself

Printing is realized on a print-on-sale basis by Kindle Direct Publishing

ISBN  9791281358010 for the hardcover edition

ISBN 9788898467204 for the ebook edition

To contact the author/translator/publisher: [email protected]

Culture as a translation of reality

A culture is a way of perceiving reality. Do not be misled by the verb “perceive”. Some might think that, if the objective reality of a culture is the same, its perception must also be unique for all individuals. But perception is a subjective phenomenon, and what is perceived is not the photograph of reality, but one of the many possible photographs. The individual’s experience also influences her perceptive modalities.

When we read a newspaper, the materials are divided into various categories: politics, news, entertainment, commentary, sports, and so on. Similarly, within a culture we tend to use certain categories into which perceived reality is decomposed – often implicitly, taking it for granted. There are newspapers that dedicate a page to economy, others that dedicate twenty-five to it and do not call them “economy”, but divide the subject more specifically into “stock exchange”, “finance”, “companies”, and so on. There are newspapers that have a page on boating, others that have a page on mountaineering. In the latter case, news that could appear on the “nautical” page ends up, in the absence of anything else, in a generic area, perhaps dedicated to various news or sports. The reality reflected by these newspapers is the same, but the interpretation given to them is different, the categorization different. And to perceive implies that the perceived reality is typologised (and therefore interpreted), because this is the only way to treasure past experience in understanding the present[1].

We have talked about the implicit typology of reality: and in fact any text has two components: what is said (explicit) and what is communicated without being said because it is taken for granted (implicit). The unspoken can be obtained from a more or less large context, that is, from the culture in which the utterance is inserted. The possibility of not always saying everything is a precious resource. For example, think of a conductor who gets on the bus and says: “Tickets, please!” If she were to make explicit the unspoken, she would have to make a very long speech: “This is a bus of company X. To access it, you need a document, consisting of [...]. Since someone might not have this document, I am sent, for a fee, by company X to check…”. Note that even in this more detailed explanation, a great many elements are taken for granted.

Different cultures attribute different tasks to the unspoken part of communication. (Turning the perspective upside down, it can also be said: the role assigned to the unspoken in communication is called “culture”.) Their implicit content varies according to the varying environmental context. The affirmation