A kontrasztív szemléletű nyelvi és kulturális tudatosság fontossága a fordítás gyakorlatában (The importance of linguistic and cultural awareness with a contrastive perspective in the practice of translation)

In this study I argue that linguistic and cultural awareness having a contrastive approach provides us with a perspective which helps translators to choose consciously from different target language alternatives and offers some objective guidelines for the justification and evaluation of translation solutions. It is not easy to define which criteria we should consider when assessing a text as the translation of another. There are no codified rules in the domain of reading, understanding and translating. The first part of the survey gives an insight into some theoretical aspects of translation such as linguistic and cultural asymmetry, the concept of equivalence in translation, translational behaviour of languages, language pair specific transcoding operations, translator competences. The final section is devoted to the analysis of some pieces of translation from Hungarian to Italian showing the practical validity of what have been said from a theoretical point of view. Translation always means loosing something of the original but as French linguist and translator Georges Mounin claims „if an expression actually cannot be translated, a translator in the twentieth century is at least capable of knowing and understanding why the expression cannot be translated.”