On Strategies of Rendering of German Culture-bound Words in Lithuanian

Any element of a text has its function and becomes extremely significant in a communicative situation. Problems that arise in the process of cross-cultural communication are closely related to non-linguistic reality and become even more serious when the need to transfer lexical and specific objects defining items, i.e. culture-bound words (words that are frequently defined as non-equivalent lexis) occurs. The doctoral theses aim to approach the aforementioned linguistic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective and, during the analysis of the selected sample of culture-bound words, to prove the applied strategies and procedures to render culture-bound words and overcome the linguistic-cultural distance. The theoretical part of the doctoral theses focuses on the conception of the term culture-bound word as a phenomenon of the merger of language and culture that is linked to a certain pair of languages and cultures. This part also describes theories and theoretical approaches to linguistic and cultural equivalence, related with ways of transferring non-equivalent lexis. In order to analyze strategies and procedures how German culture-bound words are transferred into Lithuanian, an independently composed sample of German culture-bound words and their Lithuanian counterparts has been used. The sample entails all equivalent variations of German culture-bound words that have been manually collected from three bilingual German-Lithuanian dictionaries and represent the period of sixty years between 1943 and 2001. The theses apply descriptive and contrastive methods and examine the elements from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The methodology of the research is primarily oriented towards linguistic categories, i.e. names of an object and a corresponding equivalent in the Lithuanian language and, to be more specific, naming of particular features of the object and its related associations. These components constitute a significant and additional part of the meaning and become the point of reference to assess (full, partial or zero) transfer of the equivalent. The description of strategies and procedures applied in the transfer of culture-bound words from the specificity of an onomasiological group lead to possibilities of providing a particular equivalent and its variations. Findings of the research allow drawing conclusions that the selections of specific strategies applied to render culture-bound words are directly dependent on translators, and their motivation and expertise