Cultural transfer on Franco-German channel Arte

The increasingly intensive cultural, information, language, political and economic contacts and exchanges between countries and the developement of different new technologies make it necessary to foresee some media communications which from the beginning are addressed to recipients of different cultures. The Franco-German channel Arte, a European company is an example of this conception. It is responsible for the production and diffusion of cultural programmes which are aimed at various national audiences. Part of that as Arte broadcasts simultaneously all its programmes in two languages: French and German, it is necessary to use translators and interpreters who make it possible for the French audience to watch the German version and vice versa. In the following article, the results of our study about the translation of sociocultural aspects via Arte will be presented. First we will talk about the specific characteristic of the translation in the media -which apart from words also includes images. We will also show that sometimes an extra explanation is required to understand what is shown in the programme. Eventually, we will introduce the different procedures of translation used by translators when they are confronted with a term related to sociocultural aspects. Some samples from Arte TV news will be provided as a support for this article