The treatment of culturemes in a touristic text : A semantic and pragmatic study of the translation techniques used in a book about the cultural heritage of Seville

The aim of this paper is to carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the semantic and pragmatic aspects of a translation from Spanish into Swedish. Taking advantage our extensive knowledge of the local area we selected a book about the cultural heritage of Seville. Owing to the differences in the two cultures we expected to find numerous foreign cultural words – that we call culturemes – throughout the book that have no direct equivalence in Swedish. Our intention was to detect them and describe by means of several examples the translation techniques we used in order to adapt the target text to the Swedish reader. At the end we also carried out a quantitative analysis of the 252 culturemes we found, with a table showing which translation techniques dominate, and the frequency of occurrence of other techniques. We aimed to transfer as many culturemes as possible in order to give the target text some local color. This is the strategy called foreignization, recommended by Venuti. Throughout the translation and analysis process we concluded that the translator must have a sound linguistic and cultural knowledge of both the source and target languages in order to successfully resolve cultural differences and create an idiomatic and pragmatic translation