Translation of culture-specific items : a case study of local museum gallery texts

Abstract

Museum gallery text translation is a balancing act between achieving accessibility and offering educational information to its target readers who come from different culture backgrounds. The task is made more difficult when the gallery texts contain culture-specific items which are unique to the source culture. This study made an attempt to identify the translation strategies used by local museums in dealing with translation challenges of culture-specific items and analyse how the strategies were applied. The translation strategies identified were identified to be done with five strategies, namely preservation, addition, omission, globalization and localization. They were analysed based on a CSIs translation framework proposed by E. Davies (2003) and originally developed to analyse Harry Potter translations. From the data analysis, it was found that some translation strategies were more commonly used than others, owing to the two objecives, namely text accessibility and the educational role played by museums. Following the categorisation and analysis, the study evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the CSIs translation strategies that are more commonly used. The evaluation results then form the foundation of a set of proposed guidelines that translators of museum gallery texts may take as a reference to produce translations in order to meet the objectives of museum gallery texts.