The Importance of Knowledge of Culture in Translation: Case Study

Cultural differences and diversity of linguistic concepts normally force interpreters to change the sentence structure in the sake of safeguarding its main purpose and meaning. In fact, they recreate the texts either in a new grammatical structure or through the selection of words with a rather different meaning of their normal use. The question is to what extent the translator is allowed to sacrifice the form and structure of sentences for keeping the soul of the original text? Is this problem linked by the proximity of the two cultures and languages? Apart from literal translation of words, is an interpreter obliged to a cultural intermediation as well? And finally, is it possible in principle to learn the language of a country independently from its society and culture? We are of opinion that apart from learning the language, an interpreter should also know and understand the cultural concepts of that country, since in the absence of a general dominance of different dimensions of a culture, one might fall in multiple ambiguities