Through this Blog I'll try to demonstrate and explain how cultures are represented in language. The country or city where we were born will be determinant in the way we think and the way we see the world. But there's something special that make people from one place different from people of other places, the language they use. It's important to understand the meaning of "language". The Oxford Dictionaries defines language as "the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way".
People from every part of the world grow up learning throw the language their parents or people around them talk, through this language they've learned they listen the opinions of the people around them have about events or facts, and start making up their own opinion of the world
To explain the importance of language in the way people think I'll use some Spain communities as example. In Spain the primary language is Spanish, which is spoke in a similar way all over the peninsula, however each community has got its own own variation of it, generally this variations aren't really big or important but their are some cases as Catalunya and El Pais Vasco where they have their own language, Catalan and Euskadi respectively. This communities have got some expressions that could be difficult to understand for those who don't know Spanish or their respective sub-language. This languages are really important culturally and people who don't know it may find difficult to understand their cultural meaning.
This is a serious problem for people encharged of a film translation, as an example I'll use a popular Spanish film called "Eight Basque surnames" where we can appreciate the importance of language in order to understand other cultures, that's why film translations are important so to maintain languages cultural meaning. This film tells us the story of the story of Rafa, a young man from Sevilla that gets in love of Amaia, a young Basque women. It's important to understand that people from Andalusia and Basque people hate each other because of their cultural differences, this stereotype has a great importance in the film because Rafa, completely in love of Amaia decides to go to El Pais Vasco and find her, he will try to imitate basque language and behavior in order to evade problems. In this fil Basque stereotypes are demonstrated through the language Amaia and his fathe use and through the jokes and expressions Rafa uses when imitating them. This film was really successful and that was the reason they translated it to English. As I explained before some expressions can only be understood by those persons who grew up using them, or those who've been leaving in a place and using its language for s certain time, if not its meaning wouldn't have sense. Those are the reasons that make impossible a literal translation of films because they wouldn't understand what they are saying and it would make films use its cultural meaning.
I'll now compare what the main characters say in the original version of the film and how the translated it in order to maintain its cultural meaning so that English people or people that speak English could still understand what they are saying or the message they are trying to send to the other characters.
Some words or expressions are said just as in the original version, one example is "Aita". There's no problem using the original Euskadi word in the translated version because the meaning of this word is expressed continuously so that we know it means father. But there are some cases where the words used in the original version aren't explained so they just translate the into English so as to understand its meaning.
Some Spanish expressions are also changed in the translated version from its literal translated form. I'll know show an example, as I've said before, Rafa was from Andalusia and his friends didn't understand his decision of going to El Pais Vasco to look for Amaia. Rafa tries to calm them down saying that he would have Amaia "tocando las palmas" in two days. This expression is translated to "dancing flamenco" so to understand that that expression was used referring to the typical dance of Andalusia. There are some cases in which it's even more clear the way they changed words so us to understand them, in one part of the film Rafa says "Lo que he ligado yo así no Lo ha ligado no Bertín Osborne", in the English version they even change the name of the famous person Rafa refers to so as to give a foreign version to the film but keeping the original cultural reference, in this case, in the translated version Rafa says " I've scored more goals than Julio Iglesias ".
There are some jokes that may be difficult to understand for a person that doesn't speak Spanish or don't know some Basque typical stereotypes, like this words said by Koldo, Amaya's father "But he's Clemente, he might order paella". This joke has to be with the fact of independence of Basque people, they feel they don't belong to Spain, so they see like an offense to say someone you're practicing an Spanish tradition or you're eating Spanish typical food.
In conclusion culture variates with language, and your language has a cultural meaning that may be difficult to explain to other people, languages cultural meaning is so big that many films and TV shows use language and their typical expressions so as to represent some cultural stereotypes.
