《How to raise cultural awareness through teaching translation》.pdf

Available online at Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 46 ( 2012 ) 3910 – 3915 WCES 2012 How to raise cultural awareness through teaching translation * Camelia Petrescu - ra, 300006, Romania Abstract As a dual act of communication which presupposes the existence of two distinct codes, the source language and the target language, translation reflects the relation between these two codes depending on their respective linguistic and cultural identities. An important requirement for teaching translation becomes, thus, raising the cultural awareness of the translation students. A contrastive approach to the study of languages is proposed here as a first step towards cultural awareness. The paper looks into the translation of a corpus of European institutional texts from English into Romanian with a view to assessing the ethnocentric behavior of the two languages/cultures. Keywords: Cultural awareness, forma mentis, translation, referential/vernacular language. 1. Introduction The Romanian linguist and this is a fact more and more people admit only a servant of thought but also a master of it. If it is true that man speaks the way he thinks, it is also true that man thinks the way his forebears used to speak. In our native language we look for the best suited