This paper is dedicated to That’s what she said, a pragmatic idiom and formulaic punchline demonstrating a relatively high salience in the US despite its restrictedness to oral and semi-oral genres and frames. This cognitively and functionally complex formula poses tremendous challenges for audiences not acquainted with this idiom and lacking relevant cultural knowledge needed to decode it within its contexts (which is the case for e.g. learners of English as a second language).
While That’s what she said has hardly received any attention by scholars so far – possibly due to its generally perceived inappropriateness (as per the sexual innuendo it can evoke). The present study takes on an intercultural approach to the complexities and merely unavoidable shortcomings that a translator will be faced with when attempting to transfer the sociocultural load tied to this utterance into not only the German language code itself, but thereby into a whole different cultural sphere for a different audience. Bădoiu speaks of the need to “translat[e] culture” (2015: 112), which is “highly complex for [the translator having to] render the cultural elements within a text without interpreting them” (ibid.: 112). She goes on that “the ideal is to transmit the original, maintaining its essence and yet make it accessible and intellegible” to the recipient (ibid.).
The hypothesis to be investigated is that there is in fact a lot of potential room for semantic and pragmatic loss in translation, as no precise or synonymous rendition of this utterance will be possible – despite the fact that a literal, word(class)-by-word(class) translation is no challenge per se (i.e. Das ist was sie sagte). So to carve out the conceptual forfeits an English-into-German translation must admit to oneself when rendering this demonstrative cleft, 34 samples from TV series and movies (1992 – 2015) as well as their dubbed renditions in German will be analyzed to carve out any patterns and intercultural strategies on the translators' part.
--------
Bădoiu, Zoe Larisa. 2015. Do you speak “Culture”? Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov. IV, 2: 109-120.
