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Top1. Introduction
Outside some notable anatomical similarities shared with other Mammalia, Creative ideas, reminiscences, thinking, rationalizing and communicating appear to be unique features of the human species. Humans also have the ability to store and transfer simple and complex information. They can also analyze and synthesize this information, discuss them and restore them back as new knowledge for further actions or for predicting consequences of other happenings or events. But all these are possible with the aid of language. What is packaged and communicated using language cannot be separated from the language. From this perspective, it is often said that “language is symbolically what language expresses”. Human language is not only a medium of communication. It is also a store of cultural values.
Over the years, humans have devised lexical patterns of packaging information in a more concise and precise manner through the media of words, proverbs, idioms and other forms of fixed expressions. This cognitive ingenuity makes it possible for a single word or group of words to mean one or many things in a given language depending on areas and contexts of usage. This way too, single or group of lexical elements become representations and descriptors of material and nonmaterial cultures of a people or groups. Cultural lexical items are generously available in every language making every language a functional part of the culture of the speakers. Translation as an intercultural communication is also affected by this reality being as House (2016:14) puts it “a particular type of culturally determined practice”.
Culture-bound terms represent labels used in naming objects, ideas or imagery that are peculiar to a given culture and its language. The ubiquity of culture-bound terms in translation is a good description of the interdependence of culture and translation (Hanenberg, 2015:7). From target texts point of view, Baker (1992:18) defines culture-specific concepts as “source-language words [that] express concepts totally unknown in the target culture”. In a similar vein, Gudavičius (2009:94) describes them as “…specific cultural realia that do not have equivalents in other languages, since other cultures do not have those things or concepts in their life”. Culture-bound terms may be religious, customary or food related terms. Whatever aspect of life they stand for; they are known to uncover the equivalence gap that exists in the target language. Translation scholars are interested in cultural references for some important reasons. While some seek to understand the perceptual differences in cross-cultural communication or want to determine strategies used in resolving certain challenges posed by cultural elements, others seek to uncover the extent of availability of cultural references in a given text and their contributions to lexical enrichment of text.