¿Son las unidades fraseológicas un hueso duro de roer para un traductor? Reflexiones sobre la traducción de la fraseología desde una perspectiva cultural y pragmática

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to consider some practical issues of the translation of phraseologicalunits (PhUs) and to focus on problems which arise in connection with findingfunctionally adequate equivalents, that is, lexical items of both source and targetlanguage (L1- Spanish, L2- Polish) which can be used in the similar situations (cf.D.O. Dobrovol ’sk ij, 2000: 367–388). The paper first explores the theoretical backgroundof phraseology (the concept of phraseology, equivalence, typology of PhUs).The second part focuses on the concept of cultural (un)translatability, identifying differentkinds of procedure used in the translation of culture-based and culture-specificPhUs (domestication, foreignization, semantic paraphrase, adaptation, calque, borrowing,etc.). The third part discusses the importance of PhUs in use, that is, the pragmaticperspectives of idioms. In other words, it stresses that in most cases the L1- andL2 PhUs cannot be regarded as absolute equivalents because they present differencesboth in the metaphorical realization (figurative meaning) and image component whichforms its conceptual structure. The paper concludes that the analysis of the pragmaticdimension of PhUs provides important data to the translator about the usage basedparameters and the appropriateness of some idiomatic equivalences