문화소 분석에 대한 기호학적 접근

An Explorative Study of Culturemes: A Semiotic Approach

This study analyzes the cultureme which is the basic unit for the cultural translation. Many researches (Aixela1996; Newmark 1988; Chesterman 1997; Kim 2004) have studied culturemes, but only a few mentioned the extra-linguistic elements of culturemes. This study takes an approach to incorporate the extra-linguistic elements to the culturemes. For this purpose, this study employs the cultural theories (Hall 1976 and Hofsted 1997), and makes them as the cultural variable for the cultural translation. These cultural variables work as culturemes along with linguistic variables proposed by Chesterman. To include the cultural variables as the culturemes in cultural translation, this paper introduces the semiotic triad model of Peirce (1977). In semiotics, any signs or symbols can be interpreted to the other objects with proper interpretants. Thus, the cultural variables derived from the cultural theories can be interpreted as the culturemes and find ways to translation in the semiotic triads. These cultural variables are connotative culturemes and take the macro approaches to the translation, whereas the linguistic variables are denotative culturemes and take the micro approach. Both of them are managed by interpretants on the triadic model, that is, source texts, translators, and target texts in a complementary way. Consequently, this paper can encapsulate the culturemes - the linguistic as well as extra-linguistic - as a set of codes represented as symbols and the translation is a process of decoding a set of codes with the interpretant’s modulation.