L’intraduisibilité dans la traduction terminologique – un point de vue culturel
Authors: Zhang Lili , Cristnoi-Bursuc Antonia 
Published: September 2023

The Untranslatability in Terminological Translation – A Cultural Perspective

The article tackles the untranslatability of perfumery French terms into Chinese and discusses the cultural explanatory factors that influence it. The first part is devoted to the theoretical presentation, which first defines culture as all that is created and known materially and spiritually, that it is the identity of a social group which differs from others. Translation is defined as a reformulation of the message in the target culture, and the essence of translating a term consists in determining its equivalent in the target language. The relation between the source term in the source language and the target term in the target language is theoretically an equivalence. However, terms are designations of concepts, and the creation of terms is a process of linguistic materialization of concepts. Since this process of linguistic materialization is cognitive and is strongly influenced by cultural practice and context, it is possible that the equivalence relation between the source term and the target term is not always absolute. It is possible that the so-called "equivalence" is just a partial equivalence or a functional equivalence. To justify the theoretical deduction, a terminology database in perfumery has been created, in which a certain number of French-Chinese terms in perfumery are collected. These terms constitute the object of analysis. The second part therefore specifies the inventory of French-Chinese terminological work in the field of perfumery, the parallel corpus in which the identification of bilingual terms is carried out, the principles to follow when identifying bilingual terms, the method used to construct the terminological database and to demonstrate the terms, and the method used to analyse the terms in the database. Then the third part is devoted to an observation of non-equivalences between French and Chinese terms. The non-equivalences are at the categorical and conceptual level. This means that the concepts designated by the French terms and the concepts designated by the Chinese terms are not mutually concordant. The non- equivalences are also found at the semantic level, which means that the French terms and their corresponding Chinese terms are semantically divergent. Examples cited from the terminological database testify first to the existence of categorial and conceptual non-equivalence, then to the absence of total semantic equivalence in the translation of terms. These non-equivalences are the direct causes of failures in the translation of terms, in other words, the direct cause of terminological untranslatability. A final discussion asserts that the indirect causes of the terminological untranslatability are found in cultural divergences. More precisely, the untranslatability is related to the practice of the field of perfumery and to the situation of terminological standardization in both countries. The different development in practice and in terminological work in perfumery between France and China leads to an unbalanced terminological development between the two languages, which manifests itself in the untranslatability of terms. The non-equivalences are also explained by the lack of terminological standardization in perfumery and the complexity in the perfumery market. Countless perfumed products, constant innovation of perfume notes, advertising strategies to increase turnover, etc., all this complexity is reflected in the linguistic description of products, including in terms. Finally, the conclusion opens a research perspective on terminological standardization in perfumery as well as on the translation approaches of translators faced with the untranslatability of terms.