Translating the East back from the West. Douglas Lytle’s Pink Tanks and Velvet Hangovers

Douglas Lytle’s book Pink Tanks and Velvet Hangovers (1995) provides a detailed and in-depth picture of the post-Velvet-Revolution reality of Czechoslovakia through American eyes, and can be thus seen as a translation in the broader sense of the word; it is an attempt at explaining, interpreting and mediating one culture to another. The mechanism of this “cultural translation” is analyzed in the first part of the paper. The role of one’s own, native culture in the perception of other cultures is determined, and consequently, the variety of encounters and even clashes between the two different cultures, Czech and American, are discussed, using David Katan’s classification of approaches to culture (2004), with special attention being paid to the gradual development of Lytle’s own cultural attitude from a behaviourist, i.e. static, to a rather dynamic one. Translation in the narrow sense is the focus of the second part of the paper. First, possible reasons for translating the book into Czech are examined, together with the basic functions such a rendering could serve (documentary vs. instrumental translation in Christiane Nord’s terms (1997)). Taking these functions into account and based on concrete examples, certain general problems are then considered issuing from the task of translating the text into the culture it actually presents. These involve, among other issues, dealing with cultural facts that need to be explained in detail for source text recipients but are well-known to target text recipients, as well as minor factual errors, misspellings and other inaccuracies that cannot be detected by source text readers but would be immediately observed by target text readers.