Cultural and Contextual Competence
This domain tests whether you can read a text's cultural frame and decide how much of it to carry across. Items cover realia, forms of address, politeness, humour, taboo, institutional differences and audience design. The exam rewards explicit reasoning about the reader, not exotic flavour.
Culture-specific items
Aixelá's taxonomy gives you vocabulary for choices: repetition, orthographic adaptation, linguistic translation, extratextual gloss, intratextual gloss, synonymy, limited universalisation, absolute universalisation, naturalisation, deletion and autonomous creation. Choosing between retention and substitution is a function of text type, reader knowledge and the brief - a legal text and a tourism brochure will not resolve the same item identically.
Politeness and address
Brown and Levinson's positive and negative face explain why imperatives that are normal in one language read as brusque in another. Watch the T/V distinction, honorifics, kinship terms, and Hall's high-context versus low-context expectations about how much is said explicitly. Titles, academic degrees and job names rarely map one-to-one across legal systems.
Worked example
A menu item names a regional dish with a protected designation. Reasoning: identify whether the reader needs identification, prestige, or both. Retain the original name and add a short intratextual gloss describing the preparation, rather than substituting a familiar but inaccurate dish. Record why: substitution would erase the regional claim the menu is making.
Traps that cost marks
- Ethnocentric substitution that erases the source culture.
- Over-glossing until the target text becomes an encyclopedia entry.
- Assuming institutions (courts, qualifications, holidays) are equivalent.
- Missing humour or taboo because the vocabulary looked neutral.