Abstract

All along the centuries, both the word “culture” and the syntagm “cultural realities” have been of utmost importance in communication and translation. Culture has been and will be a challenging point of discussion since it encompasses and aims at a variety of areas such as: language, linguistic and cultural realities, nation, identity, gap, code, conflict, transcending/crossing borders, gender, iconicity, ideology, intentionality, register, power, translation, speech community and others. In the present paper, we have taken the liberty to scrutinize religious communities and their cultural realities, language and practices and how they are negotiated in translation. We also tackled some Romanian culture-specific elements and checked their (un)translatability. Unlike the syntagm “cultural universals” which defines a cultural reality that remains unchanged from culture to culture, realia are the opposite. In point of function, realia are both referential and indicative. In addition, the main characteristic of realia is that they directly refer to the social-cultural background of the TL (target language). Translating cultural realities or “realia” represents a real challenge for the translator. The realia we have chosen for discussion highlight the religious Romanian Orthodox Christian community and, furthermore, the intricacy lies in their archaicism, not in their dialecticism. Consequently, translating religious terminology requires the translator’s competence since they embody the truth and the word of God that has to be accurately reproduced in the TC (target culture).