Translating the world: differences and common core in culturally-determined vocabulary

Abstract

Content vocabulary may have different connotative values and different denotational meanings in different languages according to cultural idiosyncracy, manifested in culture-specific "key" meanings and culture-related scripts. Our claim here is that, even in all these cases involving the use of background knowledge with culturally-determined differences in different languages, there is still room for transfer of a core meaning, which makes translation possible and allows transcultural communication. This fact is illustrated by examining some words related to the term 'freedom' in English which are claimed not to be equivalent across languages.