What do you do with the Dust Bowl? With un sans-culotte, les CRS, le bac, the NHS?
These are culture-bound terms — what translation studies calls realia: words that name something which exists in one culture and has no counterpart in the other. They raise the same question as titles and proper nouns, translate or preserve, and add one of their own: how far are you willing to move the reader into a foreign world?
The axis behind every decision
Every choice in this area falls somewhere on a line first named by Lawrence Venuti:
- Domestication — bring the text toward the reader. Foreign referents are replaced by familiar ones, and the translation reads as though written locally.
- Foreignisation — bring the reader toward the text. Foreign referents are kept, and the translation openly announces that it comes from elsewhere.
Neither is correct in the abstract. A cookbook, a children's picture book and a literary novel sit at three different points on that line, and your job is to choose the point deliberately rather than drift along it sentence by sentence.
The six available procedures
Whatever the referent, the toolbox is the same:
- Established equivalent — a conventional translation already exists; use it.
- Borrowing — keep the term unchanged.
- Borrowing plus gloss — keep it and add three words of explanation inside the sentence.
- Descriptive translation — replace the term with what it means.
- Generalisation — replace it with a broader category (un pain au chocolat → a pastry).
- Cultural substitution — replace it with a local equivalent. The most drastic option, and the one that needs the most justification.
Historical elements
Events with an established equivalent
Like toponyms, major historical events have conventional names in each language. You look them up; you do not invent them.
- World War II ↔ la Seconde Guerre mondiale
- the American Civil War ↔ la guerre de Sécession — note that neither name translates the other
- the Storming of the Bastille ↔ la prise de la Bastille
- Bastille Day ↔ le 14 Juillet — the English name is not used in French at all
- the Black Death ↔ la peste noire
Terms that need describing
Un poilu — a French infantryman of the First World War — has no English counterpart, and the literal sense (hairy) would be absurd. It becomes a French WWI soldier, or is kept with a gloss where the period flavour matters.
Terms that must be preserved
Some terms are so bound to one culture that translating them destroys them.
Un sans-culotte stays a sans-culotte in English: without breeches would be meaningless. The Dust Bowl stays le Dust Bowl in French, with a brief gloss on first mention. These function like surnames — they identify rather than describe.
Contemporary cultural elements
Institutions
Institutions usually take a functional equivalent, adjusted to the variety of the target language:
- un HLM ↔ a council flat (UK) / public housing (US)
- les CRS ↔ the riot police
- la Sécu ↔ the French health service, or national health insurance
- the NHS ↔ le système de santé public britannique, or kept with a gloss
The limit of this procedure appears with education. A-levels and le baccalauréat occupy the same slot in their systems, but they are not the same qualification, and substituting one for the other puts a British teenager through a French exam. Prefer a description — the French school-leaving exam — whenever the setting is explicit.
Everyday objects
Un pain au chocolat can be borrowed (it is already half-naturalised in English), generalised into a pastry, or glossed as a pain au chocolat, a chocolate-filled pastry. Which you choose depends on whether the object matters or merely furnishes the scene.
Brands and shops: the procedure to handle with care
The old textbook example replaces Asda with Carrefour. It is worth saying plainly that contemporary literary translation almost never does this, because it produces incoherence: a character in Leeds cannot shop at Carrefour without dragging the whole novel to France.
Cultural substitution is legitimate where the setting is not part of the content — advertising, software, picture books for very young children, some comedy dubbing. In a text with a real geographic setting, prefer keeping the name and letting the sentence do the work: He went to Asda to do the weekly shop tells any reader that Asda is a supermarket, with no note required.
Glossing: how much, and where
When a referent has to be kept but explained, the options run from least to most intrusive:
- Let the context explain. Always the first choice. Most referents are self-explanatory in situation.
- Add two or three words inside the sentence — le Dust Bowl, ces tempêtes de poussière des années 1930. Invisible, and enough nine times out of ten.
- A translator's note. Acceptable in essays and scholarly work, a last resort in fiction, where it stops the reader dead.
Whatever you choose, stay consistent: gloss on first mention only, and never explain the same term twice.
Three questions that settle each case
- Does a conventional equivalent already exist? If yes, use it and stop there.
- Will the reader understand it in context? If yes, keep the term as it stands.
- Does the foreignness carry meaning here? If yes, preserve and gloss. If no — if the referent is only furniture — generalise or substitute.
And one rule above the three: be consistent across the whole text. A translation that keeps les CRS on page ten and writes the riot police on page eighty has no policy, and the reader feels it even without being able to name the problem.
Conclusion
Cultural referents follow the logic already seen for titles and proper nouns: established equivalent first, preservation when the term is transparent, description when it is opaque, substitution only when the setting itself is expendable.
What they add is a decision about the reader. Do you want them to feel at home, or to travel?
There is no universal answer — only a choice, made deliberately, and held to from the first page to the last.