What is Culture-Specific Use of Verbal and Nonverbal Means

This chapter intends to integrate culture, pragmatics, and text typology in translation teaching and to raise awareness on their significance in the translation process among translation trainees. First, it offers an overview of contemporary translation theory on translation teaching from a culture-sensitive, pragmatic-functional, and text typological point of view. Then, it applies intercultural pragmatics to Greek/German translation of the special text type “obituary.” The findings of this analysis lead to the conclusion that intercultural pragmatics not only reveals translational obstacles and difficulties but also offers solutions for the amelioration of translational competence in general and in Greek/German translation of “obituaries” in particular. The chapter ends with the presentation of a short text type-specific contrastive typology for obituaries in Greek and German culture. By that, the author intends to demonstrate the significance of text prototypologies on the basis of intercultural pragmatics for the development of the translational competence of translation students and of its implementation in translation teaching.