ABSTRACT
This chapter explores language variety and quality, in particular, to an English text. It compares paired texts on similar subjects for their language and context through practical tasks, aimed at highlighting textual features, eliciting responses and encouraging readers to reflect on the potential linguistic and cultural challenges arising from the texts. The chapter looks at the various cultural references that together provide a source text (ST) with a cultural context or setting. It considers how to choose appropriate strategies to deal with the challenges that arise in the translation process. The chapter provides pointers to help translators decide whether such challenges concern meaning, lexis, cohesion and coherence, or cultural references. The text pairs are based on the following common text types: recent texts and older texts; information and advice texts; specialist and technical texts; fiction and non-fiction texts; and newspaper and magazine articles. The practical tasks are designed to raise awareness of language variety across a range of text types.
