ABSTRACT
National allegories – like crime fiction, which has from its earliest manifestations, and often in its most iconic texts, eschewed the very rules upon which it appears to be constructed – are far from being static and impervious to change. The translation of terms designating cultural referents has become an important niche for specialists of translation studies, such as French scholar Michel Ballard, who prefers the more succinct term culturemes, which he describes as ‘signs pointing to cultural referents, which is to say elements or traits that, when taken together, constitute a civilization or a culture’. Culturemes are crucial in crime fiction texts, which are so pointedly anchored in their social and geographical realities and which, as a result, contain extremely precise descriptions of place. The genre is, typically portrayed as an Anglo-American one which has gained a foothold in other national literatures following an initial wave of translations.
