Abstract

Culture-specific references in literary prose create translation problems that cannot be resolved through lexical substitution alone. Their meaning often depends on social relationships, historical knowledge and the narrative voice that introduces them. This paper proposes a functional framework for evaluating translation choices among retention, explicitation, cultural substitution and selective omission. The analysis brings together work on culture-specific items, translator visibility, equivalence and skopos- oriented decision-making. Through clearly identified constructed examples, it demonstrates why strategies must be judged by their effect on characterization, narrative rhythm, cultural distance and reader inference rather than by their surface similarity to an original expression. The central argument is that accessibility and cultural specificity should be treated as negotiated variables, not as mutually exclusive translation ideals. The paper presents a reproducible decision sequence for literary translators and reviewers without claiming new comparative corpus findings.