Translating foreign words in imperial Russian literature: the experience of the foreign and the sociology of language

This article explores the treatment of foreign words in translated literature, in particular, in translations of two classic works of Russian nineteenth century literature, Mikhail Lermontov’s A hero of our time and Leo Tolstoy’s War and peace, both of which contain a great number and variety of foreign words. Foreign words play an important compositional function in these texts and challenge the notion of a pure and unified national identity. The treatment of foreign words is compared with the treatment of culture-specific Russian words in the translated texts, which serve to “foreignize” Russian culture, the ground for source text readers. The results suggest that there is no norm for the treatment of foreign words, that many translators underestimate or ignore altogether their compositional role in these texts, and that no relation appears to exist between the treatment of foreign words and that of culture-specific source text words. The problem of foreign words, which has been understudied in Translation Studies to date, challenges any simple opposition of domestic and foreign and may invert the target reader’s perception of domestic and foreign, a translation “shift” that reaches far beyond traditional studies of semantics and plays a potentially significant role in the cultural construction of the Otherness.

from the International Journal of the Sociology of Language

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