“Visibility” and “Invisibility” of the Translator in the Linguocultural Adaptation of Realia: A Diachronic Study of Translations of F.M. Dostoevsky’s Novel “Crime and Punishment”

Introduction. F.M. Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment" belongs to world literature, and the presence of constantly published new translations testifies to the interest in it. The objective of this study is a comparative analysis of translations of F.M. Dostoevsky's novel “Crime and Punishment” in the diachronic aspect. This article assesses changes in the translation norm.

Methodology and sources. The research material was the novel “Crime and Punishment” by F.M. Dostoevsky, as well as translations into English by C. Garnett, D. McDuff, R. Pevear and L. Volokhonskaya. The following methods were used in the course of the work: comparative-contrastive, descriptive, and contextual.

Results and discussion. Early translations of the novel are characterized by ease of perception, but at the same time they lose markers of the original culture by neutralizing them and replacing them with markers of the receiving culture. Later translations demonstrate a conscious effort on the part of the translator to emphasize the work's belonging to another culture, as a result of which the text of the translation becomes more difficult to perceive: it abounds in transliterated elements and translation comments. A special case is demonstrated by translations that maintain a balance between domestication and foreignization, as a result of which the text of the translation retains cultural accuracy, readability and redundancy of descriptive elements (translation comments), which do not complicate the perception of the text, but bring the reader closer to the original culture.

Conclusion. The differences revealed in the linguocultural adaptation of culturally marked vocabulary demonstrate different attitudes towards the “visibility” and “invisibility” of the translator, however, during the study it was revealed that maintaining a balance between the two extremes allows one to generate a translation that is easy to perceive and retains foreign linguistic and cultural inclusions.

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