Features of the translation of military–administrative and military-historical realionyms in «Taras Bulba» by N. V. Gogol into English, French and Tatar languages

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the translation of socio-political vocabulary in the context of the analysis of the strategies used by translators J. Cournos, L. Viardot, A. Faizi in the translation of «Taras Bulba» by N. V. Gogol, the special significance of which currently prompts the search for criteria for assessing the degree of compliance with the subject content of the original and translations in English, French and Tatar, respectively. The military-administrative and military-historical realionyms of the subject-thematic area «socio-political relations», the group «military-administrative structure of society» are recognized as the exponent of the implementation of these strategies. These realionyms and their trilingual equivalents are compared in terms of the use of domestication and foreignization strategies. The aim of the article is to identify convergent and divergent strategies in translations of military-administrative and military-historical realionyms of the original text in order to assess the quality of translations. The corpus of 28 military-administrative realionyms of «Taras Bulba» (1842) by N. V. Gogol selected from the point of view of belonging to the subject area «Social and political relations», taking into account symptomatic statistics, that is, the frequency of occurrence in the original text. The object of the article is formed by 84 equivalents of the indicated realionyms recorded in the texts of translations, which were made in English by J. Cournos (1952), French by L. Viardot (1853) and Tatar by A. Fayzi (1953). The subject of the article is the strategies of convergence and divergence of the subject content of N.V. Gogol «Taras Bulba». The work used general and particular scientific methods. The methods of logic (analysis, induction, comparison, grouping) and statistics (sampling method, analysis of correspondences) belong to general scientific ones, and the comparative method belongs to private scientific ones. Foreignization increases from the English translation of J. Cournos from 43% of socio-political vocabulary to 93% in the Tatar translation of A. Faizi. L. Viardot foreignized 53% of realionyms in the French text of the translation. 12 out of 84 translation solutions are divergent to the original text, six of them are contained in the English translation. 54 out of 84 units were borrowed by translators using the methods of transliteration and transcription, as well as unreasonable capitalization of realionyms. It can be stated that the quality of the translation was affected by the following translation errors: the omission of the realionym, its replacement, inappropriate modernization (use of anachronism), incorrect capitalization, the presence of «false friends of the translator»; factual errors. The analysis of translation strategies for realionyms from the point of view of the implementation of convergence and divergence strategies can be one of the criteria for the quality of a translator’s work. The choice of a convergent strategy is a basic condition for the implementation of a better translation and, thereby, the reproduction of the original author’s intention by means of the target language, while the choice of the opposite, divergent, strategy is highly likely to distort the realities of the source text, misleading the recipient about the subject content of the original. The expression of the strategies of convergence and divergence at the elementary (microstylistic) level in the translation of realionymic vocabulary is domestication and foreignization.

convergence, divergence, domestication, foreignization, realionyms, translation strategies, story by N. V. Gogol «Taras Bulba», English, French and Tatar