The influence of the translator’s linguistic personality on the formation of character images (based on M.A. Bulgakov’s Heart of a dog and its Chinese translations)

This article examines the influence of the translator’s linguistic personality on the representation of characters in a translated text. The material for the study includes the original text of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella Heart of a Dog and three of its Chinese translations, created by different translators: Cao Guowei, Bai Huaxiong, and Huang Mingdun. The focus of the analysis is on the speech of the character Sharik (both before and after his transformation into Sharikov), as it serves as a vivid example of stylistically marked language that reflects the internal transformation of the character. The study aims to determine how the translator’s linguistic personality influences the choice of lexical and stylistic devices and, consequently, how the literary character is perceived by the target audience. A comparative method is used, aimed at analyzing Sharik’s speech behavior in the three Chinese translations of Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. The choice of this character is due to his distinct linguistic features and the transformation of his image throughout the story, which makes his speech particularly illustrative for analysis. The study includes the following stages: collecting speech excerpts of Sharik from the three translations; creating parallel tables with translation fragments for visual comparison; conducting a survey among native Chinese speakers unfamiliar with the original Russian text. The respondents were asked to read three versions of the same excerpt, evaluate the image of Sharik formed in their minds, and share their subjective impressions of the character’s language and speech behavior in each translation. The results of this study can be applied in several academic and practical fields. In the theory of literary translation, they contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of the translator’s linguistic personality in the transformation of the source text. For practicing translators, the findings may help minimize distortions of the author’s style when conveying the lexical and stylistic features of the original.