REAL AND OPTIMAL METHODS OF RENDERING REALIA IN TRANSLATION

Abstract

This article focuses on analyzing the translation of realia of literary works of detective genre by A. Christie. In particular, English-Ukrainian and English-Russian translation of realia is subjected to analysis. The data samples include the realia from two detective novels by Agatha Christie (“A Murder is Announced”, “And Then There Were None”) and their equivalents from seven translations of these novels into the Ukrainian and the Russian languages by different translators. The novels by A. Christie are the examples of classical literary works of detective genre. Written in the first part of the XX century, they abandon in realia of Britain of that time, which accounts for creating a culturally rich and specific background. In this study realia is approached as an object, phenomenon or event, formed within a certain culture, and the corresponding language unit – its name. In translation studies there exist different classifications of the ways of rendering realia. With regard to the “cultural turn” as a recent development of translation studies, two methods of rendering realia can be distinguished: 1) ren­dering the content of realia (most fully and precisely); 2) rendering its cultural coloring. Employing both methods results in the most adequate translation. In the translations under study such cases are numerous, but there are also others: in a number of examples the content of realia is rendered with certain losses (or is even unclear), in other cases the cultural coloring is either lost altogether or not distinct enough. The possible optimization of rendering realia, as we see it, can be a more productive use of paratranslation, footnotes, in particular, which in the analysed translations was employed occasionally.