Translating speculative fiction: creating new fictional realia

Abstract

The article explores creation of new fictional realia as a translation technique. Fictional realia are defined as a special kind of linguistic realia, also known as quasirealia or irrelia, which describes various aspects of fictional worlds: flora and fauna, everyday life, social and political structure, etc. New realia creation involves incorporation of new lexical units in a translated text, which may remain semantically connected with the original realia and its referent or eliminate the connection completely. When the new realia preserve the connection with the original lexical units and their referents, we observe the creation of a new realia-word, which may be categorized as an attempt to redesignate the original realia, rather than a direct translation. This type of realia creation is somewhat similar to modulation, but differs from it due to the impossibility to establish direct logical links, such as “part and whole”, “cause and effect”, etc. Elimination of the aforementioned connections leads to the creation of a new realia-object, the translator’s own invention, which is absent is the original text and the corresponding fictional world. Creation of a new realia-word may resemble adaptation, but it does not necessarily share the same goal. In both cases, creation of new realia is a creative process, which is heavily dependent on the translator’s personality, their own vision. Creation of new realia is demonstrated through the analysis of the translations of fictional realia from “We” by Y. Zamyatin, “Brave New World” by A. Huxley, and “1984” by G. Orwell.

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