Short Story Text Translation Analysis Levels (Based on the Experience of Translating W. Borchert’s Stories into Russian)

Abstract

The article discusses the characteristic features and categories of the short story genre and the levels of translation analysis of such texts from the point of view of theoretical understanding of various aspects of literary translation. The purpose of our study is to consider the existing approaches to the translation analysis of the literary text as a whole, to correlate them with the format of the short story genre, and to justify the need for developing a translation strategy for this genre. The research is based on the data extracted from the analysis of 42 short stories by a German writer Wolfgang Borchert, the translation of which into Russian is currently being done by the authors of this article. The categories selected as relevant for the translation process are the categories of chronotope, dynamics, and narrator. The chronotope reproduces the spatio-temporal picture of the world and organizes the composition of the work. The dynamics is associated with both the generation and perception of the content of the text. The examined components include the components of the text dynamics such as the plot movement and statics, neutrality and expression of the style of speech, the economy and redundancy of language tools, the pragmatics of direct and indirect speech. The narrator is a mediator between the author and the reader, the fictional creator of the fictitious world of a work of art. One of the main tasks of the translation analysis of an original text is to identify these categories and their means of expression, and find means for their parallel deployment in the translation text.

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