Culturally specific elements in the translation of fiction (on the material of K. Gibran’s work ‘The Prophet’)

The present paper is devoted to the analysis of culturally specific elements and stylistically marked vocabulary in the original of the famous book ‘The Prophet’ (1923) written by the Lebanese-American writer and philosopher Kahlil Gibran. The authors of the article investigate the optimal ways of preserving the elements of national and cultural specificity when translating this work into Russian paying special attention to its rich vertical context. The analysis of the original source of ‘The Prophet’ and its adaptation into Russian reveals an interesting feature: the abundance of biblical terms in the Russian text does not convey the originality and stylistic uniqueness which is represented in the English-language version of the book. More than that, new approaches to maintaining the colourfulness and archaic spirit of the text are considered within the present paper. The proposed techniques can enrich Russian translations of works inspired by biblical themes, giving them greater expressiveness and depth. One of the options for recreating the unique sublime atmosphere of a work of fiction is to use syntactic constructions characteristic of biblical texts, which themselves create a sense of archaicness. An alternative approach consists in replacing the stylistically neutral word next to the archaism with its more obsolete synonym. The main part of the paper presents a translation experiment aimed at achieving harmony between the source and target cultures of the work under discussion. The major aim is to preserve the national, historical and cultural nuances of the source material and to convey a common meaning, even if the author’s artistic techniques make it somewhat difficult to immerse oneself in the foreign-language world. The study has revealed that certain culturally specific details do not require literal translation if the use of neutral analogues does not distort the cultural and historical context intended by the author

Cultural artifact · Originality · Source text · Sublime · Target text · Vocabulary · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies · Translation Studies and Practices

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