Translation of culture-specific words in literary texts

A.S. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin into Portuguese

Abstract

This thesis explores the transfer of culture-specific vocabulary in Portuguese translations of A. S. Pushkin’s novel "Eugene Onegin" made by Dário Moreira de Castro Alves (2008) and Nina and Filipe Guerra (2016). It is important to note that unlike the English, French and German versions, the first Portuguese translations of “Eugene Onegin” were published only in the 21st century. In addition, at present there are practically no scientific papers aimed at studying Russian-Portuguese translations of literary texts. Furthermore, the content-specificity of Pushkin's novel as an "encyclopedia of Russian life" underlines the significance of an adequate transfer of Russian culture in translation. The cultural code is reflected primarily in culture-specific words denoted by the term "cultural realia". In this regard, the study is intended to identify the dominant and most adequate strategies for translating Russian cultural realia into Portuguese, as well as to establish criteria for evaluating translation of realia in literary texts.

The theory is based on a linguistic approach to the study of realia as non-equivalent cultural words (Katan 2018; Vlahov, Florin 2009). The role of culture-specific words in creating cultural background of a literary text, possible classifications of these words, and translation strategies are discussed in the light of Venuti’s theory (1995; 2008). The investigation deals with a self-compiled representative corpus containing Russian realia in "Eugene Onegin", all Portuguese equivalents in both translations, and translators’ comments. The realia are classified according to their semantic feature. Thus, the corpus includes domestic, ethnographic, natural, onomastic realia, and idioms (in total - 1014 units). The comprehensive methodology (contextual, qualitative, quantitative analyses, as well as a translation experiment with participation of native Portuguese speakers) that is used in the study has enabled to obtain reliable data on adequate strategies for translating realia into Portuguese.

The study concludes that domestication prevails in both Portuguese translations of the novel, and it is also the dominant strategy for translating all thematic groups of realia, except for onomastic units. At the same time, foreignization has proven to be the most adequate strategy for translating all thematic groups of realia. The study has also established the criteria for adequate translation of realia, such as: 1) rendering source culture of realia; 2) conveying (direct / secondary) meaning of realia; 3) achieving the equivalent effect of the source text. In order to verify these criteria, a translation experiment has been designed and carried out. During the experiment native Portuguese speakers (106 informants) were defining the meanings of Russian realia in Portuguese translations of the novel "Eugene Onegin". It was assumed that in case of adequate translation, the informants would be able to identify the meanings of Russian realia correctly and fully in the translation text. Eventually, the hypothesis was confirmed hence the criteria can be used to determine adequacy of strategies for rendering realia in Russian-Portuguese literary translation. The concept of a translation experiment is also hoped to be found useful for studying the issues of conveying culture-specific vocabulary in Portuguese translations of Russian literary texts, as well as in translations into another language.