Peculiarity of cultural transfer in literary translation (on the material of the Russian and Armenian translations of the British classic literature)

Abstract

The article is the first attempt to analyze in a comparative way the situation of the transfer of British literary classics to Russia and Armenia in the 19th–20th centuries on the basis of the Armenian and Russian translations of Dickens’ novel “The Adventures of Oliver Twist”. The article outlines the range of issues related to the study of the specifics of artistic translation in the light of the paradigm of cultural transfer. The idea of “translation as violence” and the concept of translation “skopos” are analyzed as closely related to the paradigm of cultural transfer. The Armenian national culture is characterized as predominantly focused on cultural transfer and the phenomenon of translation. The article sketches the situation of “counter-movement”, which was favorable to the active reception of Dickens’s heritage in Armenia in the late 19th century as a “classic”. This favorably influenced the “intermediary” role of Russian translations in Armenia. The conclusion is made that the socio-cultural context of early Victorian England in its specificity, as well as the topicality, are rather and almost equally alien to the host context of Russia and Armenia, which articulated their own “communication request” for Dickens and formed the “reputational background” of the author in a significantly different socio-cultural and geopolitical usus. At the same time, there is the factor of Armenian national specificity, which manifests itself, among other things, in the increase in the “degree of optimism” of the translated texts, a phenomenon that is less indicative for the Russian translations.