Indirect translation in Dutch-Russian cultural transfer

Abstract

This is the first review of the existing research on the topic of indirect translation in Dutch-Russian language pair. Both theoretical justifications for the study of this problem (H. Pięta, M. Ringmar, C. Dollerup, etc.) and the results of empirical research (I. E. Kuznetsova, H. van der Tak, I. M. Michajlova, etc.) are presented. The paper includes observations on the influence of the mediating language on the creation of the first dictionaries, translation of scientific works, legal documents and fiction, and separately highlights the issue of using English as a “pivot language” in popular online translators. The main problem in this case becomes the translation of personal pronouns and homonyms. In recent years, on the one hand, researchers have been fighting the stigmatisation of mediated translation as a priori inferior and proving that mediated languages link distant cultures and play an important role in the dissemination of literature. On the other hand, textual analyses of different types of indirect translations reveal errors and inaccuracies that could have been easily avoided in direct translation. An intermediary translation can be seen as a translation made with the help of a language other than the source language, but not necessarily from a “third language”: when translation plurality occurs, we can often speak of intralanguage indirect translation. This paper uses Multatuli’s novel Max Havelaar as an illustration, in particular the 1959 Russian edition, where German and Russian translations mediate. Resorting to the help of their predecessors, the Russian translators omit the same fragments, use similar paraphrases, and repeat lexical and phonetic distortions. The use of mediating texts is certainly related to extra-linguistic factors: lack of translators, demand for texts, publishers’ desire to reduce costs or speed up the translation process. The study of specific cases of indirect translation and further systematisation of the identified distortions allows us to track negative trends, and the novel Max Havelaar and its translations into different languages can serve as material for identifying these patterns.