художественный перевод

Six English-language translations of N.V. Gogol’s novel «The Overcoat» are analyzed in the article; special emphasis is placed on the lexical, syntactic and stylistics text characteristics, on the presence of the colloquialisms, historical vocabulary, idioms, puns, and author’s neologisms; the approaches of both Russian and English-speaking researchers to the concept of «translation equivalence», its essence and qualities are defined.

The article is devoted to the problems of literary translation, in particular to the ways of supplying adequate translation. On the examples from a short story by a famous XX century English writer D.H. Lawrence, the authors of the article show that in the cases where there are no analogues in the target language to the structures of the source language, lexical and grammar transformations prove to be effective. Transformations of this kind, which are used taking into consideration the text function and the context, make up for stylistic shifts inevitable in literary translation.

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the English version of N. V. Gogol’s «Overcoat» that was made by C. J. Hogarth in 1918; some of the main problems that the translators encounter while dealing with the text of the novel are mentioned; the means used for rendering social and national particularities of the text and the plot, Gogol’s narrative technique and reasoning.