Argot translation in S. Dovlatov’s prose (based on the translation of “Pushkin Hills” and “Craft” into Spanish and Portuguese)

Abstract

Using the example of translations of the novella “Pushkin Hills” and the novel “Craft” into Portuguese (Brazilian national version) and Pyrenean version and Argentine national version of Spanish, the article analyzes the strategies for translating prison slang vocabulary discovered in S. D. Dovlatov’s writings. Prison jargon is an important element of the writer’s idiosyncrasy, and it is found in almost all his texts. For example, Dovlatov often uses prison jargon to define his characters by linguistic means, in their direct speech. The cultural marking of the Russian prison-camp jargon is particularly difficult to translate. Due to historical circumstances in the twentieth century, many lexemes from prison jargon moved into colloquial speech, while maintaining a special expressiveness and connotations. Prison jargon is present in all languages and cultures, however, as a rule, it is used by a rather narrow circle of people, while for people far from the prison environment, the meanings of these jargonisms are unclear. As a result, the translation of jargonisms in which the Russian reader of Dovlatov instantly reads the implicit information referring to the prison environment poses a difficult task for translators, as in most cases there are no connotative equivalents in the translation language. Within the framework of the communicative-functional approach, due to the comparative analysis of translated texts, the article examines the translation strategies used by translators to convey the stylistic originality and expressiveness of prison jargon found on the pages of S. Dovlatov’s works. The analysis of the translated texts has demonstrated that due to the fact that the prison jargon used by the writer mainly refers to the layer of non-equivalent vocabulary, in order to achieve the communicative equivalence of the translation texts, translators turn to both the strategy of foreignization and the strategy of domestication, adapting the text to the culture of translation; often slang and reduced expressions are replaced in translation by stylistically neutral ones; in some cases, translators also turn to free translation (for example, when translating puns). Such translation substitutions inevitably lead to distortions of the author’s intention and to the loss of some expressions of the original text. Nevertheless, the reception of Dovlatov’s works by foreign readers demonstrates that the translation of his prose with at least partial preservation of cultural and stylistic originality is possible.