Lexical Aspects of Russian Bible Translations

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the lexical aspects of Russian Bible translations of the 19th—21st centuries in comparative coverage and is a continuation of a study pre-viously conducted by reference to English Bibles. A historical overview of the existing Russian translations is given (the Synodal translation and the texts preceding it, the New Testament of Bishop Cassian, the Bible of the World Bible Translation Center, the “Central Asian translation”, the translation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Bible of the Inter-national Bible Society, the modern translation of the Russian Bible Society, the “Zaoksky Bible”). Special attention is paid to modern editions. Samples of texts are compared according to the lexical parameters of adaptiveness, terminologicalness, style and literalness. On the basis of this comparison, a classification of the considered translations is proposed, and their typological features and interconnections are established. The lexical nature of translations is interpreted in terms of their sociolinguistic effect (public perception). The data obtained confirms the pattern previously found in the English-language Bibles — the inverse relationship between adaptiveness on the one hand and terminologicalness, high style and literalness of the translation on the other. In terms of lexical characteristics, the Synodal and the “Central Asian” translations differ most from each other, which is probably due to their focus on church tradition and missionary goals, respectively.