Vasili Šukšinin omaperäinen sanasto suomentajan jäljiltä

Abstract

This article explores Finnish translations of Vasily Shukshin’s idiosyncratic prose that largely relies on dialogue and teems with dialectal expressions. Our aim is to test the common assumption that texts containing regionalisms or informal vocabulary often become flattened, i.e. less colorful and expressive in translation. Evidence of such flattening would offer corroboration for the translation universal known as standardization. To test the hypothesis, we compiled a monolingual corpus of ca. 672,000 words, consisting of 138 texts by Shukshin. The lexemes typical of Shukshin were identified with the help of MyStem, software for morphological analysis. The program’s lemmatizer indicated 21,295 words as unrecognizable; these words are thus very probably infrequent in Russian texts in general and typical of Shukshin’s writing. For this article, we further delimited the material to six short stories that appear both in our corpus and in the bilingual ParRus corpus compiled by Mikhail Mikhailov, with approximately 200 idiosyncratic lexemes. The frequencies of these lexemes were compared to information derived from relevant frequency counts. While the methodology needs to be refined and the corpus expanded, the initial analysis does provide some evidence of conventionalization, particularly in the Finnish translation of a story depicting a child’s language usage.