On the difficulties of literary translation: on the verge between creative rethinking and translation errors

This article is devoted to the study of the difficulties that arise in the process of literary translation. In translation science, there is a widespread approach in which the translator of a work of art is perceived as its (co)author. Giving him such a role cannot but raise the question of the relationship between the author and the text, and to what extent a literary work is a product of exclusively individual cognitive activity. Based on the ideas of Michel Foucault, this work considers the author (and the translator as the author) as, to a certain extent, the product of the discourse in which he creates the work. In this case, discourse is understood as a set of cultural, political, religious, behavioural and other codes that exist in society at the time of writing the work. Taking into account the socio-cultural aspect of the author’s function, the present study asks to what extent the difference between the discourses of the author and the translatorco-author affects the text of the translation. Cases when the translator is unable to decode the codes of the sending culture lead to translation errors, which entail a distortion of the meaning of the original, illogical causal relationships of the narrative and misinformation of the reader regarding the pragmatic intentions of the author and characters.

The material of this study was the text of the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell «North and South» and two of its Russian translations. Several contexts were selected for analysis, which are difficult to translate into Russian due to the presence of extralinguistic factors in them: codes of culture, religious movements, behavioural norms, class relations. In the course of the study, a comparative analysis of the selected elements was carried out with a comprehensive study of the literary, historical and linguistic context. This allowed the authors of the article to trace the causes of translation errors, to establish the relationship between intraand extra-linguistic factors in their commission, and in some cases to offer their own version of the translation. The conclusion of this study was the acceptance of the ambiguity of the phenomenon of translation error in the context of literary translation due to the difference in cultures between the sender of the original and the recipient of the translation. The difficulty of distinguishing between cases when an unreliable transfer of the meaning of the original can be regarded as a translation error, and when it can be considered as a creative rethinking in order to make the text as clear as possible to the reader is emphasized.

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