Wine-Drinking Objects in Sergei Dovlatov’s The Zone as National Realities and Their Translation into Spanish

Abstract

In this article, we analyse the objects of wine-drinking taken from The Zone story by Sergei Dovlatov and their translations into Spanish (the translated book was published by the Ikusager Ediciones publishing house in 2009), and propose our own translation solutions. For this purpose, we considered three types of national realities. First of all, there are concepts that appeared in the original ethnoculture and bear the semantic load which is well-known to native Russian speakers and often unknown to Spanish native speakers (samogon, braga, bormotukha, zveroboy). Secondly, there are names of alcoholic beverages borrowed from other cultural traditions. They were incorporated into the structure of the national Russian language and are either unknown to foreigners (chacha, shnaps, shartrez), or have other (additional) meanings in the original culture, which do not exist in the target language and cannot be perceived by its readers (portveyn, vermut, los’on, odekolon, spirt). To translate fiction, one needs to have not only deep background knowledge, but also knowledge of the culture of a foreign language. This will help in the process of identifying the differences between cultural traditions of the source and target languages. In particular, lexical units related to national realities can be determined as accurately as possible, and the ways to translate them into a foreign language can be found. We propose, following Lawrence Venuti (1994), two main ways of their transmission, namely: domestication (deliberate disregard of the linguistic and cultural norms of the target language and culture) and foreignization (orientation of the target text to the language system and values of the target culture), and different translation techniques depending on the characteristics of the national reality, knowledge of which is necessary for the translator and the extent to which the national reality is understandable in the target language to a reader not specialized in Russian culture. In general terms, in this article, we show that, when translating a text, it is more reasonable to choose the method of domestication or to use native words denoting close or semantically similar meaning even though it is not absolutely identical (it can range from a stylistically neutral designation of a word, its partial neutralization to absolute neutralization and descriptive translation). In some cases, one can also resort to foreignization, using such techniques as transliteration in the form of calque or borrowings, which in some cases require textual explanations or notes.