The Historical references of the Soviet Era and their treatment in translation: The case of Svetlana Alexievich

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse how several translators into European languages deal with the translation of historical references of the Soviet era, which appear in “Vremja sekond hènd” (“Secondhand Time. The Last of the Soviets. An Oral History”), a literary work by Svetlana Alexievich. Because of the gap between Russian and Occidental cultures, numerous references to the past of the USSR are obscure to Western readers. Due to their frequent occurrence in the object of the study, translators are required to decide which translation procedures they can use in order to convey the meaning of each kind of such references, in which cases they have to preserve them and to what extent they need to approach the text to the reader. In view of detecting possible challenges in translating Soviet history elements and illustrating the strategies applied, we study the translation of the original Russian text into four languages: French, Portuguese, Spanish and English. After classifying the historical references and contrasting their treatment in the corpus, we can conclude that the election of translation procedures varies not only according to the reference in question and the context in which it appears, but also according to the genre to which the translator and the publisher attribute the literary work.