Double-Sided Transformations of Culture-Bound Constituents in William Saroyan’s Cross-Cultural Domain

Abstract

The article focuses on the transformations, which occur in Russian and Armenian translations of culture-bound constituents in W. Saroyan’s fiction with special reference to the analysis of their pragmatic value and both cross-cultural and cross-language identification. The aim of the analysis is to reveal the so-called Saroyanesque identity and the translation perspectives of his specific manner of reproducing the actual reality, his personal vision of the world he lived in and created in, the world which combined the environment, circumstances, conditions, characters, cultures, ethnicity of two different communities – his native Armenian and no less native America. The so-called double-sided transformations of culture-bound constituents occur in W. Saroyan’s fiction at basically two levels: the cognitive level of ethnic and mental indicators transformations and the linguistic level of culture-bound elements translation (words, phrases, exclamations etc.). To keep Saroyanesque identity the translators should primarily transform the ideas, the concepts, the ethnic mentality of the characters, then the language media should undergo certain pragmatic modification to be correctly interpreted by the target audience.

Keywords

• Saroyanesque identity
• culture-bound element
• pragmatic modification
• cross-cultural environment
• ethnic mentality