Translation of sociolect texts

Abstract

A moment's reflection suffices to convince one that no language is homogeneous, being represented by a set of language variants or language existential forms, reflecting the hetero­geneous character of the national culture. Notwithstanding variable nature of language, lin­guistic theorizing has been mostly based on standardized languages forms, rather than on natu­ral speech dialects. The present research addresses the fundamental issue of variability within a language and aims at studying the specific fragment of the Russian language of the XXth centu­ry — Soviet camp sociolect within the frameworks of contrastive sociolectology. Sociolect nature of the source text is viewed as one of the factors increasing the degree of text untranslatability. The author dwells on the nature of adaptation interventions, which a trans­lator needs to perform to render the specificity of the Soviet camp social dialect in English. The analysis of the ways in which translators processed the source texts under consideration reveals the twofold strategy aimed at maintaining a proper balance between replicating the sociolect text specificity and making the translation readable to the target recipients. Combin­ing explanatory translation, loose translation, occasional equivalents with loan translation translators achieve clarity of the translation, preserving at the same time apparent non-nativeness of the target text, which helps to avoid leveling the sociolect nature of the source texts.

Keywords

• sociolect
• translation
• untranslatability
• camp jargon
• adaptation