Representation of the literary protagonist's figure and its authorial characterization in translation (exemplified by American prose)

Abstract

Interrelation of literary and linguistic aspects in translating prosaic literary works - a contemporary American novel - into Russian is dealt with. Paramount attention is focused on the most significant literary aspect - the protagonist's figure and its characterization formulated by the author of the original as well as her peculiarities recreated and represented in the translated text. The protagonist's main features are defined concretely on the basis of the authorial description and characterization of her appearance, behavioral, psychological and some other personal individual traits represented in detail in the original, but, however, either deliberately distorted or erroneously translated. The methodology of research is based primarily on the comparative linguistic analysis of relevant excerpts taken from the original and its published translation. Special attention is paid to the results of the performed distortions followed by the authors' detailed commentaries and, in most cases, their own suggested versions of contextual correspondences. A strictly systematized explicit classification consisting of four types of the translation invariant's violation, defined and exposed by the authors, will, hopefully, help systematize them while teaching translation to philology students as well as caution translators of literary prose, both beginners and advanced ones, against making mistakes of this sort in their practical creative activities