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Article published In: Contexts of Russian Literary Translation
Edited by Julie Hansen and Susanna Witt
[Translation and Interpreting Studies 11:1] 2016
► pp. 64–80

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Smuggling the other

Rita Rait-Kovaleva’s translation of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

Published online: 31 March 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.11.1.04sem
The first Russian translation of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) was produced in 1960 by Rita Rait-Kovaleva, a renowned translator of contemporary Western literature (English, French, German) in the Soviet Union. This essay examines Rait’s translation of The Catcher in the Rye in the context of the problem of censorship and translation, focusing on several instances of Rait’s translation of profanities and sex-related passages of The Catcher in the Rye. It demonstrates how the creative strategies of the translator not only helped her overcome censorship barriers but also transformed a foreign text into a new cultural model.
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Cited by (3)

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Veckrācis, Jānis
2024.  Various planes of retranslation: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in Russian and Latvian . Journal of Baltic Studies 55:2 ► pp. 327 ff. DOI logo
Monticelli, Daniele
2020. Translating the Soviet Thaw in the Estonian context: entangled perspectives on the book seriesLoomingu Raamatukogu. Journal of Baltic Studies 51:3 ► pp. 407 ff. DOI logo
Sicari, Ilaria
2020. Paratext as weapon. Translation and Interpreting Studies 15:3 ► pp. 354 ff. DOI logo

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