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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. 100–117

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Translating the translingual text

Olga Grushin’s anglophone novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov in Russian

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 31 March 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.11.1.06han
This article examines strategies applied in selected passages of Elena Petrova’s Russian translation of Olga Grushin’s anglophone novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2005). The novel is set in Moscow during the late Soviet period and depicts a crisis precipitated by the changes brought by glasnost in the life of a loyal apparatchik. Although the Russian-American writer Grushin composed the novel in her adopted language of English, it reflects a Russian cultural subtext and contains numerous Russian linguistic elements and cultural allusions. It is therefore interesting to analyze how these elements are rendered in the Russian translation, entitled Zhizn’ Sukhanova v snovideniiakh (2011). The analysis is followed by a consideration of challenges posed by translingual texts to theoretical understandings of translation. It argues that established concepts within translation studies, such as domestication, foreignization, source language and target language, are not well-suited to cases of literary translingualism.
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