Vol 18, No 4 (2021): PARTS OF A WHOLE: TRANSLATION INTO RUSSIAN FROM THE LANGUAGES OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF RUSSIA

The article gives a survey of the problematics, historic and cultural practice of maintaining and developing the ethnic languages of Russia through translation; it retrospectively describes the history of polycultural co-existence (including the unified method of presentation for children’s folk lore in S. Marshak’s version) and outlines the ways of dealing with today’s urgent problems of preserving ethnic language. The article describes the models of reconstructing the lost texts and the strategies of translating the texts of small ethnic groups, as well as the models of maintaining the quality of translation from Russia’s ethnic languages into Russian. We especially stress the importance of the Russian language in its role of the cultural mediator. The article pays due attention to the need to develop specific practiceoriented theories of translation which would embrace the global experience in translatology and take into account the specificity of ethno-centric mentality and the ways to keep it in translation. The article is an introduction to the following materials in the volume.

Translation as a means of cross-cultural communication serves two purposes: 1. making an additional recording of cultural works of a certain people by creating a copy of these works in a language with a higher number of speakers for further introduction of the culture to a wider public; 2. in a situation of widespread bilingualism, preserving a vulnerable language against assimilation by a dominant language by a bilingual translator’s conscious counteracting of negative interference and their educational activities in the field of ecolinguistics. In comparison with translation from/to foreign languages, these translational purposes acquire other, new aspects when applied to the languages of the different peoples in one country, depending on the language situation, politics, etc. The article examines the practices used in achieving the above-mentioned purposes of Russian-Yakut, Yakut-Russian translation in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), a constituent entity of the Russian Federation. The article also describes the role of translation in the spiritual culture of the Yakut people as a proxy of literary and artistic innovations capable of shaping and changing the artistic tastes of readers, as well as a means of integration into the world cultural space, enabling the Yakuts to look at their native culture from the point of view of native speakers of the Russian language and members of Russian (including Soviet) culture. Translation as a sphere of close interaction of languages is of interest to the language policy of this multinational constituent of the Russian Federation. With the adoption of federal and republican laws for language issues in the 1990s, the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) started to give more attention to the translation between the two official languages. As a result of years-long observation of bilingual Yakuts’ speech culture, it has become apparent that researching linguistical issues of translation, drawing up practical recommendations for translation based on scientific research, and then popularizing them among bilingual Yakuts may become a great help in the preservation of the native language. A review of the Sakha Republic’s (Yakutia) experience in translation development in a multinational constituent of the Russian Federation leads to a conclusion about the importance of the work of a translator (who translates from and to languages of Russia) in standardization of their native language. Such a translator can consciously regulate the mutual influence of the languages in society.

In this article we’ve focused on the topical problem of preserving the languages and cultures of indigenous peoples of Siberia, which can be solved through the translation of ethnic texts (as an important category of Siberian texts) into Russian and other languages, and translation of texts of great cultural and religious significance from Russian and other languages into languages of Siberian peoples. We aim to study initiatives of individual scholars and enthusiasts who have been translating both “strong” texts from indigenous languages of Siberian peoples and “strong” texts of Russian literature (mostly religious ones) into these languages. The ethnic literature of the peoples of the Krasnoyarsk Krai is considered in historical and comparative perspective, taking into account the national and cultural conditions of these peoples. The conclusion concerns the importance of ethnic translation with the cultural information and memory as the key unit of translation and the saving of the unique languages and cultures of Siberia as its main task.

The urgency and topicality of the research is due to an insufficient study of zoom-investigating into a pre- and post-translation mental stage, and of ways to identify or forecast the author’s mind ethno-centered content. Hereby the objective of the study is to describe ways of representing the oriental ethnic mind in translation from Buryat into Russian. To implement it, the following tasks are solved: to prove the conceptual difference of the Buryat mind within three dimensions the experimental axiological data on the semantic space of three generations of modern Buryats are presented, the main vectors of oriental Buryat mind are determined, the given axiological observations are confirmed on the basis of a literary text material, the author being a conservatively orientally-minded author by himself, and a number of ways to represent the Buryat ethnic mind in translation into Russian are discussed, and their correlated correspondences (ir)relevance issue is respectively raised. The materials are as follows: the semantic differential experiment data and Dambinima Tsyrendashiev’s story “Һuhlshyn uulzalga” ‘Last meeting’. The research methods are a psycholinguistic experiment, a posttranslation analysis of the target text in Russian, an algorithm presentation of the source text ethnocentered semantics explication at the pre-translation stage which is presented in the conclusion.

The article presents the review of Tatar literature works and their translations into Russian and some other world languages. The Tatar literature has rich heritage, the first works of it (manuscripts) are dated back to the Middle Ages. The first printed works were published in the XVIII century as that time the Tatar language was the diplomatic language used in the communication between western and eastern countries. The time of XIX-XX centuries is considered to be the rise of the Tatar literature. Since that time the Tatar writers started writing their works in Russian that was caused by “natural bilingualism” established on the land of Tatarstan due to historical development. In the Soviet times the works of Tatar writers and poets written in Tatar were translated into Russian which is the intermediate language in the Russian Federation. After the collapse of the USSR Russia opened its boundaries and the number of translations of the Tatar writers’ works into Western and Eastern languages have been growing dramatically. Modern Tatar literature is continuing the traditions of the Tatar literature, the works of Tatar writers have been translating into foreign languages in order to present them to world community.

At present, the official business style of the Yakut language is more developed in comparison with the translations of the twentieth century, when this style was just beginning to be practiced. Along with this, the translation of official-business style texts is also developing. As state and municipal services are an integral part of our life and understanding the strengths and merits, which adds the translation to society, it is very important to translate the Yakut language information, regulatory documents of the population of our Republic and members of the institutions, namely the Standard of applicants to the State autonomous institution “Multifunctional center for the provision of state and municipal services in the Republic of Sakha” (Yakutia) Rules of applicants. The aim of this work is to analyze the difficulties of transmission cliché official-business style of Russian into Yakut language and the search approach solutions to these difficulties. The methodological basis of this study is the comparative and descriptive methods based on the data obtained by the continuous sampling method. As a result of the analysis, we identified lexical and grammatical difficulties in translating official-business style cliches from Russian into Yakut. Lexical words include borrowing words, words without equivalent correspondence and abbreviations in the cliche, where the first ones are most often transmitted to the Yakut language by transcription or remain by themselves, the second ones are translated by an adequate replacement, paraphrasing or description, and the third ones with the Russian version in a bracket. Grammatical difficulties include complex sentences with passive constructions and participial turns, which directly affect how the cliche will be translated into them. Cliches in complex sentences occur frequently, sometimes several times in the same sentence.