Literary and Digital Translation As a Form of Intercultural Communication in the Epoch of Social Transformations

Abstract

This article is devoted to the transformation of models of literary translation in the era of digitalization. The first translations in Russian practice tended to “retell” events, and the text was made “based on” the original rather than being a translation in the modern sense. Examples of such approaches to translation can be seen in the work of V.A. Zhukovsky, A.S. Pushkin and other authors of the early nineteenth century. At the same time, it was at the beginning of the 19th century that the first attempts were made to contrast the translation with their own, Russian literature: “the same subject in Russian” was replaced by a translated text close to the modern concept of translation. The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by mass translations of poetic texts and, in the vast majority of cases, the authors who translated them were also poets: V.Ya. Bryusov; N.S. Gumilev; A.A. Akhmatova; B.L. Pasternak; and others. The translation of the poem was understood as the transfer of the original poetic experience to Russian soil, and high demands were placed on the quality of the poetic text, often leading to significant semantic differences between the original text and the translated one. With the advent of machine translation and the expansion of digitalization, translation has become available to almost everyone. At the same time, there are areas in which literal translation almost does not interfere with the perception of the text (for example, in an official business style or when translating texts of instructions) and requires minimal stylistic editing. However, literary translation can radically lose its meaning, and in the case of a poetic translation, it can deprive the text of its aesthetic characteristics (rhythmic organization, rhyme), which poses new challenges for translators in the digitalization era. Translation gaps in the text of fiction should be considered not yet completely solved by the task of the modern digitalization society.