When source language gives up its primacy: Translation of foreign insertions

Abstract

The paper discusses the problem of translating foreign insertions in one of the Russian key cultural texts. It is argued that French insertions are translated into English in a direct way, with Russian in this case giving up its place of a source language to French. The author supports his attitude by empirical finds such as correlations between tenses of French and English insertions as well as parallel French/English syntactic structures and correspondences between metaphoric devices in French and English sentences. It is admitted that translation should be approached as a co-authored creativity of a translator and the source narrative author.