(no subject)
The differences between these versions of “Catcher” seem to be the result of divergent approaches to the craft of translation itself. Rait-Kovaleva’s translation is a domesticating translation-one that “smooths out” the original to make it conform to linguistic and cultural norms of the target audience-while Nemtsov takes a foreignizing approach, which upends literary and speech conventions in the receiving culture. To do this, Nemtsov employs a mélange of English-language calques, Russian provincial speech, neologisms, slang originating in Soviet prison camps, and contemporary hipsterish lingo. The mixture of unconventional speech is deliberate: advocates of foreignizing like to claim that such “marginalized” language, through a bizarre sort of syllogism, best represents the absolute difference of the foreign original. In other words, the Soviet prison slang in Nemtsov’s translation is actually meant to stand in for the original’s foreignness-its Americanness-for the Russian reader.