Lexical Variability in French Translations of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign

Abstract

In this article we consider the lexical variability of the French translations of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”. The research material includes the following lexical classes: color designations, flora and fauna names, as well as warfare terms. Lexical units are selected manually and processed with the help of a self-compiled parallel corpus of translated texts. A distinctive feature of the monument’s translations into foreign languages is the absence of the original text, which leads to a situation of multiple “original” texts. We have analyzed 11 texts of French translations of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (some of the translations considered were unknown in Russian scientific practice), as well as the original Russian texts used by the translators (in case they were presented as parallel texts or mentioned in paratexts). We are faced with the situation of translation multiplicity, an actual area of research in modern translation studies, so we also considered the problem of multiplicity of original texts. The study revealed more than 30 occurrences of color designations lexemes, 99 uses of animal and plant names, as well as more than 100 occurrences of military lexical units. The features of translations of each lexical class were considered separately and the results of the analysis were compared. A number of reasons for lexical variability have been identified: differences in the original texts (reconstructions and translations into modern Russian), the abundance of “dark places” in the text of the monument (word boundary ambiguity in different reconstructions or lexemes that do not have a clear interpretation in modern Russian), different times of publication of the translation (during the period between 1823 and 2005), individual interpretations of the source text. A question about the correspondence of the translation devices used in recent translations of the “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” to the universal features of translation proposed by M. Baker, A. Berman and U. Eco has been raised. Most of them are applicable to the French translations of the famous epic. However, in some cases less common correlations have been found (meaning discrepancy, metonymic synonym, etc.).