Ebonics in Russian translation?

[John Dunn]

It would appear that the situations described by Romy Taylor and by Robert Orr present two different problems which are perhaps dealt with in two different ways.  In Robert's example below the speaker is someone who is not a native speaker of English; in addition she uses forms that are also found in some pidgins, and thus it is not surprising that the translator uses forms that are found in Russian pidgins, such as that used at one time in Kyakhta.

The translator in Romy's example has somehow to distinguish between two different native-speaker varieties of English.  For the educated speaker there is no problem: standard English can be represented by standard Russian.  But how is the non-standard English of the other characters to be represented?  What the translator sees looks to be 'ungrammatical' English with 'faulty' agreements and the like, and it is therefore not surprising perhaps that the translator resorts to similarly 'ungrammatical' Russian.  The result looks outlandish to an English-speaker who knows that this form of Russian could never be produced by a native speaker, but it is not clear what other options the translator had, given that Russian does not, as far I can make out, possess a native-speaker variety that can sensibly correspond to Black English.   There is, however, another point: we have not been presented with the original, but it is arguable that Black English, as it often appears in literatur!
 e, is not so much an accurate reproduction of that particular variety of speech as a caricature of it; if the translator has, albeit more by accident than design, produced another caricature, perhaps it is not so wide of the mark after all.

John Dunn. 
________________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Robert Orr [colkitto at ROGERS.COM]
Sent: 02 June 2011 08:24
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Ebonics in Russian translation?

Further to my previous posting on this topic, a further relevant example is
provided where Flashman attempts to  teach some English phrases to a newly
kidnapped slave to pass the time on the Middle Passage:

Me Lady Caroline Lamb   - Moja est ledi Karolina Lemb

Me best rattle in Balliol College - Moja est lucsij boltuniska na Belliol
Kolledzh.


> Many years ago I browsed through a Russian translation of Huckleberry
Finn.  I remember > clearly that Jim's "Who dat?" was translated "Kto tam?"

Representative Abraham Lincoln's "I'm a who's-yar boy from Indiana myself"
is rendered by "pered toboj ne kto-to, a kto-to-tamer iz Indiany", and
footnoted.

In addition to George MacDonald Fraser's extensive footnotes, these Russian
versions contain all sorts of extra footnotes for cultural and historical
items that Anglophone readers might be expected to understand automatically
- a sort of mirror image of the material in Genevra Gerhart's The Russian's
World.

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