Ebonics in Russian translation?

[Romy Taylor]

Hi Seelangs,

I wonder whether linguists and others good at text analysis can give  
their thoughts on a translation of Black dialect into Russian?

The author, Wayland Rudd, was an Afr-American living in Moscow, and  
his play is about African Americans circa 1930.  Unfortunately, I  
don't have the original in English.  But in the Russian translation,  
educated African Americans speak standard Russian, while the servant  
"Momsie" speaks something like the foreign characters in an old  
"Tintin" book, or like an old Hollywood caricature of a foreigner.

Here's an example:

??????: ? ???? ????? ?? ??????? ?? ???????????! ????? ??!

?????: ????? ???, ?????, ????? ???. ???? ???????? ???????  
????????????? ???????! ??, ???????, ?? ????? ?? ?????? ?????! ??,  
?????, ? ?????, ?? ?? ?????? ????? ??????????? ? ????????? ?????, -  
??? ?????? ??????, ???????????, ???? ???? ? ????? ????? ????.

I guess one question is: how standard was it to translate Black  
American dialect as ungrammatical / foreigners' mistakes?

And my second question is: is this related to the way that some  
Soviets (including Trotsky and Stalin) saw African Americans as  
national minorities (speaking a distinct language and requiring their  
own homeland) as opposed to ethnic minorities?

Yours gratefully,
Romy Taylor

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