The translation challenges of crossover fiction (R. Adams's Watership Down and its Russian versions)

The research focuses on the problem of translating crossover fiction caused by its simultaneous addressing a diverse cross-generational audience due to the blurred borderline between traditionally separate readerships. Resulting from the combination of two structural models - one archetypal and addressed to children and the other experimental and addressed to the adults - the crossover fiction does not necessarily retain its potential to appeal to multiple audience in the target-culture. In the process of translation, this hybrid literature genre allows various approaches to harnessing its crossover potential ranging from cooperation with its double audience to the ultimate confrontation and rejection, when the adults and children cannot share their reading experience. Since crossover fiction is not only a literary phenomenon, but also a marketing category, the translation commissioner often plays a crucial role in determining how the translated text will function in the target culture. The translator, in turn, considers the source-text as an information field, which (s)he modifies not only depending on the linguistic features and source function of the text in the original culture, but mainly depending on extratextual parameters: the target-text purpose (skopos) and the target-text audience. The commissioner's decision to position the text under translation in the book market opens several options in terms of the target age group of the reader-in-situation, which may be mixed audience, adults, or children. Of them all, translating for the latter seems to be most disputable and challenging, as children's literature of any culture and epoch is more subject to regulations and restrictions than that for adults. The author argues that adaptation, or domestication, is inevitable in translating a crossover text for children. Though this product is not translation proper and thus should be marked as an abridgement or adaptation, it can represent the original work of literature in the target-culture. The comparative analysis of two Russian translations of R. Adams's epic fantasy Watership Down - one by E.V. Dogel published by the Detskaya literatura Publishing House in 1988 under the title Udivitelnye priklyucheniya krolikov and the other by T.N. Chernyshova published by Azbuka-Terra Publishing House as Obitately kholmov - clearly demonstrates the possible changes (genre model adaptation, manipulation with style, integrity, complexity, ethical and axiological component) that happen to the double focus of the origin in terms.

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