Strategies of Rendering Cultural References and Realia of Religious Discourse: A Case Study of the Translations of The Cathedral Clergy by Nikolay Leskov into English and French

The article considers two basic strategies, domestication and foreignization, used to translate lexemes denoting cultural references and realia of religious discourse in the novel The Cathedral Clergy ("Soboryane") by N. Leskov. For the purpose of this research, realia constitute lexemes, which may be unfamiliar to representatives of other cultures, while cultural references comprising texts, situations, enunciations and names are in fact intertextual elements recognized by the speakers of a certain language. Thus, realia and cultural references are the terms used to characterize the same object from different points of view. The study is based on the corpus of lexical units used to denote elements of religious discourse taken from the novel and its translations into English and French. The translation of intertextual elements from sacred texts is dominated by domestication. The translation of puns based on religious text elements is carried out in two different manners: foreignization prevails in the English text, while domestication dominates in the French one. As for the names, both translators, with rare exceptions, tend to choose domestication and use the equivalence method. A comparative analysis has revealed that foreignization prevails in the French translation, while domestication is more typical for the English text. Besides, the same strategy may be implemented in different ways. Thus, foreignization is achieved mainly due to the use of transliterated or transcribed Russian lexemes, or Latin words, in the French text, while it is achieved as well through the use of archaisms in the English version. The realia may be divided into the following thematic groups: clergy ranks, clergy apparel, church architecture, churchware. The lexemes denoting the ranks of the clergy are rendered through domestication. As for the clergy apparel, the French text is dominated by foreignization, and English by domestication. The lexical units used to denote the elements of church architecture are rendered mainly through domestication. The analysis has demonstrated that domestication allows to render the original meaning only partially, while the translated text becomes as close as possible to the cultural background of the target language. In its turn, foreignization reduces ethnocentricity of the target language and undermines the authority of the cultural codes it conveys. The use of certain translation transformations also depends on the choice of a particular strategy. The study has revealed that, for example, the use of calques or transliteration is common for the foreignization strategy, while paraphrasing or annotated translation is typical for the strategy of domestication.