Anton Chekhov's Novella The Steppe in English Translations by Constance Garnett and Ronald Hingley: Strategies of Domestication and Foreignization

The article analyses the English-language translations of Chekhov's The Steppe by Constance Garnett (1919) and Ronald Hingley (1980) in the aspect of domestication and foreignization translation strategies. These translations are considered canonical; they cover the most significant period of the novella's reception, and determine the novella's interpretation in the English-language culture. A comparative analysis of the translations shows that the dominant strategy in the translations by Garnett and Hingley is that of domestication: it gives an idea of the general vector of the novella's interpretation in translation, which targeted at the reader of the host culture. This is evidenced, first of all, by the transformations found in the translations of the main image of the story - the image of the steppe, in which the Russian national and Chekhov's individual authorial worldviews are closely intertwined in a complex system of associative similarities and connotations. A striking example of this is the translators' transformation of the nomination of the image of the steppe: the steppe/the steppes. The domestication strategy in the translations is used in different ways and in various combinations with the foreignization strategy, which is connected both with the time the translations were made and with the translators' individual attitudes. Garnett's translations in the 1910s and 1920s introduced Chekhov as a Russian writer to the Englishspeaking public; therefore, her translation of The Steppe naturally retains the main cultural codes of the original (anthroponyms, names of folklore characters, names of nationalities), and domestication is realized mainly through the neutralization of deeper and more specific national-cultural contexts included into the image of the steppe. Hingley uses domestication as a “global” strategy, which correlates with the stage of active, as the analysis convincingly showed, “appropriation” of Chekhov's works by the English-language culture in the 1970s-1980s. The main technique of domestication in Hingley's translation of The Steppe is the search for functional analogues and parallels in the English-language culture. As a result, markers indicating the connection of the steppe space with the Russian national picture of the world, and, along with them, the author's meanings, are significantly reduced in Hingley's translation. The most indicative in this regard is the double nomination of the steppe image (steppe/prairie), which probably indicates an attempt by the translator to interpret this image as having not only national-specific, but also universal semantics.

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