Domestication and defamiliarization in Christopher English's translation of N. V. Gogol's Dead Souls

One of the merits of Christopher English's 1998 translation of Dead Souls that sets it apart from earlier versions is his treatment of the theme of language which is depicted as possessing a certain cultural and ethnic identity. English is extremely attentive to the fragments of the poema in which Gogol defamiliarizes language, focusing not on the fictional reality, but rather on its linguistic presentation. English's translation is scrupulous and creative in reproduction of various terms, names, nicknames, - to verbal realities, in general. When translating these verbal realities English uses both domesticating and defamiliarizing techniques. The text undergoes cultural adaptation to become a fact of the European culture through translation which results in the introduction of a great number of foreign insertions. This renders Gogol's word more elitist, refined, intellectual (especially through the use of Latinisms). Although this code of intellectuality is not characteristic of Gogol's works, these 242renderings may serve as an adequate vehicle of integration of the most Russian work into the foreign linguistic environment of the European discourse. Foreignization is used in the fragments where Gogol himself defamiliarizes the language. The fragments in question contain idiomatic expressions. Idioms in Gogol's text are frequently accompanied by a marker that emphasizes (or models) their exotism, unseamlessness - a certain quotation formula signaling the introduction of a strange, foreign word. One such formula is as the expression goes here in Russia. The use of these formulas may be considered as an attempt to model an objective viewpoint that would be in line with Gogol's ambition to show all of Russia, albeit from one side. Gogol's defamiliarization allows verbatim translation of these idioms devoid of any pragmatic adaptations, because the text of the original itself frees the translator of the necessity to look for an idiom about which one might say: as the expression goes here in England. From our point of view, it is the balance between defamiliarization (which allows to preserve cultural veracity) and domestication that distinguishes English's translation among other versions.

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