Translation of dialects in Mo Yan's novels into Russian

Abstract

The subject of this study is the specific character of rendering dialectal and colloquial-substandard speech in I. A. Egorov’s Russian translations of Mo Yan’s novels The Republic of Wine, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. The analysis focuses on dialectal vocabulary, colloquial forms, phraseological units, proverbs, culturally marked lexical items, and other elements of folk speech that contribute to the construction of the writer’s artistic world. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the translator reproduces the local colour of Gaomi County, the speech characteristics of the characters, the expressiveness of the author’s style, and the sociocultural markedness of the original. Dialectal speech is considered not as an isolated lexical feature, but as an essential component of Mo Yan’s poetics, closely connected with the representation of everyday life, historical memory, grotesque imagery, and the emotional intensity of the narrative. The methodological basis of the study is a comparative qualitative analysis of the original Chinese texts and their Russian translations, with due regard to the functional and stylistic effects produced by the translator’s choices. The scholarly novelty of the research lies in the systematic examination of the Russian translations of three of Mo Yan’s novels from the perspective of preserving the artistic functions of dialectal speech. The study demonstrates that I. A. Egorov generally avoids imitating specific Russian regional dialects, since such a strategy could result in the false geographical and cultural localization of the Chinese text. Instead, the translator draws on the resources of broadly recognizable Russian colloquial and substandard speech, expressive syntax, functional compensation, and the descriptive rendering of culturally specific realia. It is concluded that, despite the inevitable partial neutralization of local dialect markers, the Russian translations largely preserve the principal functions of the source text, namely the creation of local colour, characterization, expressiveness, and evaluation. The findings therefore confirm the effectiveness of a functional-stylistic approach to the translation of dialectal elements in literary prose.