Journal Article

Description of Yakut culture in Russian in texts of different genres

Vasil’eva, Akulina

2022

Overview

Describing a culture by means of another language is a large and interesting translation task. Nowadays, this eternal problem becomes more and more relevant for traditional cultures since the quality of the transmitted verbal information about unique culture-specific elements also depends on the accuracy of their description. The Russian language for the peoples of the Russian Federation is the language of interethnic communication, and translating folklore and literary texts, as well as writing scientific works in Russian on the Yakut culture, allows other peoples to discover the Yakut culture. Over the four centuries of Yakut-Russian contacts, many texts describing the Yakut culture have been created in Russian. In this research, the source material is three different texts: a translation of a heroic epic, a translation of a work of fiction, and an ethnographic description of a native speaker of the Yakut language and culture written in a non-native Russian language. These texts contain the same culture-specific elements that are translated differently depending on the target audience. In the course of the research, we have found that the culturespecific elements of the Yakut culture are mainly transliterated, and commentaries on them can be different in exhaustiveness and depth. In addition, we note that traditional loan translations from the Yakut language have been established to translate various epithets and set expressions associated with folklore and mythology. Such expressions often seep into scientific texts on ethnography because traditional crafts and traditional life, in general, are inextricably linked with the spiritual culture of the people.

• Publisher: EDP Sciences
• Subject: Culture / Epic literature / Epithets / Ethnography / Fiction / Folklore / Handicrafts / Language culture relationship / Literary translation / Russian language / Translation / Yakut