An Analysis of Transfer of Sociopolitical Realia Based on Vlakhov and Florin’s Theories: The Case of the Russian Translation of Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun

Culture–specific items or realia refer to cultural items and native concepts in different societies, which frequently pose a great difficulty for translators. Concerning the transfer of realia from the source language into the target language, it is considered a great achievement for translators to preserve much of their semantic and cultural load, not least in literary translation. The present research is based on the ideas of Sergey Vlakhov and Sider Florin, the famous Bulgarian translation theorists, who classified realia into geographic, ethnographic, sociopolitical, and military categories and proposed a number of strategies to translate them properly from one language into another. Relying on a comparative and analytical–descriptive methodology, this research studied how sociopolitical realia had been rendered in the Russian translation of Simin Daneshvar’s novel Savushun. According to the results, approximate translation–specifically the functional analogue–was found to be the most frequently used strategy while transcription, transliteration, and contextual translation had been used the least. Many cases were found in which the cultural and even semantic, linguistic, and stylistic load of the words and phrases had been lost. In general, the success of Russian translators to transfer the cultural load of sociopolitical realia in to the target text is considered relative.