The translator’s voice in the narrative: “Winnie the Pooh” by B. Zahoder as an illustrative case

UDC 81`25+808.1
DOI 10.20339/PhS.3-24.052

Komutstsi Ludmila V.,
Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor,
Professor of the Theory and Practice Translation Department
Sevastopol State University

e-mail: ltataru@yandex.ru

Chichenkova Karina A.,
Independent Researcher,
Sevastopol

e-mail: chichenkova.karina@mail.ru

The “cultural turn” of the late 1980s gave rise to multiple conceptual perspectives of translation to make it a metaphor for the transcultural world in the 21st century. Translation studies have gone far beyond the study of the structural similarities and differences of languages and began to adopt methodologies of other disciplines to become an interdisciplinary field of knowledge. One of the new areas of translation research is the narrative theory of translation, which is practically unknown to Russian translation experts. This article outlines the basic principles and categories of this theory with reference to the leading western researchers in this field. Its possibilities are demonstrated in this article through the analysis of Boris Zakhoder’s translation of Alan A. Milne’s fairy tale “Winnie-the-Pooh”. The central category of the analysis is the so-called voice of the translator, which is exposed in the paratext, narrative structure, the switching of linguistic codes and in the imagery system. The analysis makes it possible to assess the degree to which ‘the translator’s voice’ interferes with the narrative communication causing a semantic asymmetry of the original and the translated narratives. The degree or the depth of interference depends on the individual judgments of the translator, who adapts the narrative to the needs and realia of his abstract reader. In our case, the reader is represented by the Soviet Russian-speaking children of the 1960s–1970s.

Keywords: Narrative theory of translation, the voice of the translator, paratextual frame of translation, narrative structure, “Winnie-the-Pooh”, Alan A. Milne, Boris Zakhoder

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