Description
Constructing social reality in the Russian and Greek versions of Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers
Svitlana Voltsenko
MA ‘Translation: Greek, English, Russian’
The paper tackles cross-cultural pragmatics through translation, namely in examining how social reality is constructed across the Russian and Greek target versions of an English novel The Shell Seekers by R. Pilcher (1987). The study is based on naturalistic evidence (the translated versions of the novel) in order to trace shifts in speech act performance. It also uses experimental research methodology in addressing questionnaires to three respondent types (one examining English-to-Greek shifts, another examining English-to-Russian ones, and a third one examining perception of shifts across all three languages). Findings show that speech act performance, in the three data sets, manifests itself through variation in interpersonal distance (Brown and Levinson 1978) between interlocutors and their relational dynamics or in the dimension of power distance (Hofstede and Hofstede 2005). Findings show that power distance is higher in the Russian version rather than in the Greek or English texts, and the results of the questionnaires confirm these findings. Moreover, power distance is lower in the Greek version than in the English and Russian texts manifesting itself through idiomatic expressions, lower tenor vocabulary and allowing the characters to express opinions and feelings more freely. The significance of the study lies in that it shows pragmatic appropriateness to be a cultural variable and in that it shows translation to be a sensitive indicator of intended aspects of social reality in fiction.
