Description
Communication styles in translating Pushkin’s Fisherman and the Goldfish (Eleni Piperidou)
The aim of the study is to examine pragmatic shifts in rendering Pushkin’s story ‘The fisherman and the goldfish’ in two Greek (1962, 2006) and two English (1962, 2011) versions, almost fifty years apart. As society may have been modified in the meantime, special attention is paid to the scale of power distance and social hierarchy awareness manifested in the story, and offensiveness, namely, whether they shifted, over the years. The study highlighted how the identities of the fisherman and his wife were portrayed. Both the analysis of the data and a questionnaire addressing Greek-English bilingual respondents, suggest heightened aggressiveness and offensiveness in the latest versions while hierarchy awareness was rather lowering. Multimodal material (pictures) of the two Greek versions also manifest a shift in the scale of hierarchy as shown through the verbal material. The present comparative analysis adds to the growing body of research that attempts to perceive the theoretical and cultural significance of shifts in children’s literature, conforming to shifting aspects of culure.
