Idiolect of Epistolary Novel’s Character through Evaluative Vocabulary: Translation Perspective

This article outlines the challenges of translating the evaluative vocabulary from the letters of Makar Devushkin, one of the main characters of M.F. Dostoevsky’s epistolary novel “Poor Folk”, into Japanese. Evaluative connotations are rarely spanned by dictionaries and can be acquired even by neutral words in specific contexts, thus being difficult to render accurately, as confirmed here by a detailed linguistic analysis of the idiolect of Makar Devushkin in comparison to that of Varvara Dobroselova, another main character of the novel. The writing style of Makar Devushkin was found to be marked by poetic and vernacular expressions, creative language use, clerk slang, stylistic inconsistencies, as well as numerous speech errors, clarifications, and interjections. The key strategies for translating Makar Devushkin’s idiolect into Japanese without losing his evaluative voice were identified: finding a contextual equivalent, omission, and literal translation. The factors determining the choice of the translation strategies were revealed. The findings show that contextual translation is the best option to convey the meaning of Makar Devushkin’s words used in non-standard contexts, altering their meanings in ways that must be guessed from the context. Omission is applied when pleonasms appear in Makar Devushkin’s speech. Literal translation is appropriate when the original expressions are likely to be understood intuitively, at least to some extent, by readers.

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