Rendering Ethnographic Realia into English in A. P. Chekhov’s Play “Uncle Vanya”

Aim. To conduct a comparative analysis of the ethnographic realities functioning in the original of Anton Chekhov’s play “Uncle Vanya” and its English translations published between 1912 and 2020 to identify the translation difficulties encountered in their transmission, ways to overcome them by seven different translators of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as to determine the most successful ways of transmission lexical units of this type and cases of distortion of the original text.
Methodology. This study employs the following research methods: contextual analysis, used to identify the specific functioning of realia within the literary context; the descriptive method; and the comparative method, applied to contrast the original text with its English translations.
Results. We identified the following translation techniques: the use of a functional analogue (in 29 cases), descriptive translation (in eight cases), the use of contextual substitution (in 11 examples), as well as the use of generic substitution (one example). As a result of a comparative analysis of seven translations, it was found that the use of functional analogues leads to the erasure of the Russian cultural flavour contained, however, it allows translators to accurately convey the meaning. The desire to preserve it, on the contrary, in some cases led to a distortion of the meaning of the original.
Research implications. The materials of the study can be used in theoretical developments and lecture courses in the disciplines of “Comparative Linguistics” and “Contrastive Linguistics” of the basic higher education programs in Pedagogical Education (Field of Study 44.03.01), as well as in the discipline “Theory of Translation” of the specialized higher education programs in Linguistics (Field of Study 45.04.02).

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