Crossing the frontiers of linguistic typology: Lexical differences and translation patterns in English and Russian Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Abstract

This article presents the results of the corpus-driven comparison between the English-original (1955) and Russian auto-translation (1967) of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The aim of the study, which was facilitated by the computer program WordSmith Tools 4.0, was to answer the question whether the differences attested between the English and Russian parallel texts arise from translation strategies [Nabokov was an ardent advocate of literal translation as the only strategy of truly transposing the original text (Beaujour 1995: 716; Grayson 1977: 13–15)], or whether they are due to typological differences between the English and Russian languages. This corpus-driven study consists of two parts. The first part aims at a comparison of lexical wordlists (i.e. top-frequency lexical words) generated for English and Russian Lolita. The analysis revealed, among others, that Nabokov used synonymy as a frequent translation strategy (particularly in the case of English reporting verbs), which indicates that repetitions are regarded as a bad style in Russian texts. Moreover, the analysis highlighted a conspicuous typological difference between the two languages whereby Russian is more explicit semantically (i.e. words have more specific meaning distinctions) than English, which in turn is more ambiguous and vague in its surface forms (Comrie 1981: 31–79). The second part aims at an examination of translation strategies used by Nabokov while translating creative, author-specific hapax legomena, following a similar study of English and German prose conducted by Kenny (2001). The analysis revealed that Nabokov exhibited a strong tendency towards lexical normalization while translating creative hapax legomena into Russian. All in all, the corpus-driven analysis revealed that although translators are free to use multifarious translation strategies while transposing original texts, they are still at the mercy of typological differences between the relevant languages.