Obsolete Words in Russian Translations of «The Song of Roland»

Abstract

   A whole range of topical scientific issues is associated with the concept of obsolete vocabulary: criteria for selecting obsolete vocabulary, the concept of archaism, the distinction between artificial and natural archaization, the problem of mixing obsolete vocabulary with words of poetic and bookish styles.   The purpose of this work is to compare and classify Russian translations of «The Song of Roland» in terms of various types of obsolete vocabulary occurring in them, to quantify the frequency of the latter and interpret these facts with regard to translation strategies.   For our study we used some fragments of Russian translations corresponding to the LII-LVI laisses in F. Michel’s version of the poem, published in 1837. In our article, we use the term obsolete vocabulary in relation to archaisms and historicisms. When describing archaisms, we were guided by P. Zumthor’s classification . Our selection of obsolete vocabulary was based on the presence of corresponding marks in the following dictionaries: S. I. Ozhegov 1986, D. N. Ushakov 1935 - 1940, the Small Academic Dictionary of 1999. The largest number of obsolete words was found in B. I. Yarkho’s translation – 58 instances. Next comes the translation of the count F. de La Barthes – 54 instances. Then follows B. N. Almazov’s translation – 53 obsolete lexical units and Yu. B. Korneev’s translation – 51. The smallest number of obsolete words was found in A. N. Chudinov’s translation – 43 examples. Historicisms (116 units) turned out to be the most frequent in translations, slightly less frequent are lexical archaisms (95 units), next in frequency are grammatical archaisms (21 units), then come phonetical-graphic archaisms (19 units), syntactic archaisms (5 units) and syntagmatic ones (3 units). In addition, the ratio of archaisms and historicisms is not directly related to the time of creation of the translation, nor is it directly related to the frequency of obsolete vocabulary in general. This suggests that translation decisions are determined by the authors’ personal choice rather than by external factors.