Linguacultural Patterns of Foreignness Verbalization in Source Text and Its Translation in the Literary Discourse

The category of “foreignness”, being the extreme form of “otherness” manifestation, is examined in the article through the peculiarities of its representation in translated fiction. The images of characters and the surrounding them narrative picture embody the “alien” motive at the level of contents and linguistic-and-stylistic structure of the text, which provokes certain difficulties in choosing lexical equivalents in translation. The purpose of the study is to identify linguacultural patterns of “foreignness” verbalization in the literary discourse and to describe translation techniques that enable the conveyance of “otherness” in translation. The empirical basis of the study consists of more than 50 contexts obtained by continuous sampling method from the Russian National Corpus, a subcorpus of parallel texts in Russian and German, applying the specified search parameters: “chuzhoy” / “chuzhdyy” (“foreign” / “alien”) and their derivatives. Based on the classification of types of foreignness proposed by B. Waldenfels, it is shown that objectification of familiar, structural and radical foreignness in the factual material is realized through toponyms, realia, foreign language inclusions, precise vocabulary, adjectives with positive, neutral or negative connotations. Familiar foreignness is noted to be subjected to functional translation using full equivalents, generalization and description. Language forms of structural and radical foreignness require differentiation of meanings, choosing contextual analogues and holistic transformation.