Keywords in a Literary Text as a Translation Issue

The article addresses the issue of rendering keywords in a literary text when it is translated into another language. The material is Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and its Russian translation done by M. Abkina. It has been discovered that the most frequently used words in the novel are adjectives with negative evaluative connotations: monstrous, horrible, dreadful, hideous and such like. Among them monstrous stands out as the main keyword: besides frequency, it meets a number of other essential criteria. It appears in all significant episodes of the novel, it is characterized by lexical polyphony, great collocational variety, richness of contextual links and due to the component “morally wrong” in its semantics is connected with the author’s global artistic purport. The comparative research has shown that “monstrous” is split in the translation into 6 different Russian equivalents scattered throughout the novel, which deprives the text of the important unifying element.