Techniques and strategies for translating American Realia in J. Franzen's novel "Crossroads"

This research paper is devoted to the study of strategies for translating Americanisms in a literary text based on the novel "Crossroads" by American writer Jonathan Franzen. The subject of the research is techniques and strategies for translating realities in an English-language literary text into Russian. The purpose of the work is to study the features of translating Americanisms from English into Russian and to identify the most frequent and effective methods of their translation. Special attention is paid to the concept of "reality" and the role of realities in creating the artistic originality of the text of the work. Translation strategies such as forenization, the essence of which is to focus on the culture of the outgoing language in order to bring readers closer to the original, and domestication, when the translator seeks to match all culturally labeled units with similar concepts present in the culture of the translated language, are also considered. By the method of continuous sampling, the Americanisms in Jonathan Franzen's novel "Crossroads" were selected and a qualitative and quantitative analysis of their translation techniques was carried out, the most frequent translation techniques were identified. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that it examines the methods of translating all groups of realities identified in the text of the novel: onomastic, geographical, socio-political, ethnographic, the realities of the education system, religion and culture; explanations are given about the effectiveness of choosing a particular technique. The most numerous groups of Americanisms in the novel were the realities of the educational system, religion and culture, ethnographic realities and onomastic realities. The most frequent translation techniques were calculus, approximate translation, as well as transliteration/transcription and transformation. The least used translation techniques are omissions and descriptive translation. The authors conclude that the translation of the novel "Crossroads" is dominated by the strategy of domestication, when the culture of the target language is in the foreground.