The specifics of translating russian religious vocabulary into italian

Abstract

As cultural contacts and cooperation between representatives of different religions, including Orthodox and Catholic, increase, a rise in interest in Russian religious literature can be observed. Hence a need in accurate and adequate translation of texts related to different genres of such literature. This paper deals with the issue of specifi cs of translation of some Russian religious lexical units into Italian, in particular 1) nouns denoting abstract notions; 2) nouns nominating religious personalities and persons in a church hierarchy; 3) adjectives used in the function of attributes and epithets. The main methods of research are structural and semantic analysis and a descriptive method. The research is based on the original text of an unknown Russian author of the middle of the XIXth century “Sincere Confessions of a Pilgrim to His Confessor” and its Italian translation “Candidi raccon-ti di un pellegrino al suo padre spirituale” by M. Martinelli. Special attention is paid to lexical and semantic analysis of the translated word as well as to the analysis of the types of transformations used by a translator, the most frequent of which are contextual replacement, transposition, descriptive translation with some grammatical structures being used and transliteration.