Studi Slavistici XXIII (2026) 1
Articoli

Proverbs Across Borders. On Translating Culturally Marked Russian Proverbs

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  • Julia Nikolaeva
Julia Nikolaeva
Sapienza University of Rome
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Studi_Slavis-18759

Published 2026-07-02

Keywords

  • Russian Proverbs,
  • Cultural Markedness,
  • Translation Strategies,
  • Equifunctional Correspondence,
  • Domestication and Foreignization

Copyright (c) 2026 Julia Nikolaeva

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The paper investigates the translation of culturally marked Russian proverbs through a corpus of 200 units of Slavic etymological origin currently in use. The corpus was compiled on the basis of recent surveys conducted among native Russian speakers. Each proverb is analysed alongside various translations sourced from literary works, offering a focused analysis of translation methods.  The study defines the concept of cultural markedness – a central theme in the ongoing debate between relativists and universalists – and compares bilingual paremiographical solutions aimed at providing a solid semantic-pragmatic invariant with contextual translation strategies. The latter often transcend the limits of translatability to achieve an equifunctional correspondence. The paper concludes by proposing a taxonomy of contemporary translation techniques and assessing their effectiveness within the theoretical frameworks of domestication and foreignization.

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