About the problem of translation Russian ethnocultural lexis in a literary text (on the example of the thematic group "Food" in the poem "Dead souls" by N.V. Gogol)

Based on the poem «Dead souls» by N.V. Gogol and its two English translations made by D.J. Hogarth and R.A. Maguire the article considers lexical units with a strongly marked national-cultural identity as constituents of a thematic group «Food». The lexical units selected are examined from the point of view of their translation into English in the target texts. By means of a comparative analysis of the source and target texts the article establishes a set of criteria to identify the most adequate and semantically motivated English equivalents to the original lexemes.