Concept of “pride” in English translations of F. M. Dostoevsky's novel The Gambler

The article focuses on the peculiarities of specific cultural elements transfer in the English translations of F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler. The aim of the research is to define the completeness of the concept of pride transfer in the translations by C. J. Hogarth (1915), C. C. Garnett (1917), J. Coulson (1966), J. Kentish (1991) and H. Aplin (2006), and to estimate the effect of the elicited transformations on the idea of the novel. The method of studying the translations is based on the concept analysis of the text. On the ground of the semantic asymmetry of the studied concept in the national worldviews of the Russians and the Englishmen, it is hypothesized that the transfer of many features of the concept in translation may cause difficulties and require numerous compensations. One of the key episodes, representing the concept of pride in the character of Madame Tarasevitcheva (the Grandmother) and being important for understanding both her personality and personalities of the other characters, as well as for studying the concept functions in the novel, was chosen as the material for the study. Translation analysis elicits the facts of full reproduction of some significant features of the concept and transformations of the others. It is concluded that reduction of some concept features distorts the character of the Grandmother and the sense of the novel. The largest number of translation losses was identified in C. J. Hogarth’s version, while C. C. Garnett and J. Coulson handled the original text more delicately, and J. Kentish and H. Aplin reached the maximum level of equivalence in their translations.