Rendering some military realities in the 19th century French translations of Mikhail Lermontov's novel “A hero of our time”

A recent “hermeneutic turn” in translation research marks an intense interest in studying a translator’s attitude towards his own and the original texts along with a translator’s individual style. The author describes specific features of translator’s choices on the basis of five 19th century translations of M.Yu. Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time” and analizes the link between the choices and an extra-linguistic context. The authors of the translations comprising an empirical corpus are A.A. Stolypin (Mongo), J.-M. Chopin, E. Scheffter, X. Marmier, A. de Villamarie. The theoretical framework draws on the concept of the “thematic grid” of a literary work which allows to regard the most frequent lexical units denominating military realities as one of the key elements for creating the artistic space-time textual continuum closely interrelated with the Caucasian War. The subject of analytical scrutiny, executed in semantic-functional aspect, is the lexical units giving rise to a variability in translator’s interpretations since it is these units that could be considered as one of the most relevant parameters of translator’s individual style. The results of the analysis demonstrate some features of reproducibility of lexical choices throughout the translated texts and its contribution to the recreation of the “thematic grid” of the analyzed segment of the novel’s architecture. The study also identifies the main factors contributing to the emergence of lexical variability, and highlights the importance of studying extra-linguistic context that could influence the nature of translator’s choices.