Translating obscene worlds in Nikolay Gogol’s short novel Taras Bulba into English and French

The subject content of Nikolay Gogol’s short novel Taras Bulba has been at the center of information and political discussions in recent years amid the geopolitical events unfolding in modern Russia: the interpretation of the historical context varies signifi cantly depending on the political motivation of the plot. Due to the changing requirements for translation, the problem of translators’ using convergence and divergence strategies in relation to the original source is becoming especially relevant. The aim of the article is to defi ne convergent and divergent translation strategies by comparing the transfer of various expressive means, with special focus on obscene vocabulary. The paper provides a comparative analysis of 20 obscene words from the subject-thematic group “animals” based on 10 English and French objects of translation. The studied lexical units with the “dog – canine” dominants, adding local color to the original text, are mainly translated into English and French through convergence strategy (90 %). The choice of convergence as a key translation strategy for invective vocabulary at the text level is determined by generally uniform national and cultural characteristics of the analyzed concepts in the target languages, and, consequently, by the existence of corresponding equivalents. The convergence at the word and content level also improves the quality translation and ensures the most complete reproduction of the original author’s intent with the expressive means of the target language.