Translations of Anton Chekhov’s play “The Cherry Orchard” into German: a comparative analysis

Abstract

In spite of the fact that Anton Chekhov was skeptical about translations of his own works since he believed that his works would not be understood in the West, the first translations of his plays into German appeared already during his lifetime and were successfully staged in German theatres. The following article reviews translations of Anton Chekhov ‘s play “The Cherry Orchard” into German by Peter Urban, Johannes von Gunther, Gudrun Duvel and Hilde Angarova. It may be worth noting that there are two approaches to literary translation. One involves adapting text for the recipient, which inevitably leads to a significant difference between the original and translated texts. The other involves translating closely to the original. Considering the fact that all the abovementioned translators kept to the second concept, they had to accomplish the following tasks: preserving stylistic peculiarities of the original text, translating Russian realia into German, managing phraseological locutions, conveying speech portraits of the characters, as well as adapting the text to a theatrical performance since the text should be understandable for the audience and easily pronounced by the actors. In the article we paid special attention to how all the four translators managed the difficulties and presented a detailed contrastive analysis of their works. As a result of the study, we came to the conclusion that the translations by Peter Urban and Hilde Angarova were closest to the original text due to precisely chosen equivalents. The translation by Gudrun Duvel is not inferior to the translations of Peter Urban and Hilde Angarova in the selection of lexical means, but it often sounds insufficiently concise, which distances it in some cases from the original text. Although Johannes von Gunther offered some interesting translation solutions, his translations have a number of shortcomings, the main ones are incorrect translation of realia and unnecessary additions.

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