Polina M. Shchegoleva

When translating literary texts, translators oft en encounter obsolete vocabulary and face the challenge of choosing the most appropriate rendering. On the one hand, obsolete vocabulary helps immerse the reader in a specific historical era; preserving such words maintains the historical flavor of the text. On the other hand, these words were used routinely by the authors, and over time they have become unfamiliar to modern readers. This article examines obsolete vocabulary and its translation in Alexander Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter into French, analyzing the strategies employed by the translator Maurice Quais as well as by three machine translation systems. The topic is especially relevant due to the widespread use of translation technologies by general readers seeking to engage with Pushkin’s works. Based on the analysis of examples of obsolete words and their translations, the study concludes that, despite the use of various translation techniques, machine translators struggle more with obsolete vocabulary. They fail to render these words with the same accuracy and proximity to the original text as Maurice Quais.