Translating Culture-Specific Items: the Legal Terminology of Shakespeare's Sonnet 46 in Russian Translations

A discussion of how to translate words with cultural implications from the source language into the target language text has been ongoing for a long time. It is well established within Shakespeare commentary that the culture-specific items used by Shakespeare in the Sonnets reflect the range of social institutions in Elizabethan England, for example, the legal system. Legal terminology is used especially frequently by Shakespeare in the sonnet cycle and plays an important role in its imagery. In translations of the sonnets, this particular feature presents Russian translators with specific difficulties. This paper aims to examine those difficulties and looks at the translation strategies applied within eleven Russian translations of Sonnet 46, which employs a great amount of legal terminology