Translating Aboriginal Siberian and Circumpolar Cultures in Russia

Текст статьи не публикуется в открытом доступе в соответствии с политикой журнала.The majority of aboriginal Siberian and Circumpolar cultures in Russia (Kets, Evens, Evenkis, Yakuts, etc) have obtained their writing systems (mostly in Cyrillic script) only recently (in the nineteenth or even twentieth century). Due to regular reduction in the number of speakers and the limitation of the spheres of usage the languages of indigenous peoples of Russia are included in the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages. These languages were first involved in interlanguage translation processes only several decades ago and the representatives of ‘other’ cultures were completely deprived of the possibility to learn the unique Siberian and Circumpolar cultures via translated texts during a long period of time. The publishing of books in languages belonging to ethnic minorities of Russia began on a regular basis in the 1930s. Previously the cultural information and cultural memory of present ethnic minorities was mostly stored in oral folklore texts which were recorded in written forms, i.e. epic stories, tales, novels, poems, etc., only recently. At present ethnic literatures are studied in the context of a specialized ethnic-philological approach and present extremely popular objects for translation. The translated texts form the centres of translation attraction. The translation of ethnic literary texts presents several variants: from the source (ethnic) language into Russian; from the source language directly into a foreign language; or from the source language into a foreign language via Russian. The main tasks of a translator as a mediator of genealogically different lingua-cultures are to reconstruct the cultural, semantic and structural peculiarities of the original text in order to share the unique cultural heritage of minorities, as well as to preserve the cultural information and cultural memory of endangered languages and cultures in the modern information space. The translation of culturally marked texts presented in aboriginal languages brings about a great number of specific linguistic and cultural challenges which require effective translation strategies and technologies, in addition to specially-tailored training and retraining programmes for translators