Volume 12 Issue 7
Published on October 2025The translation of stream-of-consciousness narrative—characterized by fragmented psychological time and disrupted syntax—posed a significant challenge in literary translation, especially between distantly related languages. This study examined this mechanism through Fyodor Dostoevsky’s psychologically innovative work, Notes from Underground. A purpose-built parallel corpus was constructed, comprising three representative interior monologues in the original Russian alongside English translations—Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s foreignizing version and Constance Garnett’s domesticating approach—as well as Zhonglun Zang’s Chinese translation, which employed language-specific compensatory strategies. Manual syntactic annotation, combined with reader-response experiments, was used to quantify key metrics including syntactic transformation, punctuation fidelity, and the preservation of Bakhtinian polyphonic contradictions. Results revealed a core tension: the foreignizing strategy of Pevear and Volokhonsky effectively recreated the original’s "neurotic rhythm", yet compromised readability for English readers. Garnett’s domesticating translation enhanced fluency at the expense of psychological authenticity. Constrained by the typological distance between Chinese and Russian, Zang’s Chinese version employed creative compensatory mechanisms unique to the target language. This study provided a novel empirical framework for translating stream-of-consciousness features and offered practical strategies for retranslating Russian literary classics into both Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages.
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