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ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN LATVIA: TRANSLATIONS OF THE HOLMESIAN SAGA IN LATVIAN
Abstract
Mister Sherlock Holmes has appeared in the cultural space of Latvia at the very end of the 19th century. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories were published both in the Latvian periodicals and in the books by different publishers. Unfortunately, the attitude towards the fictional character Sherlock Holmes was not serious; during the first half of the 20th century Doyle’s detective stories were regarded only as the phenomenon of the pulp fiction. It can be observed by the analysis of the translations carried out in the first half of the 20th century. The translators did not go deep into the source text that is why content and language mistakes are often observed in the target language. The translators also tried to make Sherlock Holmes as close as possible for a Latvian reader by ignoring the peculiarities of the English culture. In some cases they even made some text corrections on their own – adding or omitting some elements from the source text. The situation changed during the soviet and post-soviet period in Latvia. The author of the present article focuses on the comparison of the source text and translations in the Latvian language carried out during the 20th century and analyses the language politics in the translated texts. In the article the attention is paid both to the external changes, caused by the necessity to transfer a text from a foreign language, and to the internal changes caused by the linguistic transformations in the national culture of the target language.
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References14
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