Translating cultural and historical characteristics of fiction

Borisenko Yulia A.

The paper discusses the issues of rendering cultural and historical characteristics of fiction while translating B. Akunin’s historical detective novels from Russian into English. The analysis of such culture-significant lexemes as household, social and associative realia indicates that their translation is often inconsistent and contradictory, which significantly impairs the target language text in the cultural and historical aspect and leads to a distorted view of foreign language culture.

Keywords:literary translation; cultural and historical characteristics of fiction; realia.