Children’s Adaptations of the Charles Dickens Novel “David Copperfield” in Russian

Abstract

The article describes Russian children’s adaptations of the Charles Dickens novel “David Copperfield”. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether the approach to its translation changed at different historical periods — during the Czarist-era, under the Soviet government and in contemporary Russia. In order to achieve this goal, we have analyzed those “David Copperfield” translations into Russian addressed to the younger audience that are accessible nowadays. The text has been envisaged from the translation studies, as well as philological and culture studies point of view. The study has shown that some Czarist-era translators finished the story with the end of David Copperfield’s childhood misfortunes, others attempted to make a brief account of the novel. In Soviet Union more complete translations were published, accompanied by a larger number of explanatory foot-notes and more commentary. Since the year 2000 there has been no attempt to make a new adaptation of the novel, there have only been published some translations of English adaptations and a revised edition of an older translation. What all the translations have in common is the omission of regional accents and other speech characteristics of Dickens’s characters. None of this seems to be related to the political history of the country, it’s rather due to translation ethics evolution.