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Discourse analysis of the translation into Russian of the Croatian children's classic ‘The Strange Adventures of Hlapich the Apprentice’

The novel The Strange Adventures of Hlapich the Apprentice has a special place not only in the history of Croatian literature, but also in the list of obligatory school reading. It is the first Croatian novel for children, published in 1913. It is read in the third grade of primary school, being the oldest text which the pupils of junior grades read in full in the original form. The text of The Strange Adventures of Hlapich the Apprentice has 1, 750 sentences, with an average sentence length of 14.5 words. The ten most frequent tokens are grammatical words (prepositions and conjunctions), forms of the verb to be and the names of Hlapich and Gita. These tokens make up 21.86% of all tokens in the text. Based on the most frequent tokens, one can conclude that this text is written in the past tense (bilo (was) – 161, bio (was) -137 tokens) and that the main characters are Hlapich (466 tokens) and Gita (208 tokens). An analysis of the novel by means of the Croatian Morphological Lexicon shows that the text contains 5, 149 types (distinct words), 4, 524 of which are known, while 625 are unknown. Some of the 625 unknown types from the text which are not recorded in the Croatian Morphological Lexicon are standard and frequent forms of words (e.g. čuo, čuvamo, kašljati), some are rarely used words (e.g. bumbar, cirkus, dukati, igrarija), while some types are non-standard either at the lexeme level (e.g. badava, duvati, hartija) or at the form level (e.g. bješnjeti). The most frequent of the said lexemes are Turkish loanwords (dretva, hartija, kalfa, konak, taban), but there are also German loanwords (škatulja) and Hungarian loanwords (forinta). Table 1 also shows particular dialectal words (sto, opravica, kabao) and words which entered the passive lexis for reasons not connected with the language itself, such as the names of professions which no longer exist (košarač – basket maker). In addition, the text contains the forms of lexemes which deviate from the contemporary standard language, such as najvoljela, odbranila, srećan, sjedjeti, sio, lijenština and the like (Cvikić, Aladrović Slovaček and Bekavac, 2015). Since this novel abounds in archaisms and loanwords, it is interesting to investigate how the said tokens were translated and whether the words and constructions were adapted to the target language or naturalised. 81 Table 1. List of the assumed less known lexemes with frequency of appearance košarač 45 škatulja 10 zapećak 9 dretva 7 forinta 6 kabao 6 uzduh 5 kolobar 5 opanke 5 šilo 5 blazina 4 dukati 4 slamnjača 4 malta 4 žigica 4 filir 3 narisana 3 opravica 3 konak 3 menažerija 3 alaj 3 sjenokoše 3 gunj 2 mantija 2 opica 2 šoštarski 2 hartija 2 kalfa 2 krajcara 2 sara 2 halabuka 2 krst 2 klinci 2 pučka škola 2 žganci 2 rubenina 1 omara 1 tabani 1 štropot 1 šropotala 1 nakostrušeni 1 sto/stocu 1/2 The Strange Adventures of Hlapich the Apprentice has been published in more than one hundred different editions, including translations into dozens of languages: Bengali, Czech, English, Esperanto, Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian, German, Persian and others. The first Russian translation was done as late as 2013, on the one hundredth anniversary of the first edition of the novel. The goal of this paper is to analyse the discourse of the translation of the novel from Croatian into Russian. Discourse analysis is concerned with "the use of language in a running discourse, continued over a number of sentences and involving the interaction of speaker (or writer) and auditor (or reader) in a specific 82 situational context, and within a framework of social and cultural conventions" (Abrams and Harpham, 2005). The discourse analysis (Johnson 2008, Jorgenson and Phillipe, 2002) will be applied to selected chapters of the source and target texts to establish the occurrence of specific sentence structures, the most frequently used discourse markers (connectors), differences in the grammatical structures of content words, and the lexical diversity with special focus on toponymy and anthroponomy, as well as on the idiomatic expressions and specific collocations in specific situations in context. Another aim is to investigate cultural specificities and their translations (use of words associated with religion, the description of place and space, and the description of food). The results of the discourse analysis and this work will allow for a comparison to be made of the discourse complexity and differences in the source and the target texts.

children's literature; discourse analysis; translations; Russian; Croatian

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