This project focuses on the study of translation and style through the prism of translations of Russian literature in the West, and vice versa. Stylistic approaches to translation remain, on the whole, an understudied topic within translation studies, despite work such as the classic study by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) and some later book-length studies (Boase-Beier, Parks) and articles. Yet stylistic choices and solutions are inarguably a key element of literary translation. Translating an author is not, and cannot, be merely a matter of semantic equivalence – a writer’s distinct voice has to be recreated, too, in the target language.

Whether this voice is refashioned in terms of the conventional literary style of the day (domestication) or in terms of a foreignizing strategy is a key issue that dictates many of the translator’s choices in stylistic aspects of the translation. However, this project is interested also in other aspects of this field, such as the translator’s own individual style (Ribicki, Saldanha), corpus-based methods of cross-lingual stylistic analysis, and the relationship between the literary norm and style. Last but not least, the group is interested in exploring the interplay between reception and style in cases of life writing, exilic trajectories in post-Soviet era (Hoffman, Golsworthy, Drakulic, Suleiman, Codresc, Kassabova…), and euro-orientalism (Adamovsky).

Among aspects of translation this research group is particularly interested in are: issues of the differences between the original and its translation, identifying stylistic elements that are lost, preserved or added in translation, retranslation, and translation as a component of the Republic of Letters. Our case studies cover texts written in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries and their contemporary and more modern translations. A particular focus of the group's work is a collective study of contemporary translations of Dostoevsky into English (Pevear and Volokhonsky), French (Markowicz) and German (Geier).

All three cases are of translations of an entire (or nearly) oeuvre of the writer, all realized by the same translator or team of translators at around the same time (1990s onwards). This allows the group to consider such previously unexplored issues as translator style in the context of the work of an émigré translator, and whether or not, and how, the evolution of a writer's style may be translated as the translator progresses from one work to another.