| Popis: |
This paper deals with the kuranty (digests of foreign newspapers) during the 1720s. The authors' main focus is on the question how the translators of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs chose the material for translation among the newspapers that arrived with the mail. The translation technique used for translating the foreign newspapers is analyzed. One of the conclusions is that the translators marked on the originals when they first read through the newspapers what needed to be translated, then they made the translations; the heads of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs decided, which of the translated articles had to be met by the Russian diplomats. During the 1720s – contrary to the situation during the seventeenth century – the kuranty were not only a means to learn about foreign events, but now they also had the function to control the European newspapers. A comparison of the translation techniques applied for the “old” and the “new” kuranty shows that these techniques have not changed a lot since the 1670s: both here and there the translators left alone information that was felt as being less relevant; for instance, they left out whole sentences, if they were of low importance for the Russian rulers, and so forth. It is true that the concrete newspaper articles which we analyzed in this paper, comparing them with their immediate (German) originals, are, in a way, more literal than the kuranty produced during the 1660s–1670s: almost every single word of the original German text has an equivalent in the translation. Generally speaking, the professional level of the translators – which was quite high already in the 1660s–1670s – had improved still more during the reign of Peter I. |
