Jack Kerouac's "On the road": Translation and Adaptation in Russian Culture

Firstly published in 1957, “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac is considered as the defining work of the postwar Beat Generation in the USA. Even though the full text of the novel was released in Russia years later, some of its parts managed to penetrate into the Soviet culture in disregard of the USSR censorship. The present study aims to investigate professional techniques used to perform a productive cross-language communication and define whether the quality of the considered translations has had an impact on adopting foreign cultural values by Russian community. To achieve this purpose, the following paper provides a comparative analysis of two translated versions of the original text. The implementation of Tulenev’s criteria of representativeness revealed that both of the considered texts do not meet the full number of requirements for an adequate translation. Nevertheless, from the point of culturology, the quality of the translation is not of primary importance due to the cultural breakthrough triggered by the emergency of the first translations of the significant foreign literary works. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that previous works did not consider translations of the literature dedicated to the Beat Generation, but focused on the phenomena in particular. We hope that these findings may contribute to the existing knowledge of translation science, as well as be used to improve the level of one’s cultural competence.