The Problem of Military-Historical Translations from English to Russian and from Russian to English based on “Stalingrad” Books by V. Grossman and A. Beevor

This paper is devoted to the problem of historical war translations. The paper is aimed to find differences between translations of war-related texts from English to Russian and from Russian to English. Two books titled “Stalingrad” by V. Grossman and A. Beevor were chosen as a material of the research. The texts were chosen since they both relate to the same topic of Stalingrad battle and life of Russian people during the Great Patriotic War (World War II). To understand the texts completely reader is expected to have similar level of background knowledge as a writer or translator has. Our object of the paper is to investigate the strategies of translation that translators use. We assume that translations from Russian to English and from English to Russian will contain different translational strategies due to cultural differences and traditions of war terms translation. We used corpus methods to analyse and compare two original texts and their translations. The texts and their translations were used to build frequency of the words use glossaries. We put four lists that reflect frequency of words use based on these texts. Then glossaries were compared to find out the translations of certain words. We paid attention to translation of military terms, different words that reflect cultural features, and translation mistakes.