Multiplicity of Literary Translation: Two Translations of “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger

The presence of several translations of the same literary work in one culture has become of interest for the scholars in the field of translation science since the middle of the 20th century. This phenomenon of the coexistence of various translations is called the multiplicity of translations which has been discussed up to the present days. The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the grounds for the emergence of multiple translations of Jerome David Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye” in the Russian culture. This study examines two translations of the book into the Russian language made by Rita Rait-Kovaleva in 1960 and Maxim Nemtsov in 2008. The present investigation hypothesizes that the multiplicity of translations of this novel has arisen due to such reasons as the peculiarities of the socio-cultural background of certain epochs and the personal characteristics of the authors including their intentions and preferences regarding their works. To achieve the set goals and test the hypothesis, such key research methods as discourse and comparative analyses have been chosen. First, the discourse analysis allows exploring the biographies and individual characteristics of each of the authors as well as analysing in detail the three epochs when the works were published (the post-war USA of 40-50s, the Soviet Union of the 50-60s, and the postmodern Russia at the beginning of the 21st century). Second, the comparative analysis of the two translations of the original novel is carried out in order to identify the differences between the texts. As a result of the examination, the discrepancies at different levels of the language reveal the influence of the socio-cultural characteristics of the epochs and the individual peculiarities of the authors on the translated texts and confirm the hypothesis. Besides, theoretical and practical implementations as well as the research limitations are rigorously considered in this paper.