Dr. Long’s Translations of Fiction

The text draws attention to a little-known and almost unexplored part of the activities of the American missionary, educator and public figure Albert Long – namely his translations of literary fiction. Dr. Long translated into Bulgarian two short novels – “The Dairyman’s daughter” (1864) and “The History of Little Henry and his Bearer” (1864), as well as the novel “Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan (1866), a number of poems and hymns. This article focuses on his translation strategies and his work with texts. It examines the stylization through the use of colloquial expressions and vocabulary from the Bulgarian language of the Renaissance period, the conscious archaisation of the translated text, and the introduction of authorial neologisms. In general, in his translations of fiction A. Long achieves not only a formal but also a semantic equivalent of the translated text by adding lexemes, additional connotation, choosing a stylistically marked translated equivalent. As a translator A. Long sets high standards to the transfer of semantics and functionality of texts from a foreign language into Bulgarian.