Ways of conveying non-equivalent lexis when translating A. S. Pushkin’s “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” from Russian into English

The translation of non-equivalent lexis incorporated into a poetic text is always a special complex problem for a translator, since, in addition to knowledge of a foreign language and proficiency in professional translation competencies, they must have a poetic gift and deep background knowledge. It is important for a translator to choose the right translation strategies in order to preserve not only the meaning of the poetic text, but also its rhythm, intonation, melody and cultural component. The aim of the study is to determine to what extent the translation strategies used contributed to the preservation of the national and cultural peculiarities of non-equivalent vocabulary when translating A. S. Pushkin’s “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” from Russian into English. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time a comparative study of two translations of the above-mentioned fairy tale was conducted, which made it possible to consider ways of transmitting non-equivalent lexis within the framework of a poetic text, evaluate the effectiveness of these methods and identify translation challenges that lead to wrong perception of the work by A. S. Pushkin. It was found that the translators used various methods of transferring non-equivalent lexis, among which the most frequent are transcription when translating proper names, analogue and description when translating realia, methods of description and calque when translating lacunae. It is shown that lacunae present the greatest difficulty in translating the poetic text of A. S. Pushkin. With the multiplicity of translation solutions, the meanings of non-equivalent lexical units were distorted in some cases, which did not allow to fully convey the national and cultural peculiarities of the work.