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Soviet Language in English Retranslations: Mikhail Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog

Following Antoine Berman it would normally be assumed that the early translations of a given text will be more target-oriented and domesticating than later ones. To test this hypothesis, the extent to which retranslations approximate to the source text is examined in terms of how they deal with the type of of historical realia we refer to as ‘Sovietisms’. This comparative corpus analysis is based on English translations of Bulgakov's novella The Heart of a Dog by Michael Glenny (1968), Mirra Ginsburg (1968), Hugh Aplin (2005), Andrew Bromfield (2007), and Antonina W. Bouis (2016).