Lexical discrepancies in the editions of the Russian translation of the commercial treatise by John Law «Money and Trade»

DOI:10.30842/alp23065737182178207

Korkina T. D. Leksicheskiye raznochteniya v redaktsiyakh russkogo perevoda kommercheskogo traktata Dzhona Lo «Money and Trade». Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 2022. 18(2): 178–207.

The article presents a linguo-textological study of two editions of the Russian translation of the commercial treatise of the Scottish economist and banker John Law «Money and Trade considered: with a proposal for supplying the nation with money» (1705). The translation was carried out by Prince Ivan Andreevich Shcherbatov (1696–1767). To date, three lists of two editions of the translation have been identified — 1720 and 1724, stored in the manuscript collections of the Library of the Academy of Sciences and the Russian National Library of St. Petersburg. The article is the first attempt to compare these two editions for lexical discrepancies, as a result of which three types of lexical editing have been identified. Firstly, the inconsistent elimination of the few book-Slavic service lexemes (яко, однакожде, донележе) and replacing them with Russified conjunctions (как, однакож, пока) were carried out. Secondly, when working on the translation of trade and economic vocabulary and the selection of a more successful match, Shcherbatov made a choice in favor of loan words: for example, in the 1724 list, the word рукоделие was replaced by the loan word манифактура, and the word купечество by the loan word коммерция; the words равность, равновесие, щет were replaced by the loan word балянс, etc. Including noted occasional loan word calque — драу бак (in the original — drawback) in the meaning of ‘return (about duty)’. The third type of editing is no longer associated with the choice of a book-Slavic word or Russian, a loan word or native, but with the selection of the best synonym from the translator’s point of view, a more successful derivational variant. Of particular interest is the translator’s work on editing a group of etymologically different, but semantically close polysemantic words состояние, качество and степень, стать, рука and сорт. Based on the English original, Shcherbatov controlled the sphere of semantics of Slavic words.

Keywords

Russian language of the 18th century, Peter’s era, handwritten translations, commercial treatise, lexical discrepancies, trade and economic vocabulary

About the author

Korkina Tatiana͏ D.

Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg, Russia)

TDK2006@bk.ru

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Keywords

Russian language of the 18th century, Peter’s era, handwritten translations, commercial treatise, lexical discrepancies, trade and economic vocabulary