DEICTIC WORDS IN RUSSIAN TRANSLATIONS OF MARK TWAIN’S ‘THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER’
The substantial part of the novel ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ is a focalized 3rd person narrative, where the point of view of the hero is presented by the narrator. The text also includes many fragments of free indirect discourse. The deictic elements thus acquire an important role in shifting the deictic center to the here-and-now of the protagonist. The conventional author’s deixis, referring to the time frame of creating the text, also exists in the novel. The research was focused on the use of deictic elements in ﬁ ve Russian translations made by S. Voskresenskaya (1896), M. Engelgardt (1911), K. Chukovsky (1958), N. Daruzes (1948) and S. Ilyin (2011). Functional analysis was used in the research combining quantitative and qualitative methods. In general, the author’s deixis in translations is easily and correctly reconstructed, whereas the heroes’ deixis in the focalized fragments gets diverse interpretations. Translators often add the deictic words, they may also omit or change them but in these cases other egocentric elements, such as words denoting perception, thought and evaluation, awareness or unexpectedness, etc. are employed to support or compensate for the focalizing function of deixis. K. Chukovsky, N. Daruzes, and S. Ilyin use more deictic words than earlier translators, the shifts from distals (‘that day’) to proximals (‘today’), from past to present narrative tense can be detected in their texts, especially in the last translated version made by K. Chukovsky. The ‘approximating’ eﬀ ect, drawing the attention of the reader, is created in later translations by ‘condensing’ deictic and other egocentric words in the fragments presenting the protagonist’s point of view.