Дон Кихот

Lexemes, carrying a specific cultural charge in their native environ- ment, prove to be one of the most difficult stumbling blocks for translators of lit- erary texts. In this study, we aim to get to the heart of the culturally marked con- cepts found at the very beginning of “Don Quixote”, and to analyse whether and how it is possible to render them in a foreign language by observing the work of translators from different language groups and historical periods. Through a few code names and concepts, in a few sentences, the image of the knight is construct- ed almost materially in the original text – with the place he comes from, with his title, his spear and shield, his eating habits, his clothing (giving him social and religious belonging) and last but not least with the name he bears. A substantial part of this ‚materiality‘, however, appears to have been lost or misrepresented in the translations under consideration. Five of the Bulgarian, as well as one each of the French, English and Russian translations of the novel are presented. 127The choice of the foreign-language versions is related to the fact that Bulgarian translators, until the mid-twentieth century, translated the novel through the intermediary of French and Russian, while the English version is juxtaposed with the French due to the temporal proximity of their creation and the geographical proximity of the two host cultures. An attempt has been made to delineate the relations among the different translations and the influences they have had on each other, and to analyse the different strategies in recreating a nationally coloured vocabulary through the prism of the definitions and classifications of realia proposed by S. Vlahov and S. Florin, as well as the theoretical postulates of lan- guage as a cultural phenomenon and of translation as an intercultural transfer.