Socio-Cultural Environment as a Context and Its Effect on Discourse in Translation

This paper aims to analyze the influences of the socio-cultural environment on discourse in translation. To illustrate a deep connection between discourses and societies in which they were produced, communicative patterns of high- and low-context cultures are examined. Though the original version of the translated text comes from a different culture, the translation reflects communicative preferences of the target culture. To uncover some of these preferences, a comparative study of two translations from Russian into English and from English into Russian is conducted. This study, together with further investigation of some more recent translations into Russian, revealed a number of choices affected by translators' cultural background (for example, making the translation more emotionally charged) and current ideological preferences in the society (excessive use of anglicisms).