Cuvinte-realia rusești și corespondențele lor românești: schița unui dicționar
Russian Realia and Their Romanian Equivalents: draftSketch of a Dictionary

Summary/Abstract: Although we are at the stage where we are going to send to print a small dictionary of Russian realia-words (i.e. culture-bound items) with their Romanian lexical and phraseological equivalents, we also wanted, on this occasion, to make this approach known – an approach that has drawn our attention over several years – in order to receive the suggestions and observations of researchers in this field.In general, and in this dictionary, in particular, a realia-lexeme is a cultural element, as an intra- and inter-cultural revelator. A realia-lexeme can certainly help to detect a cultural area, a language, and a given people, especially if a receiver has a certain cultural knowledge and recognises the area concerned in a written or oral communication. This confirms the role of the realia-unit to be a culture/cultural detector/mediator.The dictionary will contain an introductory study showing how to theorize the concept of “realia” in Russian and Romanian literature, in particular, as well as how to render Russian realia-words. In the dictionary, the alphabetical ordering of realia-lexemes was preferred in Russian, the words being followed by their Romanian phonetic transcription (Ба́ба-Яга́ [Baba-Iaga]). The dictionary also has a Romanian index (i.e. the phonetic transcription in Romanian of the title of each article: Baba-Iaga) in which the realia-units are grouped into the five categories (ethnographic realia, socio-political and administrative realia, geographical realia, onomastic realia, and aphoristic realia; cf. Vlakhov, Florin 1970, 1980; Vereshchagin, Kostomarov 1973), thus providing another way of identifying the dictionary corpus. To note that, in the selection of realia-words, a decisive role was played by books and studies about Russian history, culture, and civilization, the works of the great Russian classics, as well as the tourist guides about Russia and the webography in the field. This dictionary will contain about 200 realia-units.The dictionary is a more didactic rather than normative one, and can be considered an opportunity to reflect, especially for beginner Russian translators, the difficulties and challenges that arise in identifying or clarifying some cultural-semantic equivalents from Russian to Romanian. Moreover, the material presented can also be considered a source of cultural information about the Russian area and, consequently, it is also addressed to a wider public.

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