Translation and Linguistic Innovation: The Rise and Fall of Russian Loanwords in Literary Translation into Dutch

This paper examines the use of Russian loanwords in Dutch translations of Russian literary texts from the period 1970-2009. In an increasingly globalized world, as more information is exchanged across cultural borders worldwide, one might expect a growth in the number and use of loanwords, even between cultures that are relatively distant from each other such as Dutch and Russian. In the case study conducted, which was based on a representative corpus of 20 Dutch translations of Russian novels, we found that while there was a relative growth in the number of loanwords used in the 1970's and 1980's, the trend since the 1990's has been downwards. In the earlier period the public's interest in dissident Russian literature and in the cultural developments of the Glasnost period was intense, which in turn stimulated literary translators to use foreignizing translation strategies, bringing the (Russian) source text closer to the (Dutch) target public. With the rise of new genres (postmodernism and crime novels) in Russian literature and the changes in publishing policies this tendency diminished and the number of loanwords in translation decreased, which indicates a rise of domesticating translation strategies in Dutch culture in recent decades.