An examination of realia in translation studies: Tatyana Tolstaya's work as The Aetherial Worlds

Translation plays an important role in the establishment and sustainability of intercultural interactions. One of the major problems encountered by the readers of the source and target texts is undoubtedly the issues of translating realia in the source text. In this context, a translator should be able to accurately analyze the realia encountered in the work and transfer it to the source text without a loss in its cultural characteristics. In this study, sixteen stories from Aetherial Worlds, which is a compilation of short stories by one of the contemporary Russian authors: Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya and translated into Turkish by Erdem Erinc, have been examined. The realia in the stories have been analyzed in relation to the categorization of cultural words by S. Vlahov and S. Florin's Untranslatable in Translation (Neperevodimoye v perevode- Непереводимое в переводе) and they have been comparatively analyzed in Russian and Turkish in the context of translation strategies suggested for the realia.