Abstract
The new possibilities of global communication and the latest information technology bring the history of literary translation as a scientific discipline within the science of translation to a new level since it infinitely expands the possibilities of searching and comparing historically significant information necessary to build a coherent concept of the evolution of translation activity in the history of human civilization. The problem of translation of fiction is one of the most important in both linguistics and literary criticism. Disputes about the methods, techniques and principles of translation, about the requirements for translations and the degree of their correspondence to a target text, about the originality of a translated text, as well as the problem of interlingual communication in general do not lose relevance in modern science. It has been by time that for a correct and profound interpretation of a literary text, a translator must know well the information about the era described in the work and the time in which the author lived; philosophical and socio-historical prerequisites for the creation of the work to involve “out-of-text structures” [Lotman: 1970, p. 65]. In the paper the authors explore the peculiarities of translation of literary texts, consider different points of view on this issue and draw appropriate conclusions. Also, to reveal the specifics of fiction translation, in addition to the theory of proposition, the article deals with the theory of primary and secondary genres by M. M. Bakhtin [Bakhtin: 1986]. The authors hold the opinion that there are no good or bad translations of literary texts in general, no perfect, no canonical ones. No translation fully renders the text of the source material: each translator selects only the essentials in the original and subordinates the secondary and the tertiary to them. What they consider primary or minor is a matter of individual taste.