STEREOSCOPIC VISION AND A MEASURE OF ACCURACY (M. L. GASPAROV’S METHODOLOGY AND PSYCHOLINGUISTIC EXPERIMENT)

In his article about V. G. Marantsman’s translation of The Divine Comedy, M. L. Gas- parov speaks of the “stereoscopic vision” that a foreign-language text receives in the situation of multiple translations. A potential reader who has learned several translations receives a stereoscopic vision of the source text. As can be seen from this statement, the author proceeds from the presumption of the semantic multidimensionality of the origi- nal and the limitations of the translation in comparison with the original. Logically build- ing on the thought of M. L. Gasparov, we can formulate the following chain of theses: the further the translation is from the original, the more one-sided it is, and the closer it is to the original, the more complex it is, because it better reproduces the multidimensionality of the original. In Russian philological science is relatively widely known methodology developed by M. L. Gasparov. In this paper, the authors use this methodology to test what happens to the reception of a text when several translations of a text are encountered, and whether or not reading several translations “stereoscopic” of the source text actually occurs. “Stereoscopic” is defined as a result in which the reader gets a more accurate picture of the original than when reading a single translation. An experiment involving 225 people was conducted. Taking into account the assumptions accepted in the work, the “stereoscopic vision” of the original when reading several translations was not experimentally confirmed.