Tr
Transliteration
Reproducing the sound of the original in Hungarian script — preserving a unit's “foreignness” (e.g. Kijevi Rusz, polovecek, Ioann metropolita).
leans → foreignisationTranslation Studies · Linguoculturology
How Pál Mislei's 1980 Hungarian rendering of a novel set in eleventh-century Kyivan Rus' reshapes the culture-specific vocabulary that carries historical identity — and, with it, the cultural memory a foreign-language reader inherits.
Abstract
This article is devoted to a comprehensive study of the rendering of culture-specific vocabulary in the Hungarian translation of Pavlo Zahrebelnyi's historical novel Yevpraksiia, translated by Pál Mislei (1980), as well as an analysis of the influence of translation strategies on the representation of the historical and cultural identity of Kyivan Rus' in Hungarian cultural discourse. The relevance of this study arises from the insufficient exploration of the field of Ukrainian-Hungarian literary translation, particularly the lack of systematic works analysing culturally marked units and their historical and semantic transformations in the translation process.
The aim is to identify the impact of translation strategies on historical and semantic shifts in the perception of Ukrainian culture-specific elements in Hungarian translations, and to determine the patterns and consequences of these transformations for the representation of the historical and cultural identity of Kyivan Rus'. The analysis reveals that the translator employs a wide range of strategies, including transliteration, descriptive translation, semantic neutralisation, partial adaptation and modernisation. Although these strategies help to make the historical realities of Kyivan Rus' more accessible to Hungarian readers, they simultaneously give rise to historical and semantic shifts and a partial reduction of the cultural specificity of the original text.
Research shows that the most significant changes occur in the sphere of onomastics, ethnonyms, socio-political vocabulary and sacred names, which serve as key markers of historical identity. Their translation is often accompanied by generalisation, functional substitution or adaptation, which leads to a shift in historical meanings and the formation of an alternative model of cultural memory. At the same time, the translation of original neologisms reveals a tendency towards stylistic neutralisation, which diminishes the degree to which the author's linguistic distinctiveness is conveyed. The adequate rendering of culture-specific vocabulary in literary translation requires not only stylistic accuracy but also the translator's in-depth historical and cultural knowledge.
01 — Introduction
In a historical novel, linguistic elements are conveyors of cultural memory, collective identity and the worldviews of a particular era.
In contemporary translation studies, the issue of reconstructing culturally specific elements occupies a central position, since literary translation involves not only conveying denotative meaning but also representing the historical and cultural experience of the community that speaks the original language. The complexity of this task arises from the uniqueness of each culture and the asymmetry of cultural codes, which do not always have direct equivalents in a foreign-language context.
This problem becomes particularly acute when translating historical novels, where even if the objects or phenomena they refer to disappear in real historical time, in a literary text they remain important markers of historical authenticity and means of constructing an image of the past. As Larysa Nahorna points out, the concept of “historical culture” encompasses the entire system of conveying historical knowledge to society, particularly through literature and the arts. Consequently, the literary translation of a historical novel acquires particular significance, as it can influence the formation of historical perceptions within the target culture.
Pavlo Zahrebelnyi's novel Yevpraksiia, an artistic reconstruction of the era of eleventh-century Kyivan Rus', is rich in culturally marked vocabulary — sacred proper nouns, ethnonyms, titles, historical realities, archaisms and the author's own neologisms. In the Hungarian translation, these elements undergo a variety of transformations — ranging from transliteration and partial adaptation to neutralisation, modernisation and semantic reduction. These translation choices give rise to historical and semantic shifts, particularly in the realm of ethnonyms and titles, which in turn influence the perception of the historical and national identity of Kyivan Rus' within foreign-language cultural contexts.
In this article, translation is examined as a space where historical accuracy and cultural reception interact, where every transformation of lexical units reflects the specific characteristics of Hungarian receptive culture and traditions of mediation. There is a growing need to examine the limits of translation adaptation in the case of historically marked texts: how do translation strategies influence the representation of historical and national identity in the target culture, and where does the line run between the communicative accessibility of a text and the historical-semantic transformation of its content?
Translation practice proves that translations already produced often acquire the status of established conventions and are perceived as fixed linguistic patterns. This inertia within the translation tradition can lead to the establishment of inaccurate or anachronistic interpretations of culture-specific elements and, consequently, to the prolonged reproduction of distorted perceptions of historical and cultural realities within the target culture.
To examine the title and dedications; to identify the rendering of toponyms and anthroponyms; to trace strategies for ethnonyms; to describe the translation of titles and military-administrative terminology; to examine how sacred onyms are transmitted; to characterise the translation of original neologisms and stylistically marked vocabulary; and to determine the extent to which the text has been historically and semantically neutralised or modernised.
02 — Literary Review
Most scholarship on culture-specific vocabulary moves between Ukrainian and English; the Ukrainian–Hungarian direction remains a near-blank field.
The problem of translating culture-specific units has been examined by Ukrainian and international researchers in translation studies and linguoculturology (Zorivchak, Klaudy, Heltai, Slavova & Borysenko, Petukhova & Hovorun, and others), focusing on the challenges of defining culture-specific terms, their cultural connotations, methods of transliteration, and strategies for domestication and foreignisation. Yet most studies concern translations from Ukrainian into English and back, with other language pairs being far less common.
The study adopts Pál Heltai's view that culture-specific elements are those whose referential and connotative meanings, encyclopedic associations or features of functioning in speech relate to a certain culture and are explained by it, whereas in other language-cultural communities they are either absent or substantially different. In this study, culturally specific units with historical and ideological connotations acquire particular significance, since their semantic transformation in translation may lead to a shift in historical perspective and cultural identification.
At present one of the few works on Ukrainian–Hungarian cultural realia is Oksana Tashkovych's study of the Hungarian translation of Panteleimon Kulish's The Black Council. Academic discourse still lacks a specific analysis of the translation of Yevpraksiia from the perspective of reconstructing culturally specific vocabulary — a gap this article sets out to address.
The Hungarian Eupraxia császárné pokoljárása was translated by Pál Mislei and published in 1980 as a joint project of the Budapest publishing house “Európa” and the Uzhhorod publishing house “Karpaty”. The editor-in-chief was Shara Karig; the Hungarian text was cross-checked against the Ukrainian original by László Sándor, and the poetic excerpts were translated by Dezső Tándori.
03 — Key Concepts
Across the translation, Mislei moves between five recurring strategies — pulled between foreignisation (keeping the original's strangeness) and domestication (smoothing it for the reader).
Reproducing the sound of the original in Hungarian script — preserving a unit's “foreignness” (e.g. Kijevi Rusz, polovecek, Ioann metropolita).
leans → foreignisationUnpacking a term into a phrase when no equivalent exists (e.g. druzhyna → kijevi vitézek, “Kyivan warriors”; kniahynia → fejedelemné).
leans → domesticationReplacing a marked concept with a general one, de-concretising the historical marker (e.g. poruganie → irónia; vasilevs → mindenható uralkodó).
leans → domesticationSubstituting an established target-culture equivalent that is only approximately analogous (e.g. kniaz' → fejedelem; established exonyms such as szászok, besenyők).
leans → domesticationProjecting later or modern categories onto the medieval text, creating anachronism (e.g. Rus' → orosz / Oroszföld, “Russian / Russian land”).
leans → domesticationOmission or simplification that flattens the author's expressive word-creation (e.g. the dropped neologism zlovchennia; veselozubo → a neutral “flashing teeth”).
effect → loss of specificity04 — Results & Discussion
Reading the original against Mislei's Hungarian, category by category — from the novel's title to Zahrebelnyi's invented words.
The title is a semantic guide that frames how a reader perceives a work. In translation, Zahrebelnyi's bare Yevpraksiia was expanded into Eupraxia császárné pokoljárása — “Empress Yevpraksiia's walk through hell.” This is a compensatory strategy: for a Hungarian reader unfamiliar with Ukrainian history, the heroine's name alone does not carry enough weight, so the title is made to signal the novel's central theme.
The novel carries two dedications: a quotation from the Izbornik of 1073 and lines from Pavlo Tychyna's poem War. The Izbornik excerpt is written in literary Ukrainian shot through with Old Slavonic vocabulary — a stylistic marker that pulls the work's historical context to the surface. In Hungarian it is simplified and loses that culturally specific texture: the lexeme poruganie (mockery, humiliation, contempt) is rendered as irónia, radically altering the semantic tone and stripping away the archaic flavour.
Поруганіє же є слово лицемірно,
от супротивного супротивноє явленіє являє;
поруганіє же образі д: поруганіє,
похухнаніє, поіграніє, посміяніє;
і поруганіє єсть слово с укором гаголемо
Zahrebelnyi, 2002, p. 26
Az irónia kétértelmű dolog,
valamiről az ellenkezőjét állítja;
az iróniának alakja négy: gúny,
csúfolódás, játék, kinevetés;
s az irónia szemrehányással kimondott dolog
Zahrebelnij, 1980, p. 5
Gloss of the original: “Mockery [poruganie] is a hypocritical word; from the opposite it manifests the opposite; mockery has the form [d:]: mockery, sneering [pohuhnanie], derision [poigranie], ridicule [posmianie]; and mockery is a word spoken with reproach.”
By contrast, the Tychyna excerpt is conveyed more faithfully — evidence of the translator's surer command of modern Ukrainian — though it still concretises and partly neutralises the imagery: human madness becomes the metaphor of horrible hearts, and the folklorically coloured potion is reduced to neutral herbs.
Тільки й єсть у нас ворог ‒
наше серце.
Благословіть, мамо, шукати зілля
Шукати зілля на людське божевілля
Zahrebelnyi, 2002, p. 26
Az ellenség bennünk lakik ‒
szivünk az.
Áldásod add, anyám, leljek füvekre,
Leljek füvekre, írul szörny szivekre
Zahrebelnij, 1980, p. 5
Compensatory strategies and simplifications secure communicative access for the foreign reader, but at the cost of the archaic stylistic flavour, a semantic shift in key concepts (poruganie → irónia), and a partial neutralisation of the religious-literary tradition of Kyivan Rus'.
Proper names carry extralinguistic information needed to convey both denotative meaning and cultural context, so their translation demands a deep grasp of the historical setting. The single most ideologically charged case is the inconsistent rendering of the name Rus'. Mostly Mislei uses the relatively neutral calque Rusz földje (“the land of Rus'”); near the novel's end the more accurate transliteration Kijevi Rusz appears — but elsewhere the text offers Oroszföld, literally “Russian land.”
The variation likely stems from three factors: the Hungarian historiographical tradition, in which orosz long served as a generalised marker for the East Slavic region (the consistent term Rusz was only established in Hungarian scholarship in the later twentieth century, notably by M. Font); the inertia of established exonyms, by which Oroszföld automatically supplants the more accurate form; and the absence of clear editorial unification of terminology. The inconsistency is therefore not mere stylistic variation but a tension between a historically accurate transliteration and a modernising interpretation that creates an anachronistic effect.
The same shift surfaces with the ethnonym itself: where the original speaks of the “king of the Rus'” (король руських), the translation gives orosz király — “Russian king,” the ruler of Russia in the modern national sense — replacing the historical ethnonym with a modern one.
A comparable Russian-mediated influence runs through the other toponyms, partly adapted to Hungarian phonetics yet routed through intermediary forms — which loosens their tie to Ukrainian historical reality.
The inconsistent rendering of Rus' — from transliterated Kijevi Rusz to politically charged Oroszföld — shows how translation can not only convey but modify the historical content of a text, shaping historical memory and national identity in the target culture. The transformation of place names is systematic, governed by the target language's norms and the indirect influence of (primarily Russian) traditions.
The names of historical figures and characters are rendered, for the most part, by the phonetic principle and with reference to the original form — yet with persistent inconsistency. Many names come through fairly accurately, while a vowel as ordinary as [a] is rendered unevenly even though Hungarian has the grapheme for it: Maria appears without the long á, signalling that the translator followed established intermediary forms rather than target-language phonetic accuracy.
As Vozna, Slavova and Antoniuk note of Old Rus' anthroponyms in English, such an approach “may be ideological in nature — equating Old Rus' history with Russian history,” the problem lying in a disregard for the peculiarities of Ukrainian spelling and pronunciation. The Hungarian Yevpraksiia exhibits the same tendency: inconsistent transliteration not only affects phonetic accuracy but partially distorts the historical and cultural identity of the characters and the Old Rus' environment.
Unlike personal names, ethnonyms are tied directly to national identity, historical memory and cultural self-identification, so their translation carries special weight. In Yevpraksiia they sketch the historical landscape of Kyivan Rus' and the relations between ethnic communities. Mislei combines two moves: transliteration that keeps the Slavic “foreignness,” and established Hungarian exonyms with their own historical tradition.
Polovtsians → polovecek (not the established Hungarian kunok); Vseslav of Polotsk → Vszeszlav polocki fejedelem; Slavs → szlávok, Polianians → polanok. The translator prefers the Slavic form over full integration into Hungarian — preserving foreignness, at the cost of sounding less natural.
transliteration · foreignisationSaxons → szászok, Pechenegs → besenyők, Bohemians → boemannok, Prussians → poroszok. Here the choice is functionally justified: these names are firmly established in Hungarian historiography.
adaptation · domesticationA long roll-call of West-Slavic tribal names is transliterated and adapted to Hungarian phonetics — a strategy that again shows no single governing principle, preserving historical foreignness in some cases and integrating the names into the Hungarian framework in others:
The same trends seen with toponyms and anthroponyms recur: a mix of transliteration and established exonyms, balancing fidelity to the Ukrainian original against the Hungarian reader's perception — and not excluding the influence of historical and ideological factors on the formation of ethno-national identity within the receiving culture.
The title kniaz' (prince) is rendered fejedelem, and velykyi kniaz' (grand prince) nagyfejedelem. Formally apt — but not fully equivalent: in modern Hungarian usage fejedelem can mean a ruler of lower status than a king or emperor, or even a tribal chief, so it partly shifts the political context, since eleventh-century Kyivan Rus' is an established state structure, not a tribal confederation.
Given the historical-novel genre, titles would be better rendered by transcription — knyáz, knyáhinyá, knyázsná — with explanations in footnotes or comments, preserving their historical and political significance while supplying the reader with cultural-historical context.
Ecclesiastical titles define status and hierarchy within the church and lack direct Hungarian equivalents. Where the translator reaches for universal words, the specific spiritual and ideological role is flattened — though one rendering keeps its full force.
For Ukrainian culture, St Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv is not only a religious centre but a symbol of spiritual identity and state integrity — what S. Krymskyi calls a symbol of the ethical order of the Cosmos. The name Sofia functions as a cultural code, so even a slight shift can dissolve its symbolic depth. Cathedral dedications, Krymskyi notes, marked the political-ideological aspirations of the principalities: the dedication of Chernihiv's cathedral to Christ matched the city's claim to a leading role.
Rendering sacred vocabulary requires not only lexical accuracy but a deep understanding of its cultural-historical role: minor shifts reduce meaning and weaken the symbolic code that, in the Old Rus' context, marked political and spiritual identity.
Beyond its realia, the novel is built on Zahrebelnyi's imaginative word-creation. In Hungarian these tend toward semantic expansion, normalisation or reduction — securing comprehensibility while thinning out the historical stylisation, morphological originality and expressive imagery of the author's style. A few cases, though, carry the poetry across.
Other archaisms are smoothed for accessibility: slastoliubstvo (sensual indulgence) becomes sóvárgás (intense yearning), softening the ethical judgement; hlybokodumnist (profoundness) is explicated as mély bölcsesség (profound wisdom), losing its unusual word-formation; and chervonomordist (red-facedness) is rendered descriptively as a piros ábrázatú — denotatively accurate, but stripped of its stylistic roughness.
05 — Findings & Synthesis
The visualisations below are a qualitative synthesis of the study's stated findings — not measured frequencies. They map the directions of change the analysis describes.
Figure 1 — The thesis
Mislei's strategies make the realities of Kyivan Rus' more accessible to a Hungarian reader — while simultaneously reducing historical accuracy, cultural specificity, religious-symbolic depth, stylistic expressiveness and identity markers. Accessibility rises; everything that carries historical identity recedes.
Qualitative scale (Low → High) summarising the article's conclusions. “Communicative accessibility” is judged from the standpoint of a Hungarian reader unfamiliar with Ukrainian history.
Figure 2 — Where change concentrates
The study finds the most significant changes in onomastics, ethnonyms, socio-political vocabulary and sacred names. The rendering of the ethnonym Rus' is repeatedly called “one of the most problematic areas.”
Ordinal levels (Moderate → Very high) reflecting the relative emphasis placed by the article on each category.
Figure 3 — One name, three futures
The same toponym appears in three guises within a single text — ranging from a faithful transliteration to a politically charged anachronism.
Ordering follows the article: “the best option is a transliterated translation Kijevi Rusz”; Rusz földje is “far more appropriate”; Oroszföld is “historically inaccurate.”
Figure 4 — The two pulls
Of the recurring strategies, transliteration pulls toward foreignisation (keeping the original's strangeness); descriptive translation, neutralisation, adaptation and modernisation pull toward domestication.
Strategies grouped by their dominant pull, as framed in the study.
Reading the figures
It is advisable to consciously regulate the balance between foreignisation and domestication — giving preference to the former for conceptually significant elements of historical reality, and adding comments to compensate for any potential loss of meaning in cases of high cultural significance.
Rely on the Ukrainian forms of proper names rather than secondary (Russian-mediated) traditions; avoid anachronistic equivalents for ethnonyms; retain socio-political and military terms with minimal explanation; and preserve the proper-noun status of sacred vocabulary.
06 — Conclusions
The translation of culture-specific vocabulary fulfils both an adaptive and an interpretative function, directly shaping the historical-cultural model in the reader's mind.
The chosen strategies systematically alter the semantic emphasis of the text and shape an alternative image of Kyivan Rus' in a foreign-language cultural space. The predominance of adaptive strategies leads not only to local semantic shifts but to a systemic transformation of the historical narrative.
The key trend is a combination of adaptation, neutralisation and partial modernisation. While making the text communicatively accessible to Hungarian readers, these strategies simultaneously reduce its cultural specificity and historical accuracy.
Proper names, ethnonyms, titles and sacred vocabulary — which in the original form a coherent system of historical coordinates — often undergo generalisation or functional substitution, losing their distinctive character and ceasing to serve as repositories of historical memory.
Modern ideas about ethnic identity are projected onto the Old Rus' context, distorting historical perspective. It is advisable to avoid anachronistic equivalents and preserve the historical specificity of terms — the priority being accuracy, not simplification.
Replacing culturally specific socio-political and military terms with functional equivalents from another tradition makes the reader interpret the government of Kyivan Rus' through familiar models. Where possible, original terms should be retained with minimal explanation.
In the case studied, translation shapes an alternative version of historical memory, integrating culturally specific elements into a different frame of reference. The translator acts not only as a cultural mediator but as an interpreter of historical reality.
It is precisely translation choices that determine how the historical past is represented in a foreign-language context and influence the formation of cultural identity in the receptive discourse.
— Conclusions, O. Talabirchuk (2026)
07 — References
The full bibliography of the article, comprising translation-studies scholarship, Hungarian and Ukrainian lexicography, historiography of Kyivan Rus', and the two editions of the novel itself.