ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how translators’ political and ethical dispositions – their translatorial hexis – guides their microtextual translation decisions. Drawing on case studies of Zakhar Prilepin's Sankya and Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik, it examines the tension between translators’ moral positioning, editorial oversight, and loyalty to their author and target reader. This chapter argues that translators’ personal beliefs and social values influence their linguistic choices. Comparing Jeff Parker's and Jamey Gambrell's translation strategies, it considers how issues such as censorship, domestication, and the pursuit of ‘legibility’ can obscure a text's political and ethical complexity. Via translation analysis, and drawing from interviews, this chapter demonstrates that translation is not a neutral act but a site of negotiation between personal political bias, fidelity to the source text, and the demands of the target Anglophone market.
