On Perception of Culture Codes in German Translations (Based on Works by M. Bulgakov)

The article studies culture codes transformation in the German translations of the works by the Russian classic M. Bulgakov. To study the specifics of interpreting Russian culturemes, the semiotic method is employed, which allows identifying various connotations that convey information about the source language culture. Interpretation of the source and the target passages implicating the culture codes of “Meal”, “Clothes” and “Interpersonal Relations” suggests that their semiotics is mostly equivalent yet not identical. This may be due to culture asymmetry as well as to the translators' capacity to perceive the semantics and the pragmatics of the source text.