The sociolinguistic aspect of authorial speech in literary texts and the problem of translation (from the experience of a philologist and translator of Dutch literature)

<jats:p>The research aims to identify the methods available to a Russian translator for conveying markers used by Dutch authors to construct the sociolinguistic characteristics of a homodiegetic narrator in literary texts. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that, for the first time in Russian Dutch studies, a series of objective linguistic and sociocultural constraints on the accurate reproduction of the social coloring of character-narrators’ speech from Dutch literature into Russian has been formulated. The study is based on three works of Dutch literature from the 19th century (Multatuli’s “Max Havelaar”), the 20th century (K. Verheul’s dilogy “Villa Bermond” and “The Tempest Sonata”), and the 21st century (S. Kuyper’s “Bizarre”), alongside their contemporary Russian translations. It was found that in these works, sociolinguistic markers are predominantly presented at the lexical and syntactic levels, with the former presenting significantly greater difficulties during translation than the latter. The findings demonstrated that the most substantial sociocultural adaptation was required for the young adult novel, where differing societal attitudes toward profanities in the Netherlands and Russia necessitated a “softening” of the schoolgirl narrator’s speech.</jats:p>