One mistranslation in 300 pages of a book is not fatal, but a bad translation of a title can ruin it. Maria Bobadilla-Pérez
INTRODUCTIONAbout half of a contemporary reader's book list consists of translated literature. But have you ever thought why one of these books imposes you upon its magic, involves you into its plot and you are lost in it up to the last page, while the other book, vice versa, makes you put it aside and not even try to read it more? Can it happen just because a book is simply not ʻyourʼ piece of reading, the author is not ʻyoursʼ and therefore your inner tuning fork does not resonate with a book? Or maybe it is not a matter of the author at all, as you read a target text, a translated version and it is a translator who is responsible for a book to find its voice in the hearts of readers who belong to different cultures?History of translation knows a lot of cases when some unsuccessful, careless translations turned brilliant source texts into their mediocre semblance. As a result, many writers, who gained recognition and admiration in their own cultures, the source cultures, appeared to be unappreciated in a recipient culture. Moreover, their popularity in their native countries bewildered the target readers. N. G. Bagdasar'yan 1 , for instance, notes that the foreigners who read the works by Pushkin in translations, are very often surprised about his genius. The situation was analogous to the first translations of the works by N. V. Gogol into English. Up to the XXth century Gogol remained one of the least popular authors in the UK. It was the translation by Constance Garnett published at the beginning of the century that let the English-speaking readership understand: Gogol is a writer of a world-wide significance and, as 13 Тутатина Е.А. Заглавие книги: прагматика, поэтика и эволюция.