Seventeenth-century bilingual diplomatic documents of Central Asian affairs of Russian Ambassadorial Prikaz: A linguotextological study

The article discusses the 17th-century diplomatic documents of Central Asian affairs of Russian Ambassadorial Prikaz — Middle Russian translations of the labels of Khiva and Bukhara khans, petitions of their ambassadors, letters of Russian tsars and the contemporary Turkic translations stored in funds No. 109, “Relations of Russia with Bukhara”, and No. 134, “Relations of Russia with Khiva” of the Russian State Archive of Anicent Documents in Moscow. Manuscripts of sources are thoroughly characterized: Russian texts were written in Russian cursive of the 17th century, oriental ones — in Arabic graphics of the Turkic (“Tatar”) language and Central Asian Turkic and Persian. It is noted that the scribes of the Khan’s chancery, when writing official documents of their sovereigns, used not only Turkic diplomatic terms, but also those of Arabic and Persian origin. The compilers of tsar’s letters used lexical elements of literary and panegyric style, to which the translators found apt equivalents in the Oriental languages, despite the absence of Oriental–Russian and Russian–Oriental dictionaries at that time. Because of this, they were able to correctly transfer the content of diplomatic documents from one language to another — from the Oriental languages into Russian and vice versa. This demonstrates, firstly, the significance of diplomatic documents created in tsar’s and khan’s chanceries for the history of translation of Russian and Oriental official written documents and of some Oriental and Russian lexical units, including loanwords, — and secondly, the necessity for further research of such historical sources in order to answer multiple questions in the history of Russian and Oriental translation practice.