The translation of fairy tales, a literary genre rich in cultural and folkloric elements, is a very challenging task. As a matter of fact, cultures and folkloric elements differ according to the source and target communities. For this reason, translators adopt different translation approaches by resorting to various translation strategies to ensure the transfer of cultural elements in fairy tales. In this study, Turkish and French translations of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin’s fairy tales, which have an important place in Russian culture, are analyzed in the context of the transfer of cultural elements. Pushkin’s fairy tales, written in the 1830s, are remarkable in terms of their mixture of poetry and fable and their rich culture-specific items belonging to Russian culture. In this study, four translations of Pushkin’s five fairy tales, one “old” and one “new”, in Russian/French and Russian/Turkish language pairs are analyzed. In the theoretical context, Aixelà’s concept of culture-specific items and the translation strategies he suggests for the transmission of cultural items in Pushkin’s tales translated into Turkish and French were utilized. In addition, the concepts of domestication and foreignization proposed by Venuti were used, and since the fairy tales were retranslated in different years, they were evaluated in the light of Berman’s retranslation hypothesis. As a result, it was found that the Turkish translations of Pushkin’s fairy tales confirm the retranslation hypothesis in the context of the transfer of cultural elements, but the analyzed French translations do not confirm the hypothesis.

Fairy tale translation, Pushkin, culture-specific items, Venuti, retranslation hypothesis.