Comparative Analysis of French and Russian Translations of J.J. von Wallhausen’s Military Charter “Kriegskunst zu Fuß”

The text of the military charter “Kriegskunst zu Fuß” by the German military theorist J.J. von Wallhausen first published in 1615, was widely distributed in europe. The charter of J.J. von Wallhausen was translated into Dutch, Russian, and French. In the article, for the first time in Russian and international linguistics, a comparative analysis of the Russian and French translations of “Kriegskunst zu Fuß” is carried out. The Russian text published in 1647 in moscow and the French text printed in 1615 in Franeker were compared. The work used linguistic source studies, quantitative, descriptive, and comparative-contrastive methods of analysis. The degree of correspondence of the Russian and French texts to the original was revealed. A comparison of the two versions of the charter confirmed the hypothesis of ch.S. Stang that the Russian translator worked not with the German original, but with the translation into Dutch. A number of cases are noted in which the Russian version conveys the original text more accurately than the French one. At the same time, in the area of translation of military terminology, a higher accuracy is noted for the French text. It is concluded that when translating into both languages, a similar strategy was used to convey numerous latin words and expressions included in the original. It is shown that the author of the French translation had a higher level of linguacultural competence; at the same time, the translator of the Russian text made a number of mistakes due to his low level of knowledge of ancient history.