1The privileged place of the Western worldview, the exaltation and unification of the Western system of knowledge as universal, as well as the derogatory attitude toward the representatives of non-European civilizations represents the desire to subjugate the Other (the Stranger). All of these factors led to the twentieth century ethnic crisis and to the reappraisal of values and the re-placement of components in the spiritual core of the Western world. Such things are able to put an end to equilibrium and even paralyze the cultural development of a lot of countries. The crisis of identity is associated with the aggressive onset of mass culture, the information economy and the policy of globalization. The threat of national identity is perceived as a socio-psychological factor in the dynamics of consciousness, cultural, social and political behavior of people belonging to various cultural areas.

2Researchers draw attention to the fact that often national, ethnic, religious identity is formed through the denial of another identity, by declaring who we are not. In this regard, for the appearance of the collective or personal identity is an obligatory condition for the emergence of the image of the "Other", most often the enemy. On the background of this image, there is a process of self-identification. "This is a classic projection: we are not creating problems, but" they ". The transfer of the problem to the shoulders of the "other", as a rule, is combined with a deep conviction that the problem lies not in "us", but in "them". Thus, the sensation of "us" is most productively formed only with the presence of a number of "others" as the category of the inner enemy. But the research of this negative part of identity is often extremely difficult due to ethical and moral reasons.

3American society often deliberately detects an opposition between white and black identities, thereby marginalizing Latin Americans, Native Americans and Americans of Asian origin, due to which the normalization of whiteness occurs, because white has become a group with which everyone is compared.

4Understanding the processes of national and cultural identity formation is a ground for the direct understanding in the personal appropriation dynamics in the everyday life of culture and the identity of the Other. Transcultural concepts and cultural polylogue reserve the right to "opaque", visually new ideas about the order and chaos in the world and is a kind of attempt to find out the way out of the postmodern situation.

5Speaking about the importance of understanding the linguistic system of indigenous peoples, Marie Batista notes that "no one is precisely able to penetrate the knowledge of another person. The only thing that works is when another person shares his thoughts in a voice act. And the presumption of what is said is the experience of a man "[Battiste 2000: 80]. As for colonial language expansion, the understanding of linguistic structures usually is a peculiar "road map for the understanding of cognitive categories and knowledge" [Inglis 2004:393],and this map might be lost for the aeons of the Indian generations, carriers of specific cultures. As Ronald Wardlaugh emphasizes, people are accustomed to "use the language to communicate values and experience. Although it cannot be argued that culture requires a special linguistic structure, but this influence has always been a noticeable phenomenon of specific features of the language structure "[Wardlaugh 1986: 212]. An analysis of these language "peculiarities" makes better understanding of the meaning and semantic environment that are components of the knowledge of the Native American people, but these structures represent the greatest difficulty in translation.

6A well-known writer and literary critic, Louis Owens (representative of the Chokto-Cherokee nation), wrote that for American Indians, the identity issue encompasses centuries of colonial and postcolonial persecution, “brutally enforced peripherality, cultural denigration – including especially a harsh privileging of English over tribal languages – and systematic oppression by the monocentric “westering” impulse in America"(Owens 1992: 4).

7Indigenous people are convinced that the use of language has a physical effect on a person and environment, so English language is considered by them as violence. The pronounced word was equated with action, based on the effect of the ceremonies of indigenous religions. Lee Irving wrote that "the sacred pronouncement was regarded as very powerful and dangerous, so a cautious attitude towards it was a must in order to avoid negative consequences" (Irwin 1992: 239). That is why, according to Burke, writers dealing with the sacred ceremonies, shamans, religious beliefs, using sacred texts should be very cautious when choosing the language of their works. The belief that language has a physical effect is still integral to Indigenous religions across the country. This belief means the very act of re-telling a story can became dangerous itself, particularly when using Indigenous language as Susan Power does in Grass Dancer. In addition, translation of words from Indigenous languages into English causes the words to lose their power. This places Indigenous people who depend on these ceremonies for well-being and spiritual health at risk, which is yet again another form of violence enacted against Native peoples that, like assimilation, is vested in cultural genocide"(Burke 2011:18-19). Louis Owens wrote that the indigenous authors who write in English must have a double understanding, speciphic "linguistic twist" that illustrates the distance separating the writer from the English language and its ideology, as well as the risk of alienating the reader. "The writer is approaching an essentially “other” language and thus entering into dialogue with language itself. The result of this exquisite balancing act is a matrix of incredible heteroglossia and linguistic torsions and the intensely political situation” (Owens 1992:15). This becomes especially relevant due to the fact that contemporary authors may not always boast of free possession of their own language, "the problem of translatability is equally relevant in this case, because this problem represents the place of a person in culture, in relation to its position among cultures" (Cheyfitz 1991: c.xvi].

8Traditionally, cultural identity was considered from two diametrically opposed points of view. On the one hand, the Cartesian approach reigned, according to which man was reduced to the dichotomy of consciousness and mind. Another approach was in opposition to the first, there is no generical personality, but each individual is culturally and nationally rooted. As of the beginning of the XXI century it is believed that both of these positions do not fully correspond to human nature. The current state of philosophical thought requires the search for "such an interpretive scheme in which man, freedom and cultural identity would appear as complementarity, not mutual exclusion. Personal deployment of identity takes place in a certain communicative environment and is interconnected with existing speech-discursive practices. The meaningful elements of the personal self-image depends upon the cultural environment and, conversely, affect the formation of the latter. Self-creation of an individual is simultaneously the creation of inherent cultural behavior, style of speech, narrative features and moral response.

9Modern researchers of Native American identity write with sadness that during the 20th century, the government of the United States and Canada made a lots of efforts to assimilate indigenous people into the mainstream society. The notorious Indian boarding schools, where children were separated from their parents and native traditions in order to learn the white society's customs under the threat of punishment cells and cruel physical beating, they were forbidden to communicate in their native languages. The motto of these educational institutions was "to kill an Indian, save a man." Violent loss of native speech caused the self-identification of many tribes, and the loss of individual identity in the context of interpersonal relationships as well. "Native Americans have had several centuries of experience with authoritative discourse, having had their native language s ruthlessly suppressed to the extent of punishment for speaking “Indian” represents a common denominator among Native Americans who “gone to school” (often a boarding schools where the process of displacement was most rapid and intense” (Owens 1992:12).

10US modern life requires general familiarization with the realities of the indigenous community, so Native American writers create so-called texts-intermediaries. James Ruppert calls this phenomenon mediation, in his opinion, it "creates a text where different languages are declared, which mutually translated into each other" (Ruppert1995:14). Researchers declare the novel by Susan Power "The Grass Dancer" (1994) as the best manifestation of Native American heteroglossia. "Indigenous people have had to shift their culture for too long in accordance with Western ideology, it's time for a non-indigenous reader to travel in the opposite direction, with an interpreter and a guide. The fact that Pawer chooses such a topic for translation as religious concepts, demonstrates her desire to change the point of view of the mainstream reader, at the same time she could be condemned by her own people through such a willingness to talk about sacred things "(Burke 2011:20). The writing of the novel "The Grass Dancer" was a very brave act, many of Pawer’s tribespeople, including the famous Vain Deloria, whose works she mentions on the pages of the novel, simply did not believe in the possibility of such "translation". The most important for the Dakota religious concepts were not subjected to a simple literal translation instead they were explained in the novel. In order to understand the meaning of a specific words, the reader had to use his imagination, bringing together several stories, generously scattered on the pages of the work. At the same time, the writer often left important concepts without translation, giving only the English alliteration of the word in the Lakota language, "because of the absolute alienation of these realities to the non-radical reader, the inability to bypass them, by changing another English word or allegory" (Burke 2011 :34).

11In May 2017, the Ukrainian translation of excerpts from "The Grass Dancer" by Susan Power was published in the independent literary and art magazine of foreign literature Vsesvit (Kiev). The writer of the novel radically alters mainstream readers’ perception of the world by confronting them with material incomprehencible in Western scientific context. The novel has been written in English, so the novel targeted two audiences simultaneously and performed a profound act of cultural translation. B. Burke states that in the novel “reader gets more comprehensive picture of life for Dakota people and how their spiritual beliefs influence the way they see the world” (Burke 2011: 34).The translator had to take into account the peculiarities of the "untranslatable" phenomena of indigenous beliefs that lie at the basis of the Native American identity and transmit them into Ukrainian language to bring the Indigenous America closer to the Slavic reader.

12One of the main concepts of religious believes in the novel deal with the idea of finding Ukrainian words for different names of medicine people. The very name “medicine people” does not have equivalent in Ukrainian language. It might be translated as “шамани”, but this word in a way has a derogatory connotation and indicates inferior attitude of the interpreter. Another version of translation might be “духовенство”, this word has no derogatory meaning and is close to Native American realities. The very word “medicine” in Native American context quite often might be translated as “чари” or “ліки”. Neither of these words explicates the full idea of the concept. In a way the word “medicine” transforms the idea of the spiritual power without any indication of its use by its owner. And Susan Power uses it when she speaks about Yuwipi ceremony as well as she addresses the notion of witchery. That is why the word medicine people and medicine should be attributed to the phenomenon of translation anomaly and translated in accordance with the context. One of the novel’s chapter titles is The Medicine Hole in Ukrainian we propose variant Магічна нора. In translating this concept, we used the compensation strategy when elements of pragmatic meanings, stylistic nuances, the identical transmission of which are impossible, are transmitted in the text of the translation by elements of another order not necessarily in the same place as in original text.

13Translation of the Dakota-specific ceremony name into Ukrainian was done using the transliteration strategy, when the translation was performed in the order of the letters of the original lexical unit using the alphabet of the translation language. The translation of the word anomaly takes place at the level of the graph; the English graphs are replaced by the Ukrainian ones:

It was a memory from his childhood, one of the first times he attended a Yuwipi ceremony conducted by his grandfather.- То були дитячі спогади про його першу участь у ювіпі-церемонії, що її проводив дідусь.

14Another example of the transliteration strategy usage takes is the Dakota-specific word he’yoka. The sacred clown of the heyo'ka, the one who receives vision from the stormy creatures, is a very common image in the cultures the Great Plains. It is known that among many indigenous peoples there is a widespread religious practice to look for visions, during which the person establishes contact with representatives of the "spiritual world" who become bodyguards throughout the life of a person and help to find a personal appointment in the world. Heyo'kas (insane in Dakota language) are those who saw the spirits of thunder. This vision gives the person (usually a male, although there may be exceptions) a huge force, but at the same time, this person must be afraid of a thunder and lightning that will strike it if he does fulfill his duties. If heyo'ka does not fulfill his duties, thunder and lightning can destroy not only this particular person, but the whole family, which is the most terrible punishment for indigenous people. The sacred clown had to perform special rituals for their community, to play the role of the messenger of thunderclouds, to play the buffoon, to make everything upside down, causing a human laugh. When the Dakota-person became heyo'ka, he had to perform a special ceremony - cook a dog that was to be killed quickly and not leaving traces on it, as if it was killed by the lightning. The pieces of the cooked animal were originally offered to the thunderstorm who, according to the Dakota believes, lived in the west, and then the spirits of the other five sacred directions, after which they were fed the whole community, this treatment was to bring blessings to the people. Ukrainian reader does not know about this Native American concept and there is no equivalent word for it in our language, so the transliteration was the only way to do the proper translation.

“This uncle of yours had a powerful dream, where the thunderbirds appeared to him. You know what that means?”

“Yes”, said the boy.

“Sure. He had to become heyo’ka. And that is hard”. Herod ran his thumb in jagged lines across his arm. “He painted the lightening on his arms and legs and his face too. He did everything the opposite way it’s usually done, and he said what he didn’t mean”.

«Цей твій дядько якось мав могутнє видіння: перед ним з’явилися грозові птахи. Знаєш, що це значить?»

«Так», – відповів хлопець.

«Звичайно. Він став хейокою. А це важко, – Херод провів пальцем з обламаним нігтем по руці. – Він намалював знак блискавки на руках, ногах і обличчі. І почав робити все навпаки, як це зазвичай робиться, й говорити те, що не мав на увазі».

15Another example of the transliteration strategy was used to translate the name of Dakota trickster as well.

He took a deep breath and launched into a story about Iktomy, the tricky spider who was both clever and imprudent and whose misadventures served to instruct. - Він тяжко зітхнув і почав історію про Іктомі, майстерного павучка, який був одночасно розумним та нав’язливим і чиї невдалі пригоди повчали.

16The text of the novel is full of Dakota words, which has no explanation in English, the meanings of these words the reader has to guess, like in the song of the spirits during the Yuwipi ceremony.

Look, there are four of you, the spirits told me in Dakota, but they spoke individually, at their own speed, so their voices overlapped and rippled in echoes:

Iho! (Iho!) (Iho!) Topa. (Topa.) (Topa.)

«Дивися, вас тут четверо», – сказали мені духи на дакота, та вони говорили кожен у своєму ритмі, їхні голоси зливалися і відлунювали:

Іхо! (Іхо!) (Іхо!) Топа. (Топа.) (Топа.)

17Native American names are very informative, so they have been translated into Ukrainian despite the fact that commonly there is no practice of translating such nouns. This translation demanded the number of translation strategies as well. First was the strategy of neutralization, the replacement of unimportant or incomprehensible for the reader original units with the neutral or conversational equivalents of the language of translation. Like the name of the main novel hero is Harley Wind Soldier, his friend’s name is Frank Pipe. In Ukrainian translation the names became Харлі Воїн Із Вітром and Френк Священна Трубка. Another strategy is a concretization, which is accompanied by the desire of the translator to reproduce the objectivity and integrity of the translation abnormality by clarifying the necessary details. The names of Charlene Thunder and her grandmother Mercury Thunder are translated differently, while Charlene is translated like Шарлін Грім, Mercury in Ukrainian version is Ртуть Грім, as an element in periodic Mendeleev system, to indicate her witchery nature.

18The lexicalization strategy involves the translation of a dialect with a regional dialect equivalent, a conversational unit, or a diminutive speech. The following sentence can serve as an example:

While we waited, I pointed out my new neighbor, a magnificent Brahma bull purchased by the rancher who leased several acres of my land. He was eyeing us too, staring rudely right into our faces. He shook himself a couple of times, his muscles rippling, his nostrils flared. He was full of contempt.

Old biddies, his bloodshot eyes told me. Come any closer and I’ll snuff you out in one breath. The split-rail fence that penned him in seemed suddenly flimsy.

Поки очікували, я звернув його увагу на мого нового сусіда, величного бика Брахму, котрого придбав чоловік, який орендував у мене кілька акрів землі. Він теж спостерігав за нами, нахабно витріщаючись просто нам у вічі. Бик струснувся кілька разів, його м’язи напружилися, а ніздрі видавали обурення.

«Старигани, – казали його налиті кров’ю очі, – тільки підійдіть, і я здмухну вас одним подихом». Дощатий паркан, до якого він був припнутий, ураз здався крихким.

19S. Hall emphasizes that identities are related to the use of resources of history, language, culture in the process of becoming in opposition to existence. The question is not "who are we?" Or "where are we from?", But rather "where are we moving?", "How are we presented?" And how this will affect how we will be able to represent ourselves. Halls notes that identity is constructed from within, and not from outside. (Hall 1996: 4), so the act of speech, in this case, is that very internal basis, cementing North American identity. That is why the attempt to transfer the identity of another people by the linguistic means of their own people at the moment is the cornerstone of modern translation theory. The main conclusion that can be drawn is that the translation of dialectal speech is always a loss. National languages represent realities in different planes, according to the rules established by their outlook. Often the translation of nationally-tagged units is a struggle not at the linguistic level, but at the level of cultures. The quality of the translation often depends on the cultural sensitivity of the interpreter, who is obliged to do thorough literary analysis before starting the act of translation itself.