Abstract
During the 2010s, the moral well-being of youth became a political priority in Russia. Concerns among older generations that foreign, mainly Western influences were corrupting the country’s youth provided the regime with a pretext to transform youth well-being into a matter of national security. This securitization of youth policy altered norms regarding what information young people were allowed to encounter and what was deemed forbidden. These shifting norms manifested in, among other things, discourse about Russian traditional values and the federal content rating law. Heightened anxiety over the forbidden further complicated cultural transfers to Russia, particularly those involving Western culture intended for young audiences, such as young adult (YA) literature written by Western authors. This article examines the Russian translation of A Winter’s Promise, the first novel in the YA fantasy series The Mirror Visitor (2013–2019) by French author Christelle Dabos. The focus is the translation’s approach to two topics that are considered, to a greater or lesser degree, forbidden for youth in Russia: substance use and sexuality. A comparative analysis of the source and target texts reveals that the Russian translation attenuated these forbidden topics, making them more acceptable in the Russian context. These attenuations indicate that, even though contemporary Russian publishing follows free-market principles, translating Western YA literature into Russian remains a considerably ideological matter.