Humanities & Social Sciences 3 (2016 9) 559-567 ~ ~ ~ УДК 81-13 O’ Henry’s “Midsummer Masquerade” Unmasked Nadezhda N. Efi mova* Eurasian Linguistic Institute 8 Lenin Str., Irkutsk, 664025, Russia Received 16.01.2016, received in revised form 29.01.2016, accepted 02.02.2016 This article explores “A Midsummer Masquerade” by O’ Henry in terms of culture-specifi c markers of the author’s individual style and cultural metaphors as potential interpretation gaps. <...> An attempt is made to elicit implicit information on quasi-words and malapropisms, allusions to the Bible, references to historical personages and political events. <...> Approaches to short story translation are considered in light of P. Newmark’s insights into the nature of this genre and his typology of short story specifi c characteristics, which are relevant for translation. <...> The conclusions draw on key points of the general cognitive theory of translation and modern Americans’ comments on the selected fragments. <...> Through showing the potential diversity of interpretation, this research highlights the importance of background cultural knowledge and considers some cases of untranslatability. <...> Research area: philology. of “A Midsummer Masquerade”, the fourteen short stories of the seventh the collection “The Gentle Grafter”, was published in 1908 by “Doubleday & McClure Company” in New York and remains one of the least studied and commented on works authored by O’ Henry. <...> The four published Russian translations of the story were performed by M. L. Lozinsky, Z. D. L’vovsky, S. A. Adrianov and M. I. Becker; the examples of individual fragments analyzed here are selected from the latter translation. <...> In this article we highlight linguistic markers encoding culture-specifi c information and characteristics of O’ Henry’s individual style, which deepen the understanding of the author’s message and might present a challenge for translation. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: caprico2009@yandex.ru # 559 # examples of Russian translation are selected from M. Becker’s version [O’ Henry (c)]. <...> According to Peter Newmark, story “as the most intimate and personal form of writing in imaginative literature” is characterized by “compactness, simplicity, concentration, cohesion”, while “its symbolic and connotative power transcends its realism and its denotative effect <...>