Pecularities of translation into Ukrainian of English phraseological units in the texts of literary discourse

The need for differentiation is often called forth by the very abstract nature of many English words that have no adequate counterpart parts in Ukrainian and must be rendered by more concrete renomination.

Descriptive translation

 In most cases it is the replacement of an equivalent lacking word or phrase of the source language text for its description employing the language units familiar to the target language speaker. E.g. friendly fire – вогонь по своїм.

Descriptive translation doesn’t always involve equivalent lacking words sometimes it may be done for sociologic reasons as in the following:

e.g. Edward is surprised by what he hears from Mr. Smith ‒ Едвард здивований тим, що йому каже містер Сміт.

Antonymic translation is the substitution of lexical unit for it target language antonym with the corresponding changes in the lexic-grammatical structures of the target language sentence to preserve the original meaning of the message. Sometimes it’s the only possible way of rendering the target language phrase: e.g. don’t count your сhickens before they are hatched – не діли шкуру невбитого ведмедя, не на того натрапив – you’ve picked the wrong person; take your time – не поспішай; anything is better than treason – нема нічого гіршого за зраду.

But: the war is certain to come – що має бути, того не минути.

Omission is the transformation of mixed lexical-grammatical nature which occurs whenever some elements of the utterance are dimmed, communicatively redundant or irrelevant for the target language recipient In the omission (or adding) of a componental part in the target language: a lot of water had run under the bridge since then – багато води спливло відтоді: 

e.g. there are reports that (a number of) people were killed but we don’t know exactly how many 

e.g. (earlier) today I spoke to managers

Some words of generalized meaning have a tendency of being omitted while their meaning is absorbed by the other target language lexical components:

e.g. the last thing I felt doing was dancing. Good manner seemed to be a thing of the past.

Compensation is a deliberate introduction of some additional element in the target text to make up for the loss of a similar element in the source text. The main reason for this transformation is a vocabulary lacuna in the target language. For example, one of the Galsworthy’s characters was called a leopardess. But there is no one-word equivalent of the same stylistic coloring in. Therefore, the translator compensated the word by using the word тигриця to characterize the lady. 

Metaphoric transformations are based on transferring the meaning due to the similarity of notions. The target language can re-metaphorize a word or a phrase by using the same image (Don’t dirty your hands with that money! – Не брудни рук цими грішми!) or a different one (Він поверне Вам гроші, коли рак на горі свисне – He will pay us our money back when hell freezes over). The source language metaphor can be destroyed if there is no similar idiom in the target language: Весна вже на порозі. – Spring is coming very soon. Or, on the contrary, the target text is metaphorized either to compensate a stylistically marked word or phrase whose coloring was lost for some reason, or merely to express a source language lacuna: Він вирішив почати жити по-новому. – He decided to turn over a new life.

A contextual substitution is a target language unit which is of different referential meaning than the source language unit nevertheless performing in a given context similar communication function thus satisfying the requirements of communicational equivalence.

Unlike the equivalents and variants context substitution are normally not given in the dictionaries. They are chosen from the semantically or topically correlated lexical environment in the respective languages:

e.g. Newton was such a giant on the scientific field – був світилом

All sorts of communicational clichés are also function as contextual substitutions:

e.g. Please, find enclosed and agenda of the meeting – при цьому надсилаємо порядок денний.

 

2.2.2 Grammatical transformations in the translation of literary discourse phraseology

Changeability of the grammatical tense form is the most frequently occurring type of PhUs’ transformation. Verbal PhUs in all the dictionaries are presented in the infinitive form. As we use the language in various situations, we cannot speak or write using infinitives only.

Grammatical transformations are the