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

– complete/partial discrepancy of grammatical categories, forms and features of source language and target language. Some grammatical categories and forms (articles, perfect tenses) simply do not exist in the Ukrainian language. Thus, the article which is non-existing in Ukrainian may be impossible to render correctly lexically: e.g. the barons were powerful enough not to need a king especially the king.

Different grammatical combinability of words in the respective languages. The same lexical unit may require different types of syntactic relationship in the source language and target language:

e.g. to kill doesn’t combine well with an inanimate noun in Ukrainian, though it’s ok in English. Recent flood killed thousands of people in Malasia. Killed – загинули.

Types of grammatical transformations:

Transposition is the change of the sequence of elements in the target language text as compared to that of the source language text. The standard position of the attributive noun is English is before the noun while in Ukrainian it’s in post-position:

e.g. country music – музика кантрі

Types of transposition:

– Adverb-verb: I only defended myself / I did nothing but defend myself;

– Adverb-noun: I called you early this week / I called you at the beginning of the week;

– Adverb-adjective: He lives dangerously / He lives a dangerous life;

– Adjective-noun: He found it difficult to learn for exams / He had difficulties learning for the exams

– Possessive article-definite article: Your hair is too long / You have the hair too long;

– Verb or past participle-noun: I intended to give you a present / My intention was to give you a present;

– Adverb-noun: I wrote to you early this year / I wrote to you at the beginning of this year.

Transposition occurs very often and it’s usually accompanied by the other types of transformation.

Substitution is the change of the grammatical category to which the source language unit belongs. These type of transformation falls into a number of sub-types depending on the grammatical categories that are substituted.

Substitution of one part of speech for another a widespread transposition is the substitution of an English verb for a Ukrainian noun: in the substitution of a feature (or image) of the source language phraseological/idiomatic expression for some other (more fitting or traditionally expected) in the target language: as pale as paper – блідий мов стіна; to know smth. as one knows his ten fingers – знати як свої п’ять пальців; we should have broken ten minutes before – ми мали зробити перерву ще 10 хвилин тому.

In a number of cases both transformed and untransformed variants can co-exist as equally valid options: e.g. the American embassy – американське посольство і посольство америки

Addition – transformation of the target language sentence structure when new elements non-existent in the original appear in the target language text in accordance with the requirements of the structural adequacy. These additions are either structurally or contextually motivated.

Structurally motivated additions are of completely regular type and therefore predicable. Contextually motivated additions are of relatively irregular nature. They mostly reflect the differences of combinability and peculiarities of social norms of the respective languages:

• Green Party federal election money – гроші Партії зелених, призначені на вибори на федеральному рівні;

• fuel tax protests – протести, пов’язані з підвищенням податку на паливо;

• peer-bonded goods – товари, розраховані на споживання певною віковою групою.

Word order change. Usually the reason for this transformation is that English and Russian sentences have different information structures, or functional sentence perspective. For example: A new press conference was held in Washington yesterday is naturally equivalent to – Вчора у Вашингтоні відбулася нова прес-конференція, where the adverbial modifiers, subject and predicate are positioned in a mirrorlike fashion.

Grammar compensation is a deliberate change of the grammar category by some other grammar means. Compensation takes place when a grammar category or form does not exist in the target laguage and, therefore, cannot produce the same impact upon the target text receptor. This can be illustrated by translating a sentence with a mistaken pronoun form from English into Ukrainian. Since a similar mistake in using the pronoun is impossible in Ukrainian, it is compensated by a mistaken preposition.

 

2.2.3Lexical and grammatical transformations in the translation of literary discourse phraseology

This type of transformations concerns both the lexical (semantic) and grammatical level, i.e. it touches upon structure and meaning. The following techniques can be associated with lexical and grammatical transformations:

Explicatory