The individual peculiarities of speech

The woman character of the story “Arrangement in Black and White” by D.Parker often speaks incorrect English. Her highly emotional speech abounds in wrong forms of some words.

E.g.: “Oh, I’m finely ”, she said. “Just simply finely. Listen. I want you to do me the most terrible favor. Will you? Will you please? Pretty please?”

“О, в мене все красненько ”, відповіла вона. “Просто-таки красненько. Послухайте, я хочу, щоб ви мені зробили страшенну послугу. Зробите? Будь ласка, зробите? Дуже вас прошу”.

The wrong use of “ finely” instead of the correct form “ fine” is not easy to translate into Ukrainian where there is no corresponding corrupted form of this word. Hence, the stylistically wrong employment of the adverb “ красненько” with the aim of compensating the corruption in Ukrainian translation.

Diminutives have a very poor representation in English (only some nouns) but there is a very large quantity of them in Ukrainian, where they exist practically among all parts of speech. Cf: English: dear – dear ie; stream – stream let;

Ukrainian: - есеньк, -оньк; -очок (лебід оньк а, мал есеньк ий, пит оньк и).

In English they may be used only as diminutives or they may express diminutive evaluation as well, which is identified in context.

It is difficult to say, for example, whether booklet, manikin or hillock are diminutives only or diminutives and evaluatives at the same time. As diminutives they mean брошюра, карлик and горбок respectively, and as diminutive evaluatives they may express the meanings of книжечка/ брошурка, чоловічок (small and handsome), горбочок (not high and pleasant hillock).

This distinction is almost always clearly identified and expressed in Ukrainian where diminutive suffixes may also point to an escalating gradation of a diminutive quality of a noun: дівчина; дівчинка; дівча; дівчатко; дівчаточко; дівонька; дівчинонька.

Similar meanings have to be expressed in English with the help of lexico-syntactic means, i.e. by means of some additional adjectives containing the seme of smallness: гол івк а – (small) little head; дівчин оньк а – dear/ lovely girl; ручен ят а – tiny hands or in some other way:

E.g.: Господи, синочки, йдіть мерщій (О.Довженко “Мати”)

Lord y, in with you quick.

Neither has the English language any morphological means to express explicitly the augmentative and evaluative meanings of Ukrainian lexemes (mostly nouns). As a result, they acquire in English an objectively predetermined form of explicit expression by means of word-groups or sentences. For example, the pejorative (mostly contemptuous) meanings of a number of Ukrainian augmentative nouns will have the following English outer form expression:

вовчище – a big formidable wolf/ a big monster of a wolf;

дубище – a very thick and tall/ ramous oak-tree;

здоровило – a healthy/ robust fellow; a regular/ robust maypole;

п’янюга – a miserable heavy drunkard; a disgusting inebriate; a three-bottle man.

Stylistic devices:

The problem of translation faithfulness is closely connected with the stylistic aspect of translation – one cannot reach the required level of faithfulness if the stylistic peculiarities of the ST are neglected.

Among the existing stylistic figures a pun (play on words) is righteously considered the most difficult for translation.

Play upon words (pun) must be duly reproduced in TL otherwise its translation will be unintelligible. This is the dominant goal which should be achieved at all costs even though it might involve some inaccuracies in the translation of other elements.

If the SL word played upon has a Ukrainian substitute which can also be used both literally and figuratively, a word for word translation is possible:

E.g.1: Whenever a young gentleman was taken in hand by doctor Blimber, he might consider himself sure of a pretty tight squeeze.

Коли лікар (Блімбер) брав у руки якого-небудь джентельмена, той міг бути впевненим, що його як слід стиснуть.

In other cases the translator tries to find in TL another word that can be played upon in a similar way.

Another SD is periphrasis. Its frequent use is characteristic of the English language. Some of the periphrases are borrowed from classical sources (myths and the Bible); others are typically English. (??? To give an example, the periphrases of the classical origin are “ Beware Greeks…”, “Prodigal son” (“Бійтесь данайців…”, “Блудний син”) whereas “ Lake Country…” (“Озерна країна”) is a typically English periphrasis). As a rule periphrases do not present difficulties for translation, however, their correct translation strongly depends on situation and appropriate background information.

Special attention is to be paid by a translator to overt and covert quotations. The former require only correct rendering of the source quotation in the TL and the main requirement here is the following – !!! never suggest your own homemade translation for a quotation. The latter (covert quotations) take the shape of an allusion and the pragmatic equivalence seems the most appropriate for the case. For example, “ the Trojan horse raid” one may translate as напад, підступний, як кінь троянців (i.e. preserving the allusion) or as підступний напад (losing the meaning of the original quotation).

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11