Articles

The article deals with the Russian nomina, i.e. language identification units, created in the era of the 1917 Revolutions in Russia and ways of their translation into English. The article draws a line between language identification units and linguistic realia, i.e. national-cultural units. Both of them contain information specific to the country in a particular period of its development that causes difficulties in their translation. Special attention is paid to the methods of transferring language identification units from the original language into the language of translation by English writers who tried to create the atmosphere of the revolutionary era associated with numerous changes in the political and cultural fields. Language identification units transfer the changes that occurred in the political life of a particular country. However, precise equivalents are not always possible to find in the target language. Both writers and translators need to use transliteration, transcription, calquing and interpretation to render language identification units into a foreign language.

The article deals with the history of the Russian word “normalny” (normal, regular, sane) and its use in Russian for the last two centuries. The authors draw the attention of translators and foreign students of Russian to the necessity of being very careful when using this lexical unit, which sounds very much like its English analogue. Basing their findings on the National Corps of Russian, the authors trace the historical meaning of the word, periods of its active usage, usage peculiarities and its correlation with the lexical unit “obychny” (usual, normal, ordinary, regular).

The paper is a case study analysis of a translation of the mystery novel Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris into Russian. Due to the unconventional nature of the plot, the translator had to avoid specifying the narrator’s gender, which was a non-trivial job given that the Russian verbs in the past tense obligatorily mark the gender of their subject. To prevent the information disclosure, the translator had to avoid using the past-tense verb forms wherever they combined with the narrator’s first-person pronoun. The paper attempts to reveal and classify the techniques employed to cope with the task. Most cases involve the use of various grammatical and semantic transformations.

The need for interpreters working with the Russian language in China is constantly growing, so more and more universities launch the course “Interpretation” for senior bachelor and master students. However, if the theory of translation in China is developed well enough, the theory of interpretation, and especially interpretation to/from Russian, is almost undeveloped. 

This article describes one of the main issues in the theory of interpretation, namely the using of specific strategies by professional and non-professional interpreters in consecutive interpretation from Chinese into Russian, as well as provides the reader with some methodological recommendations.

In the semiotico-ludical approach, translation of puns can be considered as a hybrid game in which a translator does not only conduct mediation between languages, but also does a linguocreative activity in the target language. The strategies, tactics and transformations, applied to pun translation, are identified here through the use of a translation experiment and a comparative analysis of original puns used in jokes and found in audiovisual products and their translations. The author of the article concludes that quasitranslation becomes the most relevant strategy for translating puns and identifies punning as a specific type of translation deformation which involves such operations as interlingual paronymization, idiomatization and deoccasionalization.

Book review:

Translation and translations: the past and the present (in Russian)

With the development of interpretation teaching activities in China, Chinese scholars have begun to actively study the specialization of interpretation training methods as well as the scientific pedagogical design of interpretation disciplines to train professional interpreters in China. The article deals with a number of didactic concepts, principles and models of interpretation training programs suggested by Chinese researchers.

The article develops the idea that theoretical research work on interpretation in China began relatively late compared to the West. The Chinese theory of interpretation has been influenced by Western interpretation theories, among which the French translation school has had a particularly great influence on the Chinese theoretical foundations for interpretation didactics. The Chinese interpretation didactics has incorporated the most advanced Western theories of interpretation and is now moving toward scientification, systematization and professionalism, which has laid a solid foundation for professional training in the field of interpretation.

The article describes different ways of translation used in the process of teaching foreign languages in the 19th century. Some ways of translation offered by English scholars (e.g. Gamilton and Robertson) and the French scientist Jacotot are analyzed. Assessments of their works made by Russian scientists and linguists are presented.

The article studies various English and French realia found in Eliduc by John Fowles, the ways of their translation into Russian, their use for a better understanding of the plot and the poetics of the story. The main difficulty any translator faces when dealing with realia is the absence of equivalents in the target language, therefore it is necessary to choose relevant translation methods.

Linguocolorisms as part of the artistic aura in a poetic text are reviewed in the present article from the standpoint of the translator’s strategy, which is exemplified by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson’s poems and their Russian translations by A. Gavrilov, E. Valgurina and V. Avsiyan. The translator’s operations and transformations, such as invariant correspondences, borrowings, replacement, omittance, addition, dislocation or rearrangement, may cause local and global changes at the level of words, phrases, sentences as well as at the level of the whole text. The inevitable changes and radical transformation of the original poem can be motivated by the omitted linguocolorism, which has been demonstrated through the use of the conceptual models and mental patterns in the translated text; textual strategies of the poem are described from the perspective of the cognitive frame method.

The article offers a comparative semantic analysis of the cluster “Cultivated Plants” in the Russian and Chuvash linguistic world images. The authors analyze both direct and figurative meanings of the Russian and Chuvash words and set expression, as well as free combinations of words from a given thematic group. Also analyzed are polysemy, metaphors, symbols, connotations of various Russian and Chuvash words, phraseology and set similes in the Russian and Chuvash languages. Special attention is paid to the Russian and Chuvash folklore. The Russian and Chuvash words from any given thematic group are part of the linguistic world images of the Russian and Chuvash ethnic groups alike. The analysis contributes to the reconstruction of the integrated linguistic world image and helps to reveal some peculiarities of the national world perception.

The article deals with various translation problems. The author’s focus is on the linguistic bases for the translation process. According to language theories, several levels are distinguished in a literary text. In the process of translation each of those can be either activated or neutralized. The adequacy of substitution depends on these factors.

The article develops the idea that theoretical research work on interpretation in China began relatively late compared to the West. The Chinese theory of interpretation has been influenced by Western interpretation theories, among which the French translation school has had a particularly great influence on the Chinese theoretical foundations for interpretation didactics. The Chinese interpretation didactics has incorporated the most advanced Western theories of interpretation and is now moving toward scientification, systematization and professionalism, which has laid a solid foundation for professional training in the field of interpretation.