On the difficulties of translation of neologisms and lexical and phraseological units of various styles in Vladimir Putin’s public speeches: a case study of the French and the English languages

Abstract

The paper is focused on the issue of lexical-phraseological composition of modern public political speeches, which has been significantly changed over the past few decades as a result of such linguistic and extra-linguistic factors as the rise of verbal aggression in non-cooperative speech acts due to language democratization; the emergence of new trends in economic, socio-political and cultural areas of society; the removal and destruction of speech taboos between the 20th and 21st centuries. These factors have shift ed from the peripheral part of political discourse to its center such lexical units which previously were practically never found in institutional types of discourse and were exclusively the prerogative of personality-oriented discourse. A massive use of stylistically marked and culturally determined lexical units, along with various neologisms, has prompted a need to find solutions to overcome lexical-grammatical and stylistic difficulties in public political translation. Public speeches of the Russian President Vladimir Putin over the period from 2015 to 2022 served as the source of the analysis, because they have a marked interstyle nature.