“Fifty Shades of Red”: a case study

Abstract

Based on the position of V.N. Komissarov that “the task of linguistic analysis of translation includes studying the role of universals of various types in interlingual communication in relation to various combinations of languages”, the universal of color (in the terms of Anna Vezhbitskaya) is considered using the example of the lexeme red. Th e material for the analysis is the novel by T. de Gouvello “Le manteau garance” (France, 2012), which abounds in references to a number of shades of red as a plot-forming concept. Th e use of the translation method allows, firstly, to identify word-formation models for designating shades of red, secondly, to identify the translator’s strategy when translating the text of the novel from French into Russian, and thirdly, based on the results of the analysis, to establish the correspondence/non-correspondence of the translated text to the nomenclatures of translation universals developed by Mona Baker, Gideon Toury and Antoine Berman. A conclusion is made about the possibility of supplementing the list of translation universals used in translation from French into Russian with a universal of avoiding tautology, which allows one to avoid some obsession with using the same lexemes in a literary text, even those that act as terms, which, as a consequence, leads to a decrease in the quality of the translated text.