Translatioin of Political Literature

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The use of an adjective sharp in this context is unexpected: none of its meanings given in dictionaries gives the description of a hand. The difficulty of its translation is aggravated by presence of the second definition white, which excludes translation by words костлявый and сухой.

Белая, сухощавая рука мадам лежала на широком колене Адама.

In the given translation the sense of the sentence has been rendered but the unexpectedness of the used word was lost.

The last feature of lexical transformation to be discussed in this Paper is traditional word usage for every language and which causes frequent lexical transformations. This traditional usage is to some extent related to another approach to the phenomena of reality. For example:

The military base is built on terraces rising from the lake.

For Russian the traditional use will be:

Военная база построена на террасах, спускающихся к озеру.

In this case preposition is omitted in translation because as the originality of the English word usage required complete transformation.

To the traditional word usage can also be referred the so-called clichés — order, and the clichés in wider sense.

Hands up!

Руки вверх!

Long live America!

Да здравствует Америка!

The assault of the castle was followed by continuous bombing. Loss of life was uncountable.

За штурмом крепости последовала длительная бомбардировка. Жертвы были бесчисленны.

The Commonwealth countries handle a quarter of the world's trade.

На страны Британского содружества приходится четверть всей мировой торговли

As you can see from the examples given above – in translations corresponding Russian clichés are also used.

§ III. Stylistic difficulties of translation

In the previous chapters we carefully considered the grammatical and lexical transformations that occur while translating political literature from English into Russian. And we have figured out that most of these reasons are rooted in national and cultural settings of both languages.

Practically, stylistic devices in almost all languages are similar still though their functions in speech vary. Identical stylistic devices are used differently in languages; they perform different functions and have different value in stylistic system of their language what actually explains their necessity when transformations in translation occur. The stylistic changes are as necessary as grammatical or lexical ones. While applying some grammatical or lexical transformation in translation the translator is guided by principle of rendering grammatical of lexical meaning. When rendering stylistic meaning of the source text a translator should be guided by the same principle – to recreate in translation the same impression that might be left by the original text.

A translator should not try to preserve the stylistic device given in the sentence, but reproduce its function in the target language.

We should not forget that almost all stylistic devices are multi functional. It is like when polysemantic words in English and Russian languages do not coincide in their lexical-semantic variants and the same is when differ the function of identical stylistic device. Thus when comparing stylistic devices we can easily identify complete correspondence, partial correspondence and even sometimes absence of correspondence and their functions.

To illustration it we can compare alliteration in the English and Russian languages. The function of alliteration coincides in both languages — in this function alliteration is one of the basic devices of poetic speech. However the usage of alliteration for pleasant sounding in prose is more characteristic for the English language, than for Russian. The second function of alliteration is logical. Alliteration emphasizes close relationship between components of the statement. Especially brightly alliteration shows the unity of an epithet with an attributed word.

The third function of alliteration in English language – to attract attention of the reader — is widely used in the names of literary works, newspaper headings and often in articles.

The use of alliteration is a convincing acknowledgement that various functions of stylistic devices in different languages do not always coincide in usage.

Реферат опубликован: 21/05/2007