Категорія інтенсивності в англійській та українській мовах: перекладознавчий аспект

Abstract

Категорія інтенсивності та різнорівневі засоби її вираження викликають значний інтерес у сучасних лінгвістів та перекладознавців. Лексичні інтенсифікатори становлять левову частку з усіх підсилювачів. У статті проаналізовано стратегії і тактики відтворення інтенсифікаторів в українських перекладах творів сучасної англомовної художньої прози. Виявлено основні способи і прийоми відтворення структурної, семантичної і прагматичної специфіки англійських інтенсифікаторів. Досліджено специфіку відтворення їх експресивного та образного навантаження. Виявлено найчастіші перекладацькі прийоми відтворення аналізованих інтенсифікаторів: транспозицію, калькування, компенсацію, вилучення, пермутацію, пошук контекстуального відповідника.

Категория интенсивности и средства ее выражения вызывают значительный интерес у современных лингвистов и переводоведов. Лексические интенсификаторы становят львиную долю среди всех усилителей. В статье проанализированы переводческие стратегии и тактики, позволяющие передать структурное, семантическое и прагматическое своеобразие английских интенсификаторов средствами украинского языка в переводах современной англоязычной прозы. Исследована специфика воссоздания экспрессивной и образной нагрузки интенсификаторов в украинских переводах. Выявлены наиболее частотные трансформации, приемы и методы при переводе интенсификаторов: транспозиция, калькирование, компенсация, опущение, пермутация, нахождение контекстуального соответствия.

Introduction. Modern translatology focuses, among other things, on an in-depth study of units belonging to different linguistic levels (from phonopoetics to cognitive stylistics), which taken together, constitute an exceptional flavor of a literary work. Every author tends to compose something really unique both in form and in content. Nothing may be considered secondary or accessory in a work of fiction, at least in its best versions; hence the interest in the smallest building blocks of non-radical parameters such as discourse words, interjections and even affixes. Their faithful rendering in translation requires a thorough and complete understanding of linguistic material, socio-historical, ethno-cultural and psychological dimensions in the original and target culture. Purpose. The article aims to highlight procedures, techniques, methods, strategies and tactics that prove useful to faithfully reproduce English lexical means of intensification in Ukrainian translations. Methods. Method of componential analysis was used to discover the semantics of the investigated lexical means of intensification. Contrastive method helped us to reveal convergent and divergent features of intensifiers in the two languages that may influence the translator’s choice of ways of faithful reproduction of English intensifiers. Results. An intensifier is an integral element of the texts of different types and genres. Due to their expressiveness and figurativeness intensifiers occupy a special position in the arsenal of artistic means of fiction. They belong to the basic building blocks, through which the creative personality of the author as well as the specific features of his/her characters may show up. We define intensifiers as partly desemantised words or phrases that serve to express a greater (compared with the normal) degree of quality or intensity of an action/condition/process denoted by a key word. Intensifiers present a flexible layer of the word-stock of any language. They have become the object of renewed interest due to the development of computerized corpora, and also to advances in theoretical linguistics (in the study of semantic change and grammaticalization processes). This renewed interest has focused, for example, on the individual histories of particular degree items as seen from the perspective of grammaticalization, on the competition of different intensifiers within a given period and across time, and on their distribution across different social groups, varieties or registers. We have analysed lexical means of intensification – intensifying adverbs, adjectives, and nouns, their functions in literary prose and ways of their reproduction into the Ukrainian language. Different types of intensifiers, their convergent and divergent features in English and Ukrainian, their usage in the texts of different types, genres and in various registers, pragmatic factors, contextual situation, language traditions, anticipated reaction of the implied/hypothetical reader, etc. can dramatically influence the process of translation. Conclusion. The research done shows a wide range of procedures, methods and techniques applied by the Ukrainian translators in rendering English intensifiers (calque, descriptive, explanatory translation, translation by analogy, by interpretation or by commentaries and the translators’ individual word and phrase coinages). Normally translators are in a constant search for correspondences from vast resources of the Ukrainian language. Equivalents established due to the identity of the denotatum or long-standing traditions of language contacts, context-sensitive variant correspondences and translation transformations of different types (substitution, transposition, addition, omission, recategorization, differentiation, generalization, compensation, antonymic translation) were frequently used. The prospects for further research related to the translation of intensifiers may lie in the identification of specific rendering of syntactic and phonetic intensifies.