On strategies and tactics of translating amateur prose

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

State Institution “South Ukrainian National Pedagogical University named after K. D. Ushynsky”

On strategies and tactics of translating amateur prose

Ilona Derik Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor at the Department of Translation and Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Tetyana Druzhyna Candidate of Philology, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Translation and Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Odesa, Ukraine

Summary

The presented article is aimed at elaborating the problem of the peculiarities of translating amateur prose from typologically different languages, in particular from French, German and English into Ukrainian. The corpus of the research was formed on the basis of the amateur prose writings on the official sites in Belgium, Germany, the USA and Ukraine. The main objective of the paper consists in defining the basic strategies and tactics of rendering amateur writings of different genres with the preservation of the both semantic and pragmatic components. The results of the carried-out research have proved that there exist common strategies and tactics, allowing to perform adequate and faithful translation from the typologically different Rhaeto-Romanic (French) and Germanic (English, German) languages into the Slavic ones (Ukrainian). The urgency of the paper arises from the need for efficient strategies and tactics of translating different types of texts in contemporary translation studies. The object of the work is the translation of amateur prose viewed in the aspect of its faithfulness and adequacy. The subject are strategies and tactics of translating amateur prose. The immediate tasks of the article have been predetermined by the above-mentioned objective and include respectively: the disclosure of the specifics of amateur prose; the outline of the typologically common strategies and tactics of translating amateur writings.

The methodology of this research involved the inductive, the deductive method and the method of contrastive analysis. In the course of the research it has been concluded and experimentally and statistically proved that there exist common strategies and tactics of translating amateur prose into different languages. It has also been postulated that the pragmatic and the expressive potential of amateur writings is preserved and rendered in translation. The perspective is seen in reviewing this issue in different Rhaeto-Romanic, Germanic and Slavic languages. Key words: amateur prose, linguistic paradigm, strategies and tactics, contrastive analysis.

Статтю присвячено проблемі особливостей перекладу аматорської прози з типологічно неспоріднених мов, зокрема з французької, німецької та англійської мов на українську. Корпус дослідження було побудовано на основі аматорської прози на офіційних сайтах у Бельгії, Німеччині, США та Україні. Мета статті у визначенні базових стратегій і тактик перекладу аматорської прози різних жанрів із збереженням семантики та прагматики. Результати дослідження підтвердили наявність спільних стратегій і тактик, що дозволяють здійснювати адекватний переклад із типологічно неспоріднених романських (французька) та германських мов (німецька) на слов'янські (українська). Практична цінність дослідження у тому, що висновки можуть бути використані в перекладацькій діяльності.

Актуальність статті підтверджується необхідністю в ефективних стратегіях і тактиках перекладу різних видів текстів у сучасному пере- кладознавстві. Об'єктом дослідження є аматорська проза як об'єкт перекладу в аспекті його адекватності. Предметом дослідження є стратегії і тактики перекладу аматорської прози. Безпосередні завдання цієї статті, обумовлені вищезазначеною метою, є такими:розкриття особливостей аматорської прози; огляд типологічно спільних стратегій і тактик перекладу аматорської прози.

Методологія цього дослідження включала індуктивний та дедуктивний методи, а також метод контрастивного аналізу. У процесі дослідження було одержано й експериментально та статистично підтверджено висновки про наявність спільних стратегій і тактик перекладу аматорської прози на різні мови. Також було констатовано, що прагматичний і експресивний потенціал аматорської прози зберігається та відтворюється у перекладі.

Перспектива у дослідженні цієї проблеми в різних романських, германських та слов'янських мовах. Подальша розробка питань можливого співробітництва письменників та перекладачів у вивченні аматорської прози також убачається перспективною. Ключові слова: аматорська проза, лінгвістична парадигма, стратегії та тактики, контрастивний аналіз.

Статья посвящена проблеме особенностей перевода любительской прозы с типологически неродственных языков, в частности с французского, немецкого и английского языков на украинский. Корпус исследования был сформирован на основе любительской прозы на официальных сайтах в Бельгии, Германии, США и Украине. Цель статьи в выделении базовых стратегий и тактик перевода любительской прозы разных жанров с сохранением семантики и прагматики. Результаты проведенного исследования подтвердили наличие общих стратегий и тактик, позволяющих выполнить адекватный перевод с типологически неродственных романских (французский) и германских языков (немецкий) на славянские ('украинский). Практическая ценность исследования в том, что выводы могут быть использованы в переводческой деятельности.

Актуальность статьи подтверждается необходимостью в эффективных стратегиях и тактиках перевода разных видов текстов в современном переводоведении. Объектом исследования является любительская проза как объект перевода в аспекте его адекватности. Предмет исследования -- стратегии и тактики перевода любительской прозы. Непосредственные задачи статьи были обусловлены вышеуказанной целью и включают следующее: раскрытие особенностей любительской прозы; обзор типологически общих стратегий и тактик перевода любительской прозы.

Методология исследования включала индуктивный и дедуктивный методы, а также метод контрастивного анализа. В ходе исследования были сделаны и экспериментально и статистически подтверждены выводы о наличии общих стратегий и тактик перевода любительской прозы на разные языки. Также было сделано заключение, что прагматический и экспрессивный потенциал любительской прозы сохраняется и воспроизводится при переводе.

Перспектива в исследовании данной проблемы в различных романских, германских и славянских языках. Дальнейшая разработка вопросов возможного сотрудничества писателей и переводчиков в изучении любительской прозы также представляется перспективной.

Ключевые слова: любительская проза, лингвистическая парадигма, стратегии и тактики, контрастивный анализ.

Introduction. The history of amateur writings dates not further back than 1990s. The most famous official site of amateur prose in the USA is the Den OfAmateur Writing, in Belgium it's in Germany it's

There also exists an opportunity to publish your works and distribute them throughout the world both in the web and through the bookstores. Such world famous book distributors as Amazon, Google, Apple, Barnes and Noble contribute greatly to this process. Each official amateur prose site is supplied with the Google Translator service.

Problem-setting and tasks. The objective of the following research is the outline of the strategies and tactics of amateur prose translation.

Artistic translation is differentiated from other types on the basis of the following two criteria: the specific object (belles-lettres texts) and the highlighted pragmatic and aesthetic functions.

Translators of belles-lettres texts always face the problem of untranslat- ibility when searching for a proper equivalent on all the linguistic levels. The faithfulness and adequacy of artistic translation is measured by the following parameters: the aptness of the translation strategy and tactics according to the specificity of the communicative situation, the preservation of the content and pragmatics.

The most faithful interpretation of amateur prose is through the prism of national metaphor, as the latter is embodied in the artistic texts, determining their specific features.

Faithful and adequate artistic translation should be concise, accurate, clear, literary, orthographically, lexically, grammatically and stylistically correct.

The theoretical grounding for the ideas supplied was formed on the basis of the fundamental scientific works by E. Nida (Nida, 2001), H. Belloc (Belloc, 2019), R. Brower (Brower, 2019), P. Flynn (Flynn, 2013), R. Stolze (Stolze, 2019).

The genre is interpreted in the work as a historically molded type of a literary work of art, distinguished on the grounds of its reference to a certain type of literature as well as by its prevailing esthetical quality. Any genre is a combination of the form in its key moments -- unique composition, images, language, rhythm.

However, there should be borne in mind that there exist primary (simple) and secondary (complex) speech genres. The latter encompass novels, dramas, scientific researches of any kind and come into being as a result of the more complicated and relatively highly organized cultural communication. In this case, artistic communication.

In the process of their formation the secondary genres absorb and process the primary genres, composed in the situation of everyday communication. The specificity of the genres predetermines the selection of the appropriate linguistic means of all levels.

Literary language is a complex dynamic system of language styles. The language of the belles-lettres is even more complicated and sophisticated as it reflects the diversity of all genres and literary trends both in synchrony and diachrony.

The functional approach which serves as the basis for distinguishing functional styles of the literary language is simultaneously employed as the ground for defining the genre, treated as a way of linguistic communication in the given sphere of the human activity as a sample of text arrangement. The genre is widely interpreted as the historically molded type of texts (utterances), reflecting the strict pattern of the human spiritual activity.

According to M. M. Bakhtin (Бахтин, 1975), the genre is distinguished by its stability, objectivity and impersonality. The common features of the genre are respectively the thematic content, style and compositional structure as well as the communicative situation, expressiveness and expressive intonation, length (approximate length of a speech whole) and the addressee's conception.

Material, methods. The research has been conducted on the basis of the amateur literary works published on-line on the web-sites in the USA and Eastern Europe in the official languages of different countries (English, French, and German).

There has been made an attempt to perform adequate translation of amateur writings in the above-mentioned Indo-European languages into the Slavic Ukrainian language.

Methodology is viewed here as the study relating to methods. In other terms, it can be considered as defining feature of a discipline or an approach within a discipline.

The methodology of this research involved the inductive and deductive methods and the method of contrastive analysis. The original amateur writings and their Ukrainian translations were analyzed in the aspect of the vocabulary, syntax and pragmatics.

The preliminary linguistic analysis of the authentic source texts allowed to distinguish the key concepts embodied most vividly in the amateur prose (Love, Death, Life) and the leitmotif topics (Jealousy, Adultery, Despair, Sex). Though the topics may vary more depending on the age and gender than on nationality.

The sample selection included 20 amateur writings of different genres in English, French and German placed in the following sites.

The analysis of the genre peculiarities has revealed the prevalence of certain genres, such as romantic prose, fantasy, horror and humorous stories. According to the prose genre forms there have been distinguished short stories, novels and essays as most recurrent.

Table 1 Amateur Prose Genres

Findings and discussion. In the course of the research it has been concluded that there are common strategies and tactics of rendering authentic amateur prose written in different Germanic and Rhaeto-Romanic languages by means of the Ukrainian language. It has been assumed that the dominant strategy so far has been the strategy of the communicatively-relevant translation, achieved by employing the following tactics:

the tactic of relevant information rendering;

the tactic of the correct and faithful content conveyance;

the tactic of the genre-stylistic peculiarities preservation;

the tactic of the formal and structural features presentation;

the tactic of linguistic and cultural adaptation.

The main source of difficulties in translating amateur prose is a search for adequate equivalents for euphemistic words and expressions in the source languages which often reflect the peculiarities of the national and cultural mentality and temperament. The taboo words prove to be recurrent in English though they are reasonably less frequent in German and French. There also exists more censorship in Ukrainian in the aspect of taboo words employment.

The examples of the translations are adduced below in Table 2.

From the psycholinguistic point ofview translating amateur prose is intriguing because of the possibility of switches from the inner code to the outer verbalization in the processes of speech generation and its interpretation with regards to the social-psychic types of language personalities and the role preferences. The linguo-stylistic discourse analysis is focused on distinguishing the speech registers, differentiating oral speech from the written one in all the genre varieties, studying functional communication parameters on the basis its units (the characteristics of the functional styles).

Table 2 The Authentic Amateur Prose Writings and Their Translations in Ukrainian

The structural and linguistic discourse translation description presupposes its segmentation and is aimed at foregrounding the textual proper communication peculiarities -- the sense and formal discourse coherence, the ways of topic switching, the modal restrictors (hedges), the large and small textual blocks, discourse polyphony understood as simultaneous communication on the different levels of the text depth.

Communication is essentially incomplete and inferential -- it is impossible to say everything about anything at any point in time. To derive intended meaning from a spoken utterance or text, the hearer or reader needs to enrich or modify semantic representations of linguistic input (literal or prototype meanings) by using inferences based on context.

This context, or background, is the space of possibilities that allows us to listen to both what is spoken and what is unspoken; and meaning is created in an active process whereby linguistic form triggers interpretation rather than conveying information.

This space of possibilities forming the context of a text or utterance is a subset of the recipient's entire cognitive environment, selected on the basis of relevance. A person's cognitive environment includes information that can be perceived externally, as well as knowledge stored in memory, and information deriving from previous utterances or texts. This latter aspect of the cognitive environment is referred to as intertextuality.

Intertextuality is essentially a mechanism through which a text refers backward (or forward) to previous (or future) texts, by alluding to, adapting, or otherwise invoking meanings expressed in those other texts. In order to retrieve the full range of intended meaning in a given text, readers need to be able to recognize and understand such intertextual references. Failure to do so will result in partial understanding, or incomplete retrieval of the intended meaning of the text concerned. translation prose genre semantic

The implications of this for translation are clear, since the potential for failure to recognize intertextual reference between languages and across cultures is likely to be considerably greater than within them, since such recognition requires social knowledge.

The key issue is the choice of the translation strategy. The translation strategy is correlated with the main purpose of communication and the peculiarities of the target audience, being formed on the basis of the translator's linguistic competence, the author's main communicative intention and the semantic invariant of the message, it represents the combination of the translator's actions, aimed at the achievement of the discourse general communicative purpose and realized through the employment of a set of translation techniques.

The uniqueness of the amateur prose is determined by the interaction of the following features: the addressers' expectation, the genre specification (horror short story, romantic love story, essay, review etc.), the subject-subject positions of the communicants, the translation strategies and techniques assortment and the peculiarities of their functioning. Therefore, the strategy of translation should also be appropriate for this type of prose.

During the recent years, the concepts ofdomestication and foreignization have gained popularity among the foreign scholars. Domestication strategy presupposed adaptation of the cultural context while foreignization was employed in cases when the original cultural context was preserved, in terms of settings, names, etc.

According to the communicative-functional approach, the dominant strategy outlined was the strategy of communicatively equivalent translation which is primarily aimed to ensure the communicative effect identical to that one of the source text.

The translation tactic was respectively treated as a set of a translator's practical actions in the real process scientific information rendering, allowing to implement a chosen translation strategy to reproduce the initial sense of the source text by the linguistic means of a typologically different language often resulting in the use of translation transformations in case of the absence of the linguistic equivalents proper.

The tactics employed included the tactic of precise and complete information rendering, the tactic of explication, the tactic of correct presentation of information, the tactic of stylistic and pragmatic adaptation.

The typological language discrepancies led to the implementation of translation transformations (replacements, transpositions, additions and omissions) in the large scale.

The analysis revealed the predominance of verbs and verbals over nouns and adjectives, the repetition of personal pronouns, the replacement of the nouns by the pronouns, the use of the structures of secondary predication in the source languages (English, German, French).

There were spotted certain discrepancies between the original texts and their Ukrainian translations. This chiefly concerned the differences in the grammar categories such as verbal tenses, aspects, moods and voices, presence or absence of case, number and gender categories for the nominative parts of speech and lexico-grammatical classification on the morphological level, both the semantic and functional variation of the word order regularities, syntactic constructions and structures of secondary predication on the syntactical level, discrepancies in the semantics and usage of the different lexical units (homonyms, pseudo international words and international words proper, terms, abbreviations and shortenings, polysemantic words) and also dissimilarity of the stylistic stratification.

All this predetermined the employment of translation operations like grammatical replacement, functional replacement, transposition, addition, omission, contextual replacement.

Translation is often understood as a task in which one strives to reproduce the original as closely as possible, ethical behavior has been simply posited as fidelity towards the original and its author.

When a person is given the task of translating a text from one language into another one, the goal of this task is to facilitate communication between people of different cultures. The issue of comprehension will be involved.

The translator expresses content understood from a source text and becomes a co-author for the target text, but before translating the source text he or she has to grasp the message. The main factor in this process is the translator with his/her knowledge of languages, cultures, technical features and writing strategies. The focus is on translation competence and the presence of the background knowledge and professional skills.

Such types of translation as self-translation or autotranslation and pseudotranslation are also noteworthy. Self-translation is at work when the author himself translates an original work into another language. The author- translator often feels justified in introducing changes into the text where an ordinary translator might hesitate to do so.

In a certain sense the difference between translation and self-translation is a matter of authority. When it comes to an intuition of relevance authors- translators are definitely the best. Particularly disputable, however, is still the issue of adaptation in translation.

Conclusions

In the course of the complex research the detailed analysis of the translation strategies and techniques applied for the typologically distant language pair (English -- Ukrainian) has also been performed.

It has been proved that the translation strategy is correlated with the main purpose of communication and the peculiarities of the target audience, being formed on the basis of the translator's linguistic competence, the author's main communicative intention and the semantic invariant of the message, it represents the combination of the translator's actions, aimed at the achievement of the discourse general communicative purpose and realized through the employment of a set of translation techniques.

The dominant strategy outlined was the strategy of communicatively equivalent translation which is primarily aimed to ensure the communicative effect identical to that one of the source text.

The tactics employed included the tactic of precise and complete information rendering, the tactic of explication, the tactic of correct presentation of information, the tactic of stylistic and pragmatic adaptation.

The typological language discrepancies led to the implementation of translation transformations (replacements, transpositions, additions and omissions) in the large scale. The most striking differences were revealed in the grammar categories of parts of speech, tense forms, aspect forms, mood forms and voice forms. The presence of case and gender categories for the nominative parts of speech in German, French and Ukrainian alongside with the absence of the latter in English. The presence of the articles in English, French and German and the absence of articles in Ukrainian.

There were also outlined discrepancies in the semantics and usage of the different lexical units (homonyms, pseudo international words and international words proper, terms, abbreviations and shortenings, polysemantic words). The dissimilarity of the stylistic stratification was also evident.

The uniqueness of the amateur prose is determined by the interaction of the following features: the addressers' expectation, the genre specification (horror short story, romantic love story, essay, review etc.), the subject- subject positions of the communicants, the translation strategies and techniques assortment and the peculiarities of their functioning.

As it follows from the research, the debate on translating amateur prose may have failed to dwell on more complex relations between translators and authors in the matters of simultaneous authorship and translatorship. It hasn't been studied yet how such delineations might be perceived in various cultures in synchrony and diachrony.

The first place in timeliness of the research is preserved by the aesthetic function of the artistic prose. The second place is occupied by the emotive function, the third by the representative. This is a function aimed at conceptualizing the world image. Thus, the first and foremost for translation are the peculiarities of verbalizing the imaginary reality in two planes: firstly, these are the peculiarities of making objective the inner world image by linguistic means; secondly, each language verbalizes the inner world image in its own way. Thus, the linguistic aspects of translation should be studied together with the conceptual aspects. The strategic orientation of the belles-lettres texts under investigation is on the crossroads of the key tasks of literature studies (provision of information, enlightenment, contribution to the international scientific and technical progress) and the entertainment goals.

The perspective is seen in the further study of amateur prose in the Indo- European languages and in search for the improved mechanism of translating such artistic texts, optimizing the relationship between amateur authors and translators.

References

1. Bakhtin, M. M. (1975). Voprosy literatury i estetiki. Issledovaniia raznykh let [Literature and aesthetics issues. Researches of different years]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura [in Russian].

2. Belloc, H. (2019). On Translation.

3. Flynn, P (2013). Handbook of Translation Studies Online. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Volume 4. Retrieved from

4. Nida, E. A. (2001). Contexts in Translating. John Benjamins Publishing. Retrieved from

5. Stolze, R. (2019). The Translator's Approach -- Introduction to Translational Hermeneutics. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

Література

1. Бахтин М. М. Вопросы литературы и эстетики. Исследования разных лет. Москва : Художественная литература, 1975. 504 с.

2. Flynn P Handbook of Translation Studies Online. John Bejamins Publishing Company. 2013. Volume 4. P 12-19.

Размещено на Allbest.ru