Construction as basic translation unit: A case of referring to blind people in English and Ukrainian

Abstract

The research focuses on the variations in the degrees of equivalence manifested in English and Ukrainian constructions referring to blind people. In this study, patterns consisting of two or more words referring to people with decreasing ability to see, all forms sight impairment are termed blindness-constructions. The results show that in translating from English into Ukrainian blindness-constructions reveal varying degrees of equivalence: from exact correspondence in case of immediate constructions to some sort of constructional mismatch in extended patterns. High degree of equivalence with the immediate blindness-constructions is explained by their fixed form: they include combinations of words with the nouns impairment, sight / vision and the adjective blind describing stable attributes without reference to any specific situation. The modified English blindness-constructions rarely have equivalents readily available in Ukrainian, since their modifying elements broaden or narrow the meaning of immediate constructions restricting their usage to particular contexts in source and target languages. The extended blindness-constructions exhibit a mismatch across the languages. These constructions are made up of two immediate or modified ones and represent the generalized models of situations where translators, forced by the non-existence of identical patterns, have to resort to various strategies.