Translation Strategies in English-Ukrainian Rendering of Dual-Number Quantifi

Abstract

The article deals with translation strategies implemented in English-Ukrainian rendering of dualnumber quantifiers ‘both,’ ‘either,’ ‘neither’ that occur in modern fantasy fiction. The study aims to identify local and global translation strategies and methods of their adequate rendering at the post-translation stage of generalizing the translator’s experience. The research objectives are: 1) to compile a complete register of the lexemes under investigation based on J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” and its authorized Ukrainian translation produced by V. Morozov.; 2) to determine their semantic and functional characteristics and direct translation equivalents; 3) to identify their semantic roles and syntactic functions in the source text; 4) to specify the types of grammatical shifts and methods of their rendering into Ukrainian; 5) to identify and analyze the translation strategies applied by the translator to reach equivalence and adequacy of translation. The research material comprises 96 dual-number quantifiers used in the original text and their translations in the corresponding Ukrainian text fragments. In the course of the study, the following methods were employed: 1) entire sampling to compile a register of the lexemes and accomplish the source and target text levelling; 2) dictionary entries’ analysis to establish the lexical-semantic and functional properties of the quantifiers and their direct Ukrainian translation equivalents; 3) contextual analysis and immediate constituents’ analysis to identify their semantic roles and syntactic functions in the source text; 4) comparative-contrastive translation transformational analysis to specify the translation methods and types of grammatical shifts applied in their rendering; 5) to identify and analyze the translation strategies implemented by the translator; 6) quantity calculations to determine the frequencies of the analyzed phenomena. As a result, based on dictionary entries’ analysis, the main functional-semantic classes of the quantifiers have been found to be the determiner, pronoun, conjunction and pronominal adverb. By means of immediate constituents’ and contextual analysis, 17 pure and blended semantic roles of the lexemes’ referents in ‘state of affairs’ situations have been identified, the most frequent being the agent (36.4%), locative (14.6%) and experiencer (11.4%). By way of sentence parsing, 19 combinations of the semantic roles and syntactic functions have been established, the most frequent one being the agent subject (37.5%), the others showing frequencies around 10%. With the aid of translation transformational analysis, the most common methods of rendering the dual-number quantifiers into Ukrainian have been found to be omission (62.5%), equivalent (literal) translation (21.9%) and lexical substitution (15.6%). Correspondingly, the main translation strategies, including ST-oriented and TToriented ones, have been proved to be 1) communicative translation (68.8%) by omission with emphasis decrease, related and unrelated-word paraphrase, clause/sentence structure change and explicitness decrease, and by equivalent with emphasis change and clause/sentence structure change and/or addition; 2) literal translation (15.6%) including direct translation (4.2%) by pure equivalent and oblique translation (11.4%) by blended equivalent. i.e. with emphasis change and/or clause/sentence change; 3) semantic translation (15.6%) involving synonymy, emphasis change, phrase structure change, modulation, clause/ sentence structure change and explicitness decrease, 4) domestication (100%) incorporated in the above three strategies, all applied to ensure equivalence and adequacy of the translation.