PRAGMATIC DEVIATIONS IN TRANSLATION OF LEXICAL BLENDS WITHIN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The research touches upon the innovations in the English word formation processes, i.e., the role of analogy and intralingual borrowings as significant sources and ways of replenishing English vocabulary, interfering entirely with all the languages in the world and greatly influencing their development. Nominative units consisting of two or more words with a contraction of at least one of them at the place of a junction, i.e., blends, are an integral feature of the English language in general and modern English socio-political discourse in particular. Blending has been growing recently among the most productive means of word formation. Blends are needed to denote new concepts and phenomena and are often used to manifest the author’s word-formation skills; they become popular due to their expressiveness and novelty of form and content. The goal of the article is to study the functional features of blends as a means of strengthening the pragmatic component of the socio-political discourse, as well as the strategy and techniques of their translation. The general and special methods were used to achieve the goal and objectives of the study: information retrieval method – to select research material and process basic theoretical knowledge; generalization method – to highlight the most critical academic positions; deduction and induction – to clarify the theoretical foundations, generalize data and formulate conclusions; discourse analysis – to identify specific communicative and pragmatic features of socio-political communication; contextual and functional methods – to actualize the linguopragmatic meaning of the lexical units under the study, i.e., blends; the vocabulary definitions analysis – to examine their linguopragmatic peculiarities; structuralsemantic and component analysis – to determine the ways of blend formation and their main structural elements – all this is necessary for the implementation of translation analysis. The use of pragmalinguistic elements (blends, in our case) involves investigating relationships between language units and the conditions of the communicative-pragmatic space, tracing the relationship between the addressee’s intentional component and the choice of language means when translating the studied units within the socio-political discourse into another language. Conclusions. Regarding the focus of socio-political discourse on speech influence, the conveying of blend stylistics and the transfer of speech realia that form the basis of the blend implication and strengthen the socio-pragmatics of the given text cause difficulties in comprehending the English original and translation variants. The study of the translation aspect of blends within socio-political discourse revealed a lot of challenges, such as the need for a unique means for conveying blend semantics in the translation language, the complex nature of blend explication, and the problem of their interpretation. Among the translation techniques that are most effective in overcoming the outlined translation difficulties of socio-political blends, such ones should be mentioned first: transcription, transliteration, tracing, and creating an analogical model. The descriptive translation method is considered inappropriate when translating political blends (under research) because such a technique does not allow conveying pragmatics of blends and implement them in the translation language as expressive lexical and stylistic units that are components of speech influence on the addressee, and the society as a whole. The principles of the techniques studied in the article can be used for further research as being universal for translating English blends in inflectional languages (Ukrainian including), where such a phenomenon is non-typical. The process of blending hypothetically proves the activation of the redistribution of components within the different language structures and systems and their ability to self-reorganize.

Keywords

• political discourse
• blending
• blend innovation
• word-forming element
• translation technique