On Some Syntactic Peculiarities of the Armenian Translation of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract

The grandiose novel of William Faulkner “Absalom!Absalom!” is a majestic example of a piece of writing which encompasses diverse layers of plots, social layers, and dramatic collisions, revealed through intricate linguistic apparatus, particularly a very specific syntactic organization. The paper is an attempt to make a close comparison of the original and the Armenian texts of the novel, translated by Levon Mkrtchyan. The analysis of the syntactic complexity of the novel and its appropriate rendering into the Armenian language has been conducted within the framework of three sets of translation methods, elaborated by J.P.Vinay’s and J. Darbelnet and M.Baker. The results of the investigation manifest a striking deviation from the original text on the syntactic and textual levels. Scrupulous quantitative and qualitative data and interpretation are provided in the conclusion.

Keywords

• Translation techniques
• close comparison
• textual equivalence
• lexical expansion
• textual and syntactic levels