Comparative analysis of three English translation equivalents of the Russian lexeme “toska”: anguish, misery, yearning

Abstract

The study is devoted to the ways of translating the Russian language-specific unit “toska” into English. A comparative semantic analysis of this unit and its three most frequent English equivalents: “anguish”, “misery”, “yearning” has been carried out. The Russian-English subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language has been used to compare the ways of translating lexeme “toska” in fiction. The conclusions are drawn that only in their totality English translation equivalents can be used to convey all the meanings of the ethnically marked concept “toska" into the English language culture.

Keywords

• language culture
• language specific vocabulary
• language corpus
• translation equivalent
• untranslatability