PARALLEL CORPUS FOR TRANSLATION PRACTICE OF SOCIO-POLITICAL TEXTS (FROM ENGLISH INTO RUSSIAN)

Abstract

Purpose. The article deals with the study of the role of parallel corpus while translating texts of socio-political sphere as exemplified by D. Trump’s 2019 State of the Union Address and its translations. Methodology. To achieve the set objective a small-scale translation corpus of the Address in English and its translations has been compiled in SketchEngine platform that offers a possibility to create an individual research corpus. The steps of corpus compilation and program options have been described. Socio-political text translation issues, translator’s transformations, degree of usability of some constructions and lexical units, equivalence level and its context dependence are considered in the article. Results. The compiled corpus allows for both analysis of lexical and syntactical equivalents of two languages and study of the principles of translation transformations while contrasting the original and its translation. By now there is no available parallel (English-Russian or Russian-English) corpus of socio-political texts. Practical implications. Taking into account the fact that the corpus of socio-political texts under study is not big and it does not allow for a complete illustration of all peculiarities of cross-lingual equivalence, it is necessary to emphasize that there will be a possibility to study other issues, such as, for example, difficulties of cliché or metaphoric phrases translation, degree of translator’s freedom to amend/comment while translating political texts, restrictions due to the L2 language structure or some policy regulations, etc. providing that the empiric material is enriched (several addresses are compiled) and other translations are added.

Keywords

• параллельный переводной корпус
• общественно-­политический текст
• выравнивание
• переводческие трансформации