ON THE BILINGUALISM OF SOCIOLECT TEXTS TRANSLATORS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of professional translator’s bilinguism from the point of view of sociolinguistics. The correlation between the types of translator’s mistakes and the degree of translator’s language skills, his/her professional experience and sociolect nature of the source text are analyzed. The article deals with a specific substandard fragment of the Russian language - Soviet prison speech, which is studied with the method of sociolinguistic analysis. The major results of our research are as follows: the evaluation of the degree of a translator’s professional bilingualism should take into account polysocilectal nature of the language of the source/target language. Furthermore, it requires from the translator mastering of the two types of “intralinguistic capacity”: excellent knowledge of both literary and substandard (sociolect) varieties of the source language, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the knowledge of the target language and skills in handling the specificity of the original sociolect text if there are no lexical means for its rendering into the target language.

Keywords

• translator’s bilingualism
• translator’s mistakes
• sociolect text
• camp (prison) literature