Гуманитарный вектор (Oct 2023)
Unknown Words (Agnonyms) in Russian Village Prose and Their Translations into English (Linguocultural Aspect)
Abstract
The purpose of the article is to consider the ways of rendering Russian unknown words (agnonyms) in Russian literary texts about the village in translation into English and to analyze the lost functions and characteristics of Russian unknown words in English translation from the point of view of linguocultural differences between Russian and English. To achieve this goal, the following tasks were set: to compare the Russian text of V. Shukshin’s story The Bastard with the translation of this story into English and various ways of conveying the meanings of Russian unknown words in English texts. The relevance of this work is due to the difficulty of translating Russian unknown words into English and the urgent need to study how national cultures are reflected in different languages, the novelty is due to a new aspect of considering linguocultural differences between Russian and English. The full text of V. Shukshin’s story The Bastard and its English translation by R. Daglish were used as material. The methods of observation, contextual analysis and the comparative method were used. The following was established in the course of work. First, the presence of Russian unknown words in the text is a difficulty for translating the text into English; secondly, due to the differences between the Russian and English language pictures of the world, Russian unknown words can serve as a "key" for understanding some parts of Russian culture. There are five possible ways to translate Russian unknown words into English: (1) translation of a stylistically colored Russian unknown words by a stylistically neutral English literary word or phrase; (2) translation of a stylistically colored Russian unknown words into a stylistically colored English word or phrase; (3) semantic translations of unknown words with social and cultural significance; (4) rendering the same unknown word in different places in the text using different English words; (5) accompaniment of the unknown word by its English transliteration with the preceding generic name. Russian unknown words lose their expressive features in English translation in many cases.
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