Types of Information in the Texts of Epistolary Genre and Ways of Their Rendering in Translation

Abstract

The article is devoted to the issue of information type congruence in the epistolary texts translation. The aim of this research is to characterize information types contained in the text of epistolary genre, explain the language mechanism of maintaining the congruence of the information types proportion between the source text and the translation while preserving the dominant type. The book “Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son” (1774) and its translation into Russian (1971) served as the empirical material. The analysis was conducted on the basis of contexts containing verbs of speech production. The research identifies the presence of emotional, cognitive, operative and aesthetic information, as well as the ways of their linguistic expression in the source text. Ways of conveying information types of the source text in translation are characterized. The analysis reveals that the presence of specific information types in an epistolary work, alongside the choice of linguistic means for their expression, is determined by the communicative goal of the utterance – to give the author’s opinion and considerably influence the recipient’s views. The analysis shows that, in correspondence with such goal, emotional information is dominant in the text of epistolary genre under study. The preservation of the original information types in translation enables a creation of a secondary text that is equivalent to the source text and has a comparable value in the target linguoculture.

Keywords

• information types
• fictional discourse
• information theory of translation
• epistolary genre
• literary translation