Дискурс (Apr 2024)
English Onomatopoeic Verbs of Motion in Literary Works by Lora Owen and Their Translation into the Russian Language
Abstract
Introduction. The study is focused on English onomatopoeic verbs of motion in the literary texts for children. A comparative analysis of sentences containing this particular semantic group of verbs in the original text and in the corresponding sentences of the translated text is carried out, the main goal being to ascertain whether the translator managed to avoid the loss of iconicity and preserve iconic features of the original verb in the target language translation and to what extent. Methodology and source. The study was conducted on the original texts of 16 short stories for young children by Laura Owen and the texts of their translations into Russian by T. Slavnikova and E. Ukhova. The selection of verbs of motion was carried out in accordance with the dictionary definitions of competent monolingual English dictionaries, which resulted in clasifying all verbs the meaning “movement in space” as verbs of motion. The corpus of studied verbs obtained by continuous sampling from the analysed texts amounted to 201 lexemes, 160 of which being of iconic origin. At the second stage of the reseach, a comparative analysis of original sentences containing onomatopoeic verbs of motion and their contextual translations was perfomed in order to assess the quality of the translation. Results and discussion. A high degree of saturation (79.6 %) of the analyzed original tests with onomatopeic verbs of motion was revealed. The analysis of the translated texts of L. Owen’s stories for kids by T. Slavnikova strongly indicates a realistic possibility of rendering anomatopeic verbs of motion into a target language preserving their iconic essence. Conclusion. It seems apparent that to ensure adequate translation of iconic lexis, translators should be aware of iconicity theory and phonosemantics, as well as acquire skills to effectively apply them in practical translation. Further research of this kind translation might contribute to developing some strategies for translating iconic lexis.
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