«Локалоиды» и адаптация интернациональной лексики в англоязычном описании русской культуры

Abstract

Globalization has made it necessary for all nations to employ international languages, and primarily English, to promote their cultures. Application of a language to a foreign culture by necessity requires certain adaptations of the language. Such type of communication results in the formation of a specialized variety of the language: Foreign-Culture-Oriented (FCO) Language. Making use of the latest achievements in “interlinguoculturology” (a modern branch of Linguistics worked out by professor V. V. Kabakchi and his School), devoted to the study of the language in its secondary cultural orientation towards a foreign culture, we look at original English-language texts about Russian culture and analyze how culturonyms and in particular binary words belonging to two languages and often associated with each other in translation, are differently perceived in diverse cultures. We pay a special attention to binary interonyms (international vocabulary), their cultural adaptation in FCO Language and the compromise of the precision of the text and its accessibility to the audience. However, the main focus of the article is lokaloids, locally borrowed variants of international vocabulary (eg: universitet, ministr, kafe, demokratiya) which are introduced to English texts to add to the precision of the text and to avoid translator false friends or for reasons of style.