Abstract

The article deals with problems of literary translation on the lexical level. Translation strategies and techniques used to reproduce stylistically marked words and expressions of Thomas Brussig’s novel “Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee” and the equivalency of their functions in the Ukrainian translation are explored. The word choice of the well known German author targeted at creating humorous or satirical tone in his novels constitutes his own individual style which is diffi cult to reproduce in other languages. That is why each new translation of his novel arouses a great interest of linguists and translatologists. The purpose of this article, therefore, was to classify the stylistically coloured vocabulary of the novel and to examine the lexical and stylistical choices of the translator S. Onufriv, especially the means chosen to render dialectisms, slang and jargon expressions, historical words from the GDR time, expressive personal nicknames, and denominations into Ukrainian. The main terms used in this article to describe the relation between the original text and its translation are “stylistic equivalency” and “stylistic density”, their application being explained based on the linguistic theories of translation (Fedorov, Retsker, Koller, Reiß). In the article, the comparative and descriptive methods as well as the quantitative estimations were used. Seven text fragments with 123 stylistically coloured expressions of lower register were chosen for our analysis. It revealed a higher stylistic density of the Ukrainian translation compared to the German text due to the use of stylistically lower vocabulary and Ukrainian dialect words used to substitute stylistically neutral words of the German author: 181 coloured words and expressions were found. The most important translation issues regarding the reproduction of dialect, slang words and of expressive names were defi ned. It was discovered that the eff ect caused by combining words of diff erent registers (formal and casual) had been lost in translation. Full stylistic equivalency of the youth slang translation as well as features of individual translator’s style were revealed. Several suggestions were made on how to avoid word-to-word translation in some places of the analyzed text fragments. To obtain the whole picture of formal translation equivalency, the tasks for further equivalency studies on other text levels were formulated. Key words: stylistically marked words and expressions, dialectisms, slang expressions, expressive personal nicknames and denominations, translation, stylistic equivalency, stylistic density

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