Abstract
The study deals with culture-specific items denoting the status of a person in the novel Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and its translations into Ukrainian and Russian. The paper focuses around lexemes that functioned during and after the Civil War and nominated the inhabitants of the USA according to their background, political and religious views, social layer, occupation, ethnic or Afro-American identity. Structuring cultural knowledge is manifested in the cultural code, which is verbalised due to the use of the abovementioned groups of words denoting status in the novel under study. With the view to the specificity of the time described, the novel abounds in culture-specific items that cause difficulty in Ukrainian and Russian translations, thus presupposing the translator’s striving for either preservation of the historical epoch in the target text or its substitution with the features of contemporary life. The translation techniques applied are transcoding; borrowing from the English or other European languages; descriptive translation (explicitation); literal translation; neutralization; approximate translation; the use of translational doublets; contextual translation; omission. Research results contribute to the development of cultural translation which studies specific differences of source and target texts with the respect both to the source and target cultures.
Highlights
The research deals with the culture-specific items which represent historically and culturally specific information in the novel Gone with the Wind by M
Research methods of the paper comprise textual analysis aiming at specifying the structure of the source and target texts; contextual analysis helping to define the historical and cultural atmosphere of the source text; translational analysis allowing to single out techniques used by the translators while rendering culture-specific items in Ukrianian and Russian; the analysis of dictionary definitions making it possible to identify the meaning of the culture-specific items in the source text and the lexemes used to render them in the target texts; contrastive analysis enabling us to state the differences in the process of presentation of culture-specific items in English, Ukrainian and Russian
The research proves that culturespecific items denoting status are divided into those naming the inhabitants of the USA according to their background, political and religious views, social stratification, occupation, ethnic or Afro-American identity
Summary
The research deals with the culture-specific items which represent historically and culturally specific information in the novel Gone with the Wind by M. The Russian translation prepared by Tatiana Ozerskaya [3], a renowned Russian translator, was published for the first time in 1982 Both Ukrainian and Russian translations were meant for the readers, who, on the one hand, belong to a different culture, and, on the other hand, are separated from that time by more than a hundred years. The research aim is to classify culture-specific items designating the status of a person in the novel Gone with the Wind and the techniques used in rendering them in Ukrainian and Russian translations. The objectives set include: to define culture-specific items designating status; to classify them; to single out techniques applied to render such items in translation; to evaluate translators’ techniques in terms of preserving the pragmatic effect of the original text and the historical epoch
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