Black English Vernacula and the Hutsul dialect: a translation approach to phonographic level

Abstract

The article discusses issues in translating Maria Matios’ novels “Sweet Darusya”, “The Russky Woman”, “Mother Marica, the Wife of Chrystofor Columbus” and Mark Twain’s novels “The adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, one of the most conspicuous works of the 19th and 21th centuries American and Ukrainian literature, and how the authors dealt with the challenges posed by the specific nature of dialectal locutions on the phonographic level. The main part of the article gives frequent phonographical features of the Black English Vernacula: reduction of the beginning or middle sound in the word, two final consonants reduction, omission of the [r] and [ə] sounds, substitution of the final ng for n, substitution of the fricative [ð] for explosive sound [d], substitution of the negative prefix un- for on-, labialization of the laminodental fricatives [θ] / [f], use of apocopic form, palatalization, omission of unstressed syllables, diphthongization of some stressed vowels [e] → [ei]. There is also a review of the most frequent phonographical features of the Hutsul dialect, namely: substitution of the vowel sound [а] for soft consonant [е], softness of hushing sound [ж], [ч], [ш], substitution of the particle ся for sound [и], depalatalization of [ц] and [с], substitution of soft consonants [т’], [д’] for [к’], [ґ’], consonant alternations of the sounds [ц] ([ч]), [в] ([б]), [н] ([к]), weakening, shortening or disappearance of vowel sounds in unstressed positions, substitution of front row vowels (such as [е] and [і]) for soft consonants. The authors carried out the comparative analysis of the American and Ukrainian texts and their translations to determine the inventory of means employed by the translators to convey unique colloquial manner of expression by the characters including our own version of dialect translation.