Combining Linguistic Methods of Studying Egocentric Units in Russian Translated Narratives

Abstract

The present research featured a functional comparative analysis of egocentric language units in contemporary Russian translated narratives, namely six Russian translations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The study was based on parallel corpora within the Russian National Corpus and a set of digitized translations. The research objective was to present the classification of egocentric units applicable to the analysis of translations, as well as to describe the ways of combining various linguistic methods of studying egocentrics in translated narratives. Egocentric units were studied within several semantic clusters: actualizing (deictic), evaluative, epistemic, modal, and interactive. Using the heuristic method, the authors found and counted the contexts containing egocentric units of a certain type within the parallel corpora. The inductive method made it possible to reveal the trends based on the data obtained. The hypotheses were verified using the deductive method. The research was based on wide narrative contexts and took into the account the writing style, the genre and composition of the text, the use of egocentrics in the target language, and the individual translation strategies. The paper focuses on the lexical markers of uncertainty added by the Russian translators of Mark Twain. They are often used as additional markers of focalization in Russian translations. On the one hand, this phenomenon deals with specific ways of foregrounding subjectivity in the Russian language; on the other hand, it reveals the strategies of building-up suspense applied by individual translators.