Cultural implications of the nouns 'Debt'/'Duty' in Russian and English with respect to translation problems

Abstract

The article investigates correspondency between national world view in source and target languages and problems related to the concepts rendering while translating texts from English into Russian and vice versa. The aim of this research is to study one of the important concepts representing Russian national world view i.e. a conceptualized word DUTY/ДОЛГ on the one hand, and two corresponding English words such as DUTY and DEBT, on the other hand. In order to show the discrepancies between those concepts in English and Russian cultures, comparative research technique has been used. The author compared data excerpted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Russian National Corpus (RNC). As a result, it is necessary to underline that mutual understanding of interlocutors who use different systems of cultural, social and moral values, is based on the adequate perception of the concepts represented in different languages. Otherwise, dissimilarity of those concepts predetermines lack of understanding and may even cause communicative failure (especially in case of choosing inappropriate word in target language in the process of translation). While translating literary texts an interpreter should take into account the shades of meaning as well as the crucial differences in national world view between source and target languages.