Daniil Kharms’ Phraseology as Translated into English, Serbian, and Irish: Semantics and National/Cultural Peculiarities

Abstract

This article examines the meaning and use of idioms with reference to parallel texts, nominations of gestures and speech formulas, and the national/cultural peculiarities of an author’s phraseology. The article refers to translations of Daniil Kharms’ Incidences into Serbian, English, and Irish. The author studies the meanings of idioms used by Kharms and their modifications, the actualisation of certain semantic components as part of the translation process, and the rendition of the national/cultural peculiarities of idioms. The choice of a translation equivalent for an idiom depends of the author’s ability to use idioms and their modifications. Kharms does not use idioms very often, but there are idioms in his texts whose use is untypical from the point of view of semantics: this makes the search for an equivalent in the language of translation challenging. The author analyses the culture-specific nature of Russian idioms in the text, including situations where the equivalent in the translation is also culture-specific (e. g. in the case of the Russian idiom хоть святых вон выноси). The article also focuses on the shades of meaning in international idioms and the appearance of translator’s false friends in case of dated idioms (cf. поставить себя на какую-л. ногу, i. e. ‘start behaving in a certain way’ vs. поставить кого-л. на ноги). Additionally, the work considers the influence of the linguistic worldview on translation transformations, such as the specification of urban landscape in the Irish translation, i. e. the use of the language of the rural population.