DISCOURSE STRATEGIES MARKERS IN A. CHEKHOV’s PLAYS “THREE SISTERS” AND “THE SEAGULL” AND WAYS OF TRANSLATION INTO PORTUGUESE

Abstract

A. Chekhov’s plays “Three sisters” and “The Seagull” are characterized by at least one linguistic innovation: the speech of the characters is as close as possible to colloquial speech, typical for educated people. The absence of a traditional plot and the characters’ vivid and natural, “non-theatrical” speech provide for the conventional, spoken stylistic coloring of the text. However, the spoken Russian discourse, in contrast to its artificial literary imitation, has a wide range of pragmatic means that specify the discourse strategies of speakers. For example, in Russian, unlike in Brazilian Portuguese, the speaker often presupposes some part of the information without explicitly articulating it by lexically determined means, and in this way one marks his or her actual discourse strategy. By using non-descriptive lexis one can also form implicit value judgements or mark the involvement in some actions on the part of their non-participants. Such lexical means are usually language-specific, which makes their translation a really intricate task (if possible at all), which results in discrepancies between the original text and its translations. This fact by no means undermines the translator’s mission; it just highlights the difference in discourse structuring patterns that exist in different languages.